I have the pleasure to welcome another new regular contributor to the Anxious Bench, Lisa Clark Diller.
Professor Diller teaches at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her specialty is in early modern British studies, and her current research agenda examines religious minority communities and the development of modern liberal democracy. She is currently investigating the strategies of Catholic parents as they passed along their faith to their children in the face of persecution. Her writing has appeared in Church History, Fide et Historia, Exchange, and in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Seventh-Day Adventists.
She is a past president of the Southern Conference on British History, the in-coming president of the Conference on Faith and History, and the current president of the Association of Seventh-Day Adventist Historians. As you can see, Dr. Diller is as much an intellectual leader on the ground as she is in the air.
She is the daughter of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister and has contributed to the preaching ministry at her church. She is married to Tommy, and they are outdoor enthusiasts. In fact, before I was familiar with her scholarly activities, Lisa and I were Strava buddies (a fitness social media), and she has held me accountable and applauded my trail-running during the past couple harsh Midwest winters. That said, though the South is home to her and her husband, she is familiar with harsh Midwest winters, having completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago.
While I am thrilled to have a fellow early modernist and anglophone sit on the “Bench,” I am most ecstatic about how Lisa’s denominational affiliation informs her research of marginalized religious communities. A number of denominations have been historically marginalized among evangelicals. Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason provides an excellent recount of how an iteration of this historic pattern occurred during the conception of the Neo-Evangelical movement of the twentieth-century (Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism [OUP, 2016]). Seventh-Day Adventists most certainly are counted among those denominations that have been historically marginalized among evangelicals.
Since the Anxious Bench seeks to diversify its contributors and expand its audience to reach those who have been historically among the religiously marginalized, Professor Diller’s participation at the Anxious Bench, in some small way, rectifies the religious marginalization that has occurred among networks within the evangelical intellectual tradition. Her scholarship, from the advantage of her denominational perspective, will contribute generative and constructive historical discussion for all our audience to consider.
You can expect Lisa’s contributions on the first Friday of each month. Her first piece runs tomorrow. It is a fantastic exploration into apocalyptic discourse of separatists during the seventeenth-century context of the English Civil War.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In