Ten days ago Saturday Night Live — of all places — served as the platform for a Christian call to repentance, thanks to the intersection of pandemics past and present. It started with country singer Morgan Wallen, who was supposed to be SNL’s musical guest on October 10th, only to be disinvited after video surfaced of him partying in a crowded bar without a mask. Because of that COVID-era transgression, singer-songwriter-guitar hero Jack White had to fill in on short notice.... Read more
A few years ago, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch that poked fun at the colorful cast of characters who commonly appear at a church service: the nervous organist who botches the opening chords of every hymn, the choir soloist who is a little too extra, the overzealous lector who does the reading with the dramatic flourishes of a first-time competitor in a high school forensics tournament. But my favorite part of the sketch came toward the end, when the... Read more
I have been posting about the world of the seventeenth century, an exceedingly significant era for religious history (just think Puritanism, and the Mayflower of 1620). There is one source that I first explored many years ago but which still gets used remarkably little in the scholarly literature. It takes the form of a readable collection of stories and sayings published in 1650 under the slightly daunting title of Worcester’s Apothegmes, which I will explain shortly. The book illuminates the... Read more
In 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King made international news with a “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” She had translated a scrap of papyrus whose Coptic text included a statement by Jesus which began with the words, “My wife.” King noted that the fragment in no way proved that the historical Jesus had a wife. However, she used the fragment to assert that relatively early communities of Christians – say, late-second century – believed that he had married. This pointed... Read more
Today’s guest post is by Benjamin Leavitt. Ben is a History PhD student at Baylor University and an advisee of Anxious Bench contributor Andrea Turpin. His Baylor MA thesis was on competing definitions of the Christian college in the early twentieth century United States, and his current research focuses broadly on the intersection of religion and institutional identity in American higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic has had enormous effects on American higher education. Last week, Chris Gehrz (with contributions from... Read more
Chris talks to Jay Phelan about his new book, Separated Siblings: An Evangelical Understanding of Jews and Judaism. Read more
When modern people read about Christian history, most find it very hard indeed to understand why bygone eras cared so much about religious issues – about things that we might dismiss as “just theological.” Were such things really worth the cost of anyone’s life or liberty? We need to understand why some things that seem so innocuous to us today were so explosive in other eras. The whole story also has a strong contemporary relevance, for understanding modern religious change... Read more
I have been posting about my recent immersion in watching Shakespeare’s plays, working my way through the complete series of BBC productions broadcast between 1978 and 1985. When planning the viewing extravaganza, I deliberately left a couple of the more obscure plays until last, assuming that they would be of lower quality or less interest. That was totally wrong. They overwhelm. Troilus and Cressida The prime example was Troilus and Cressida (1601). I still don’t know exactly what the play... Read more
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (SUNY). He is the author of Fundamentalist U (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Other School Reformers (Harvard University Press, 2015). His most recent book, appears this week. Adam is here this week with a piece to whet our appetites for his just-published book, Creationism USA (Oxford University Press, 2020). It’s one of the most durable myths about America’s culture wars. Religious Americans, we are told by... Read more
Here’s a political trivia question for you: When was the last time that a majority of white evangelicals supported a Democratic presidential candidate? The survey data suggests that the most likely answer to the question is 1964, the year when President Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. While pollsters in 1964 did not use “evangelical” as a category when questioning prospective voters on their presidential choices, a combination of public opinion surveys that screened voters for a “Protestant” identity, along with... Read more
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