The Half-Year in Review

I usually wait until the end of June to post a mid-year report on what’s been most popular at The Anxious Bench. For reasons I’ll explain next week, I’m going to move up that update to today.

Without further ado, here are our ten most-read posts thus far into 2022, plus the most popular posts from each contributor and a few suggestions of my own for posts that deserve a second look.

The Anxious Bench Top 10 for the First Half of 2022

1. The Five Emerging Factions in Evangelical Higher Education (Dan Williams)
2. What I Learned from Designing Women (a.k.a. A Guide for Responding to Complementarians) (Beth Allison Barr)
3. What is a Conservative Christian College? On the Grove City CRT Report (Andrea Turpin)
4. A Farewell Post (Kristin Du Mez)
5. Ideas about Women Matter: A Resource List for Women in Church History (Beth)
6. The Book I’ve Been Waiting For: A Review of Aimee Byrd’s The Sexual Reformation (Andrea)
7. An Open Letter to Baptist Higher Education After the Death of Judson College (Stephanie Peek)
8. Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective (Dan)
9. “The Ukrainian Family” (Chris Gehrz)
10. The Lost Letters of Saint Paul, and How They Were Lost (Philip Jenkins)

Agnes & Tal Howard

1. The Scandal of the Evangelical Professor Mommy
2. On Loneliness and Solitude
3. The Future of Catholic Universities

Andrea Turpin

1. What is a Conservative Christian College? On the Grove City CRT Report
2. The Book I’ve Been Waiting For: A Review of Aimee Byrd’s The Sexual Reformation
3. Deeply Good People on Twitter

Beth Allison Barr

1. What I Learned from Designing Women (a.k.a. A Guide for Responding to Complementarians)
2. Ideas about Women Matter: A Resource List for Women in Church History
3. The Quiet Reformation: How The Making of Biblical Womanhood is Setting Women Free

Chris Gehrz

1. “The Ukrainian Family”
2. “Just the Same as Never Before”: A Christian College at 150
3. “Female Leadership Has Been a Consistent Part of Baptist History”: A Northern Example

Dan Williams

1. The Five Emerging Factions in Evangelical Higher Education
2. Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective
3. What Will the Reversal of Roe v. Wade Really Mean? Five False Expectations

David Swartz

1. A Tragic Anniversary: The Politics of Jesus Turns Fifty
2. Who Would Jesus Bomb?
3. Rome to Rotterdam: The Weaver-Swartzes Go on Pilgrimage

Melissa Borja

1. Heathens and the History of Race-Making in the United States (interview with Kathryn Gin Lum)
2. Corinne Tan Is Great, but American Girl Needs Stories about Asian Americans in the Past, Too
3. Asia and the Making of Modern American Evangelicalism (interview with Helen Jin Kim)

Nadya Williams

1. Russian Invasion of the Ukraine: Reflections from a Descendant of Ukrainian Jews
2. Evangelicals Need More Military History (But of a Theologically Orthodox Kind)
3. Quitting Church for Lent? Why the Desert is Not the Answer

Philip Jenkins

1. The Lost Letters of Saint Paul, and How They Were Lost
2. After Ukraine: Apocalypse Quite Soon?
3. Making Ukraine, and How Empires Invent Geography

Guest Posts

1. An Open Letter to Baptist Higher Education After the Death of Judson College (Stephanie Peek)
2. Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine: What’s Religion Got to Do with It? (Mark Elliott)
3. The Redemption of Redeeming Love: A Movie Review and Marketplace History (Emma Fenske)

All that and…

• As an evangelical who often teaches the history of warfare, I was particularly interested in Dan’s reflection on why American evangelicals “have been more likely than any other religious group in recent years to claim God’s approval for military ventures fought in the name of justice.”

• Having written my own post about a revisionist history of temperance, it was fascinating to read Husezo Rhakho’s analysis of attitudes on alcohol among the Christians in his home region of India.

• On top of all the other posts about Ukraine listed above… my favorite to research was the one investigating one evangelical denomination’s missions-based affinity for the people of that country.

• I appreciated all of the posts on Nadya’s Anxious Bench top three so far, but also her consistently excellent work for Current — e.g., her reflection on her childhood in the Soviet Union (“From Grandpa Lenin with Love”).

• If you found David’s preview of his family’s now-concluded pilgrimage to Europe as interesting as I did, know that he and his wife Lisa blogged their way through that trip at their personal blogs. (Oh, and be sure to look for Lisa’s book, Stained Glass Ceilings, due out this fall. I’m sure you’ll read about her analysis of evangelicalism and gender here at The Anxious Bench.)

• Then read Philip muse about the contemporary popularity of pilgrimage itself. I was certainly thinking about last week, as a colleague and I criss-crossed Germany visiting key sites in the nearly two-thousand year history of Christianity in that country.

(And if that brief description intrigues you, I’ll have more to say about our travels at my own blog in the next couple of weeks. Then later this summer look for details about a 2023 tour that we’ll be leading.)