Why the Pro-Life Movement Lost Its Black Supporters

Last updated on: August 10, 2020 at 12:03 pm By Daniel K. Williams

In the mid-1970s, Blacks were more likely than any other group of Americans to oppose abortion, according to public opinion surveys. Overwhelmingly Democratic and far more liberal than almost all other Americans in their view of the government’s responsibility to protect the health and economic well-being of the poor and the marginalized, Blacks were also more strongly pro-life than even white Catholics (let alone white evangelicals, who were only just beginning to mobilize on the abortion issue). This was the... Read more

4 Things I Want My Students to Know about This Fall

Last updated on: August 10, 2020 at 11:03 pm By Chris Gehrz

With the start of an academic year unlike any other just weeks away, Chris shares four things he wants his students to know. Read more

A Tale of Two Mosques

Last updated on: August 9, 2020 at 11:36 am By Thomas Albert Howard

Coverage of All-Things-Covid has unfortunately crowded from the news cycle treatment of two events pertaining to religion of world historical significance. Both involve a mosque—or at least a church that was later turned into a mosque and the site of a former mosque—and both carry potentially ominous implications. The first event was Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to bless turning Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a functioning mosque—a pledge he had made some time ago to... Read more

Saving the Good Wine Until Last

Last updated on: August 7, 2020 at 6:15 am By Philip Jenkins

Critic Colin Manlove once listed the three main writers of “Christian fantasy” during the twentieth century as C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and T. F. Powys – that is, Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953). Particularly for Americans, that last name might seem surprising, but I want to show that he fully belongs at the top table. He really was that good. The years between the two World Wars produced an amazing efflorescence of religious writing in the British Isles, in both... Read more

You Want Context? Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Crotch Shot and Family-Values Evangelicalism

Last updated on: August 6, 2020 at 11:51 am By Kristin Du Mez

Earlier this week Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and one of President Trump’s leading evangelical supporters, once again found himself at the center of controversy. And once again, Falwell had no one to blame but himself. This time, the matter at hand wasn’t his decision to keep Liberty open against public health recommendations, nor was it his threat to sue journalists who covered the decision, nor was it his tweeting a racist image of Gov. Northam. At issue,... Read more

When History Was Really Cancelled: A Black Cemetery in Waco, TX

Last updated on: August 5, 2020 at 3:48 pm By Beth Allison Barr

The nothingness surprised me. I stepped over the low stone wall and walked down the path to the river. The water of the Brazos stood still in the summer evening, reflecting only a slightly blurred image of the I-35 bridge crossing into downtown Waco. Behind me stretched the green lawn of the Fort Fisher campground. I had just walked from the Texas Ranger Museum, skirting the modern edge of the old First Street Cemetery, as I made my way down... Read more

Of Norse Gods, White Supremacists, and Cultural Marxists

Last updated on: August 4, 2020 at 2:51 pm By Chris Gehrz

Looking into the news that a pagan group has bought a former Lutheran church in Minnesota ended up making Chris recognize a debate over "cultural Marxism" within Christianity. Read more

Hiroshima: 75 Years On

Last updated on: August 2, 2020 at 2:40 pm By Philip Jenkins

I am going to address a really sensitive issue involving the question of how and when people of moral and ethical sensibilities, whatever their faith tradition, should be engaged in war, and even more controversial, how they should actually go about fighting it. Was there ever a time when such religious and ethical people could ever, ever, have considered using nuclear weapons? I am going to suggest that yes, there was, in one particular strictly limited historical context. In that... Read more

Why Hagia Sophia Is Going Back To Being a Mosque

Last updated on: July 30, 2020 at 10:55 am By Philip Jenkins

Turkey’s government looks set to turn the great former church of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a functioning mosque. By way of context, when the building was erected in the 530s, it was by far the world’s largest church, and remained so for nine hundred years. Then it was a vast mosque, and then (from 1934) a secular museum. A great deal has been written about what looks like a major tilt to Islamist causes by Turkey’s populist authoritarian... Read more

Hagia Sophia: A Building’s Transformations

Last updated on: July 29, 2020 at 11:36 pm By johnturner

On July 24, 2020, Muslims held Friday prayers in the nave of Hagia Sophia for the first time since the grand structure had been converted into a museum in 1934. In a United States consumed with the coronavirus pandemic, it might be easy to overlook the significance of this development. Few places, however, have mattered as much to the history of Christianity as Hagia Sophia, and it is worthwhile to review its contested history. The foundations of Hagia Sophia date... Read more