Protestants and Immigration, Then and Now

Last updated on: September 2, 2021 at 12:05 pm By johnturner

White evangelicals don’t like immigrants or refugees. Instead, they love Trump, travel bans, and border walls. That’s the takeaway from Pew surveys about the intersection of religion and immigration over the past several years. If you scratch beneath the surface, evangelical opinion on such matters is more complex, not least because many evangelical leaders – Leith Anderson, Richard Stearns, Russell Moore – have articulated far more progressive stances. Nicholas Pruitt’s Open Hearts, Closed Doors scratches well beneath the surface of... Read more

Why Historians Need Feminism and Feminists Need History

Last updated on: September 1, 2021 at 9:53 am By Beth Allison Barr

Today I am so pleased to welcome Amy Achenbach to the Anxious Bench. Amy is a second year PhD student in the History department at Baylor University. I have the privilege of teaching her for the second time in one of my graduate seminars–Women and Religion in Fall 2020 and currently in my Women’s History and Theory Fall 2021 seminar. Just last week we read Judith Bennett’s History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism in my current seminar, but Amy... Read more

Fundamentalism and the Dynamics of Succession in Minneapolis

Last updated on: August 30, 2021 at 3:14 pm By Chris Gehrz

Recent events at Bethlehem Baptist Church — where John Piper's successor resigned this summer — and its college and seminary reminded guest blogger Greg Rosauer of an earlier controversy in a Minneapolis church and school whose founder, W.B. Riley, gave way to a successor who ran afoul of fundamentalists. Read more

Ed Murrow’s Water Bottle, Or How Not To Use Films In Teaching History

Last updated on: August 29, 2021 at 1:55 pm By Philip Jenkins

In 2005, George Clooney starred in Good Night, and Good Luck, a decent film about broadcaster Ed Murrow’s struggle against Senator Joe McCarthy, set in 1953. A careful viewer would note a scene in an office where you see a water bottle sitting on a desk, in a way that water bottles did not in 1953, any more than did Macbooks or Starbucks cups. The interesting thing is not that somebody left the bottle there, but that nobody else noticed... Read more

“Here I am, send me” in American Military History

Last updated on: August 27, 2021 at 5:56 pm By Chris Gehrz

On Thursday, Pres. Joe Biden invoked Isaiah 6:8 in eulogizing American service members killed in Kabul, Afghanistan. That got Chris wondering just how long "Here I am, Lord. Send me" has been used in the context of America's wars... Read more

Teaching the Cold War: Some Alternative Films To Show

Last updated on: September 1, 2021 at 8:13 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting about my forthcoming book on The Global History of the Cold War, which is (not exclusively) intended as a main textbook for courses on that topic. I have an ongoing interest in materials for that course, or for a related one on Cold War Cinema. Now, if I was actually teaching such a course focused on movies, I would cleave pretty closely to the predictable choices. Dr Strangelove would be high on the list, along with... Read more

Neither Democrat Nor Republican: The New Evangelical Nonpartisans

Last updated on: August 25, 2021 at 7:01 pm By Daniel K. Williams

White evangelical politics in the United States has for many years been characterized primarily by the assumptions of political conservatism, including support for free markets, the American military, and, above all, moral regulation of the individual vices that evangelicals oppose. Now, though, evangelical critiques of political conservatism have been gaining ground in many formerly conservative evangelical venues – as evidenced, for example, by a new interest in examining structural racism or challenging the Republican Party’s support for immigration restrictions. But... Read more

Immigrant Strangers in Our Midst: An Interview with Ulrike Stockhausen

Last updated on: August 25, 2021 at 10:31 am By David Swartz

Until the 1980s, evangelicals didn’t distinguish between legal immigrants and refugees and “illegal” undocumented immigrants. They welcomed all newcomers. Read more

John Piper’s “Wishful Thinking” about Jonathan Edwards and Slavery

Last updated on: August 24, 2021 at 12:43 am By Chris Gehrz

Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and defended slavery. Why does John Piper think it's alright to engage in "wishful thinking" about that topic? Read more

Don’t Turn (Refugees) Away

Last updated on: August 23, 2021 at 3:24 pm By Melissa Borja

Chaotic scenes of people surrounding military aircraft and hoping desperately to be evacuated: this is what we saw on our television screens last week. It is also what Kathleen, a woman in Saint Paul, Minnesota, witnessed 46 years ago. It was the spring of 1975, and she was recovering from surgery in the hospital when the news broke: Saigon had been captured. She recalled, I’m watching the TV in my room, and here [are] these people, you know, scrambling... Read more

Which Psalm is famous as the "Shepherd's Psalm"?