Chris reflects on the significance of Beth Moore as an emerging leader of evangelicalism in the age of Trump. Read more
Chris reflects on the significance of Beth Moore as an emerging leader of evangelicalism in the age of Trump. Read more
Only out of the past can you make the future,” says a character in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. And yet some pasts are dreadfully dark and tangled, and how one wrings a future from them is anyone’s guess. This thought gnawed at me during a recent trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan states. I had gone in search of interviewees for a research project on interreligious dialogue. I wanted to talk with people removed from the tired... Read more
I have been reading an important new book called Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity: Cognition and Discipline (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This is by my former colleague Paul Dilley, an excellent scholar whose work I have discussed in the past. The book is important because of its Egyptian setting, using many texts that are only available to those scholars with a knowledge of Coptic, besides the familiar Greek. Egypt is so critical to the making... Read more
On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, opened its doors. The memorial is visually stunning. Around 800 rusted iron columns hang from above, each representing a county where a lynching took place. In a recent essay in Religion News Service, Jemar Tisby recounts just a few of the horrors that the memorial represents: “The memorial reminds visitors that lynching victims are real people, not simply anonymous figures from history. They have heart-wrenching stories such... Read more
In 2012, Rachel Held Evans—a New York Times bestselling author of American Christianity–wrote a stunningly provocative book titled A Year of Biblical Womanhood. In it, she vividly shows us how “biblical womanhood” is not a constant. It is a culturally constructed concept. For those of you unfamiliar with her book, she spent a year living out as many different versions of “biblical womanhood” as she could find throughout the Old and New Testament—from sleeping in a tent in her front... Read more
In May 1991 the Catholic Church marked the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Industrial Age encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII insisted that “It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.” Engaged in a “re-reading” of Rerum Novarum as Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Pope John Paul II warned against celebrating an unfettered capitalism that could “achieve a greater satisfaction of material human... Read more
In my last post, I criticized the idea that Christians should not cooperate with the criminal justice system, to the point that churches refuse to call police. That does not mean that churches should accept every aspect of contemporary ideas of crime and punishment, as they assuredly have so much that is useful and innovative to bring from their own distinctive traditions. Historically, so much of our criminal justice system has been shaped by Christian views and attitudes. Among other... Read more
The Washington Post recently decided to create a radical church-based social movement. According to the headline, “Churches Make A Drastic Pledge In The Name Of Social Justice: To Stop Calling The Police” (The story was by Julie Zauzmer). Now, further examination reveals that we are dealing with a tiny handful of churches, most of which are in the San Francisco Bay area, where normal rules of consensus reality do not apply. In no sense is this some kind of widespread... Read more
An aspiring scholar of English literature once bumped into W.H. Auden on Oxford’s High Street. Jay Parini at the time was troubled. “I wondered if God existed,” he recalls, “or if he was simply a human creation.” Parini struggled not only with religious doubt, but anxiety and depression. He needed “courage to continue.” Auden helped him find it. The poet could tell that Parini “wasn’t in good emotional shape” and invited him to his home. He “suggested gently that few... Read more
After writing eulogies for three colleagues in the last three years, Chris reflects on what he has learned about death, resurrection, and his calling as a historian. Read more
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