But we expect it to be—don’t we? What is the big deal about winter if we are expecting it to be cold anyway? That question opens historical puzzles. As scholars of the American colonies have recognized for decades, settlers from Europe and the investors who sent them supposed the climate of what became the United States would be different from what it turned out to be. Cold winters become an historical question not only as we wonder why one was... Read more
Last year’s terror attack in Pittsburgh highlighted the often-ignored US tradition of violent anti-Semitism. Not only is this tradition very strong, but it has peculiarly American dimensions in fringe religions, and the occult or esoteric. It was through this strand that the US domesticated many European anti-Semitic themes, including that of so-called Jewish ritual murder. In the 1930s, one of the country’s best known anti-Semitic groups was the Silver Shirts, the Silver Legion of America, which was founded by William... Read more
Today Peter Choi, author of the new book George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire joins us at the Anxious Bench. Historians, journalists, and pundits debating the nature of contemporary evangelicalism often set the politicization of recent evangelicalism against an idealized historical evangelicalism. With his history of Whitefield and eighteenth-century evangelicalism, Choi complicates that narrative in ways that help reframe our contemporary conversations. For many evangelicals, George Whitefield (1714-1770) represents the very best of their tradition. He remains one of... Read more
I am so pleased to welcome guest blogger Leslie Hahner, PhD, to The Anxious Bench today. Leslie is a brilliant thinker, writer, and professor. I know this because we have been in an interdisciplinary writing group together since 2011. She has two recently published books, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century and Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-right. Her current book project, which she is writing with fellow Baylor professor Scott Varda, focuses... Read more
The time machine is a staple of science fiction... but do some machines actually help us move our minds back in time? Read more
I am using a map to illustrate some long term megatrends in the history of religion. Although the map specifically concerns Islam, many of the same lessons apply to Christianity. The map appeared in Samuel M. Zwemer, The Moslem World (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement of the United States and Canada, 1907-1908). Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952) was an exceptionally important figure in the US missionary world at that time. “Sixteen years a missionary in Arabia,” he earned the title... Read more
The world of Classics is currently facing intense debates over race and racism, and the recent meeting of the Society for Classical Studies included a panel that apparently degenerated into ugly name-calling. Rather than addressing the many issues at stake there, I will focus on one, namely the whole question of “Western Civilization.” Briefly, conservatives in these debates are anxious to defend Classics as representing core values in the defense of Western Civilization, while critics see that whole concept as... Read more
John Myles (sometimes written Miles) was among the most important Baptist ministers in seventeenth-century New England. I first encountered Myles in an essay by my co-blogger Philip Jenkins, who wrote about the role of Miles in opposing the spread of Quaker beliefs and practices in southern Wales.[1] Back in 1649, Myles had gained the pulpit at Ilston, near Swansea, turning its parish church into a magnet for those who rejected infant baptism in the area. As Philip notes, the first... Read more
An evangelical seminary tries to reckon with its history of white supremacy Read more
An Anxious Bench book club: 12 books by - and mostly about - women that Patheos Evangelical readers should read this year. Read more
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