As Abraham Lincoln spoke to a war-weary nation on the occasion of his second inauguration, he engaged in what was arguably the most profound theological reflection of any presidential inaugural address. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other,” he declared. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let... Read more
For Election Day, Chris looks at how American Christians have prayed for each other as voters. Read more
As the calendar would have it, I am scheduled to post today, one day before the election. I suppose I could weigh in on American politics. But I have decided otherwise. Tomorrow, in one of my courses, I am teaching John Paul II’s encyclical, Centesimus Annus, published in 1991, the year of the breakup of the Soviet Union. (An “encyclical” is a papal letter addressing a particular topic or concern from the standpoint of Catholic theology.) Centesimus Annus is a... Read more
I love Halloween, and I love horror fiction. One of the most powerful and evocative contributions to both areas is a lengthy poem that is now regarded as one of the greatest exemplars of modern poetry in the British Isles. As we approach Halloween, it amply repays your attention. The poem is the Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, published in 1941 by Wales’s Vernon Watkins (1906-67). The Ballad takes as its subject a startling ritual that long prevailed in Welsh... Read more
We welcome Peter Choi back to the Anxious Bench today. Choi is Dean of Newbigin House, Associate Professor of American Christianity, and a member of the Consortial Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and author of George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire. To read some pundits, American evangelicals have been going through an uncharacteristically rough patch that will soon be over. It’s hard to miss this perspective, for instance, in Peter Wehner’s latest piece for The... Read more
I couldn’t tell you how many times I had walked past her. Dozens for sure. Maybe hundreds. Located in the oldest part of Baylor University campus, on the wall of a brick pavillion right between Old Main (built in 1887) and Burleson (originally built as the women’s residence hall in 1888), there is an engraved stone tablet memorializing one of Baylor’s early female professors. But it wasn’t until a student prompted me that I finally noticed her. “Dr. Barr,” the... Read more
Evangelicals in Sweden and the United States share similar theologies, but Swedish evangelicals tend to lean left on the political spectrum, supporting the welfare state, environmental protection, and religious pluralism. Read more
I have written a great deal through the years about the Global South, particularly in the context of Christianity. The term Global South was first popularized in 1980, to cover the continents of Africa, Latin America, and (most of) Asia. That concept has always had to be taken flexibly, because the different parts of that vast region were and are so diverse in terms of development, and relative concentrations of wealth. Recently, though, the divergences between regions and societies have... Read more
Last time I talked about a remarkable book published by Thomas Bayly in 1650 under the title of Worcester’s Apothegmes, which is a fine source for Early Modern social and religious history. Let me offer some more stories, focused on the Protestant-Catholic struggles of that era. The author, Thomas Bayly, was accompanying the great aristocrat the Marquess of Worcester, in the 1640s. In each case, he reports an encounter or incident in which the Marquess was involved, and notes the... Read more
Sleep No More was different. You didn’t just watch a show or read a book or even write a blog. You got to participate. You got to touch people. You got to go inside a magical world, discover symbolic connections, find meaning. Almost unanimously, the superfans I interviewed cited the power of living … in an enchanted place: a world where everything, even the design of a room or the arrangement of dead flowers or the cards on a table,... Read more
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