. . . But my students’ family history papers have taught me not to ignore them. The end of the semester in my introductory American history survey classes is the time of year when I get to read one of my favorite student assignments: family history essays. These papers always include some fascinating stories, but they have also given me an education in the history of the white rural South that has changed my perspective on race and politics in... Read more
There are so many good reasons to read Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black that I fear that mine will sound trivial: it took me beyond the religious categories whose boundaries we regularly debate here at Anxious Bench, and suggests how Black Christians can teach white Christians of all theological stripes to read the Bible with fuller insight, greater patience, and more enduring hope. Early in the autobiographical introduction, McCaulley remembers walking into a college Bible class, where he “unknowingly entered the hundred... Read more
Yes, Virginia, it’s our first Covid Christmas and there isn’t a Santa Claus. Having passed the lap of holiday season 2020, December’s dates loom large on our pandemic horizon. The CDC said don’t travel . Macy’s shrank its annual parade last week and won’t be staging Santa visits in its stores for the first time in 159 years. It’s a terrible idea anyway, children crowding in line to sit on the knee of an older man who may have underlying... Read more
Last time I posted about the overlap between entertainment, performance, and new religious movements – as I put it, how some entrepreneurial leaders straddle the worlds of the circus tent and the revival tent. Today I will discuss a book that not only explores that idea, but which is in itself a magnificent and woefully under-used resource for American religious history. Elmer Gantry is a classic American film released in 1960, the title character of which (played magnificently by Burt... Read more
It’s easy to sort out the actual history of what nineteenth-century Americans began calling the “First Thanksgiving.” There is only one source, but it’s a great one: a letter written by Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow in December 1621. In it, Winslow narrated that “our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together.” For the next week, there was plenty of food to enjoy. The settlers at... Read more
During this pandemic semester, I had the privilege of teaching a graduate seminar on Women and Religion. Since we couldn’t do everything I usually do, we did some new things I thought would be beneficial to graduate students entering a more social-media and virtual-oriented job market. We learned how to discuss scholarship and connect with scholars on social media, through our #5320women Twitter discussions on Tuesday afternoons (just search for our hashtag). We practiced giving virtual conference papers and creating academic... Read more
Looking for gift idea for the Christian history buff in your life? Chris has some books to recommend, starting with a devotional hitting shelves next Monday. Read more
Jacob S. Dorman has a really fine new book out on the historic Black religious sect called the Moorish Science Temple of America, MSTA: the enticing title is The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America. That is an important topic in its own right, but it also points to a larger issue in the making of new religions, and one that I don’t think ever gets much coverage, namely the overlap... Read more
Last time I wrote about George Herbert’s poem “The Church Militant” (published posthumously in 1633), with its famous lines about true faith fleeing from Britain to America: Then shall Religion to America flee: They have their times of Gospel, ev’n as we. That seems an appropriate topic during our current commemoration of the Mayflower landing in November 1620. But as I noted, this poem has some oddities, as Herbert was a high Anglican, who at least appeared to be celebrating... Read more
Today we welcome Abram Van Engen to the Anxious Bench. Van Engen is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Sympathetic Puritans and City on a Hill (see the Anxious Bench Q&A here). In today’s guest post, he reviews Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. Seems that’s precisely what many of us need in 2020. In 1931, the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Becker, declared that all people are historians. If history is “the... Read more
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