I often blog about gender history and theology for the Anxious Bench. I also blog about a great many other things. I was curious about my patterns over time, so I recently went and looked up when I first began writing monthly here. It was just over 5 years ago, in Summer 2019. The post was entitled “When Gender Theology Doesn’t Fit in Our Boxes: Then and Now.” As I recall, it was my friend and Baylor colleague Beth Allison... Read more
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the University of Michigan are a “failure”—at least according to the New York Times. As an October 16 article explained, efforts by the university to address inequality and injustice have left students and faculty feeling “more frustrated than ever,” and the mood on campus is characterized by disappointment and “wary disdain.” I am a tenured faculty member at the University of Michigan. Unlike commentators who have seized upon the article in order to... Read more
This year’s treatment of abortion by both major parties is reminiscent of how both parties engaged with the issue of alcohol regulation in 1932, the last election before the end of Prohibition. Only a short time before the 1932 election, advocates of Prohibition had every reason to be jubilant. In 1928, they had experienced what was arguably their greatest triumph since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment when the “dry” candidate, Republican Herbert Hoover, defeated the “wet” Al Smith by... Read more
Got a short one for you all. A few months ago, I was one of the initial signers of the Confession of Evangelical Conviction, a statement which, in my mind, is a thoroughly uncontroversial application of the Christian faith to political life. It is saturated with basic Christian claims: that Jesus is the head of the Church, that our loyalty belongs to no political party, that our decisions ought to be driven by love not fear, that the Scriptures ought... Read more
This post is a tribute to the life and teaching of Kristen Todd, PhD, the late professor of music history at Oklahoma Baptist University. Dr. Todd passed away in 2014 after a fifteen-year career of teaching and mentorship at OBU. There’s not much I remember from my undergraduate days at Oklahoma Baptist University. But I do remember one morning in the early fall of 2008, where a large class met in a lecture hall in the south side of Raley... Read more
In pretty much any period I write about, I try to use cartoons and caricatures wherever possible because they offer such a wealth of material that would be so hard to extract from contemporary prose accounts. I offer a couple of examples today, together with an appeal for any similar items that people might be able to think about. I have been working on the intersection of missions and empire in US history, and generally, pro-empire people were very happy... Read more
In 2021, a year after the killing of George Floyd, Pannell felt compelled to republish My Friend, the Enemy. Read more
Basil of Caesarea is often praised as a champion of the Holy Spirit, defending his divinity against the Macedonians and the Eunomians in his On the Holy Spirit. And my students gleaned as much, as we read the text together a few weeks ago. But this was not the only reading under discussion that day—students also read Gregory of Nazianzus’ Epistle 58. In this letter to Basil, Gregory records an embarrassing situation that arose during a dinner party—after someone praised... Read more
Good society is generally certain there is something wrong with the mentality of evangelicals. We’re only weeks before an election that could see Donald Trump back into the Oval, but the verdict is already in on evangelicals. They think wrong and vote wrong. Should Trump win, left leaning outlets of the press will lay heft blame at the feet of evangelicals (though Trump also draws the Catholic vote by a slim majority) –lamenting that so many religious actors could fail... Read more
Should those of us who work on religious history, particularly Christian texts from the past, consider publishing devotional as well as scholarly editions of our work? Friars Quarters and Conference Meeting Rooms, Mission Santa Barbara This is a question I asked myself last weekend during “‘In the Footsteps of “the Twelve’: The 500th Anniversary of the Franciscan Arrival in Mexico,” a conference at Mission Santa Barbara sponsored by the Academy of American Franciscan History, a research institute affiliated with the... Read more
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