Archives

For the second year in a row, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is...

I deeply respect my friends who are Biblical literalists, but I do have some quarrels...

Aristion was a prestigious and influential figure in the early church, about whom we know...

81% of American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. 81%! For many observers of American religion...

A radical political style resurfaces on the evangelical left in its challenge of Trump

Reading Harry Potter with his kids has got Chris thinking that history can be almost...

Permit me to heartily recommend two scholarly books hot of the press. The first is...

I have posted on how the Bible came to take the shape that we know,...

In January 2016, Donald Trump claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th...

A student stopped me after class recently. She wanted to know if I listened to...

While she drew on many other religious, philosophical, and literary sources for her post-Christian spirituality,...

This post strays a bit from the main theme of the Anxious Bench in that...

Wired magazine recently published an excellent essay that overtly said next to nothing about religion....

It's Founder's Day at the Bench. Thomas S. Kidd is James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at...

David returns to his series on Christians you might not know are pacifists

The title track from the current #1 country album — plus a tweet from the...

On November 22, 1967, in Decree 4377, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha declared religion officially...

I am struggling with a celebrated New Testament passage, and I’ll use this blogpost as...

In the past two years, the Trump administration has pushed aggressively for restrictive refugee policies....

Suffragists fascinate me. I have always been impressed by their steadfast commitment to political equality...

A recent visit to a museum on an Ojibwe reservation got Chris thinking about how...

Not for the first time, I am thinking about gospels, and specifically the four gospels....

In my last column, I discussed how shifting perceptions of death contributed to weakening traditional...

Today I discuss Darren Dochuk's recently published Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made...

A short spiritual biography of a Hollywood celebrity

Chris tells the story of Minnesota's "sky pilots" — itinerant preachers whose ministry to lumberjacks in...

Funny--our realtor did not point out the nudist camp around the corner from our new...

Whenever I taught my long-running course on World Religions, I would always greet my students...

It’s been a difficult stretch for traditional Christian sexual morality. Values once held dear are...

I am so pleased to welcome back Lynneth Miller Renberg. Lynneth is an assistant professor of history...