This is my final regular post for the Anxious Bench after nine years on its roster of writers. That’s a long time to stay on any bench, let alone an anxious one. But it’s been a wonderful resting place for me, because of the friends who have sat on it with me. I’m grateful to them and to Patheos for the liberty I’ve enjoyed to fill this space with what moves me. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “finds itself... Read more
“This is both an important and a frustrating book.” It was 2009 when I read these words in an academic review–ten years before I would agree to write The Making of Biblical Womanhood; seven years before my husband was fired; five years (give or take) before I realized I no longer believed in complementarianism; and one year after I was hired as an Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University. Katherine L. French, one of the foremost scholars in my... Read more
Throughout American higher education, women now account for at least 60% of enrollment. The gender gap is higher at private universities like Chris' employer, founded as a seminary dominated by men but majority-women for over half a century. Read more
Indexes have been much in my mind of late. If you ever write or publish a book, you will understand just how important they are. Historically, they enjoy a significance that is barely unimaginable to modern people of the Google Age. In the current London Review of Books, Anthony Grafton has an excellent review of a new book on indexing by Dennis Duncan. The book is entitled, inevitably, Index, A History of the. Duncan traces the history from its earliest... Read more
Angelus is the respected news magazine of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, and it is a sober and socially conservative outlet. I was stunned then to find a recent issue lauding a pop culture figure who in his day was regarded as a kind of ultimate evil, and a threat to civilized society. Had that figure himself not claimed publicly to be an Antichrist? The article, by Robert Brennan, concerned “Johnny-not-so-Rotten.” As Brennan makes clear, he never had... Read more
As I was preparing last week to lead a graduate seminar discussion of Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle, I ran across an especially disconcerting passage. Since Wood’s book is a study of the way in which large-scale acts of mob violence and torturous executions of African Americans were occasions for community celebration and commemoration, one might assume that the entire book would be disconcerting – as indeed, to some extent, it was. But the passage that especially caught my... Read more
A couple of years ago on a Sunday morning, I landed at Logan Airport and took a train to Boston’s South End. I was wrapping up research for what became Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity. Mostly about the activities of American missionaries abroad—and how they were shaped by these encounters—the book in its final chapter focused on how global encounters were increasingly happening at home through African, Asian, and Latin American immigration. I ended up... Read more
If the Christian university does serve as an instrument meeting the needs of external constituents like church, government, and business, what happens when those constituents' interests and values come into conflict? Read more
Twenty years ago today, while Americans cleaned up the wreckage of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush stood before a Joint Session of Congress and declared that the U.S. was going to wage a “war on terror.” “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush said. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Thus began a war that transformed the U.S.... Read more
My present work concerns one particular psalm, namely 91, and the astonishingly large impact it has had through the religious history of the West. Among many other things, the psalm raises significant questions about how we define scripture, and some seriously challenging issues for anyone who believes in the inspiration of scripture. First, as to how we define scripture. Psalm 91 was composed in Hebrew. Somewhere in the third or early second century BC, it was translated into the Greek... Read more
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