Today Chris Gehrz and I are collaborating to talk about Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who passed away at the age of 93 this week. Mondale served as a US senator from Minnesota from 1964-1976 and vice president of the United States from 1977-1981. He was the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1984, and though he suffered a landslide defeat in his race against Ronald Reagan, he is still remembered as the first major-party presidential nominee to select a... Read more
Chris celebrates the release of Beth Barr's book on "biblical womanhood" by telling the story of some of her fellow evangelical Baptists: some who argued for complementarianism, and others who affirmed an egalitarian view of gender roles. Read more
Here is a question. What passages in the Bible are deliberately intended to target or disagree with other parts of the same book? Not just passages that contradict others, but where author A deliberately sets out to disagree with author B. I offer a couple of examples, but there must be more. By way of context, I have been working on a very influential and popular text, namely Psalm 91. It has been so popular through history because it appears... Read more
This post offers suggestions for beginning a research project of any kind, and particularly in the kind of historical and/or religious history topics that I work on. Based on my own experience, I think these tactics or approaches are very useful indeed, and many conversations through the years suggest they are not widely known. If these remarks seem obvious to you, no problem. If they are of use, that would be great. Suppose I am undertaking a project on (say)... Read more
It was more than a decade ago, but I still remember that moment vividly. It was one of the few times in my life where I found myself genuinely speechless. My husband and I had been visiting a church near our home, which happened to be pastored by my former childhood pastor. My childhood church was fairly large, and I’d had little personal connection to this pastor. He’d been a respected authority figure, a friend of my dad’s, a genuinely... Read more
“Dr. Barr, I don’t know where to look?!” Twelfth-century columns soared high over our heads, fanning across the vaulted ceiling. I had tilted my head as far back as I could, trying to see the reds and blues and golds of the carved stone bosses in the arches above. That is–until the uneasy edge of her voice pulled me back. I turned to see four pairs of eyes staring at me. We were abroad that summer. I was teaching with... Read more
Chris shares an outtake from his forthcoming religious biography of Charles Lindbergh. (Just be sure to read carefully...) Read more
Today is a guest post. My Baylor colleague Elizabeth Flowers has a new co-edited collection of essays (with Karen K. Seat) entitled A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists (University of Tennessee Press, 2020). As that speaks to many current concerns in American religion, I have invited the two to describe the book and its arguments. A Marginal Majority It would be an understatement to claim that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past... Read more
Today I welcome a guest blogpost from Crawford Gribben, who has published extensively on the history of Puritanism. That includes his notable 2016 book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat. His new book is strictly contemporary in subject matter, addressing as it does Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, March 2021). I will leave him to describe the project: Evangelicalism and its Discontents by Crawford Gribben It didn’t take... Read more
This is a lightly revised post from last summer, placed where it belongs, at Eastertide. One of my newly favorite Easter season texts is Rudyard Kipling’s concise and poignant short story, “The Gardener.” If you’ve never read it, it doesn’t take long, but perhaps refresh your memory of John 21 first. “The Gardener” narrates the grief and anguish of an Englishwoman named Helen Turrell, who for years has pretended that her out-of-wedlock son, christened Michael, is really her nephew. The... Read more
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