The Jefferson Bible: An Interview with Peter Manseau

Last updated on: September 8, 2020 at 1:55 pm By johnturner

Peter Manseau is Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian. His most recent book is The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, a contribution to Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. Thanks, Peter, for engaging in this conversation about your book about Jefferson’s Bible project. What is the Jefferson Bible, and how did Jefferson create it? The book best known known as the Jefferson Bible is a collage of Gospel verses that Jefferson called “The Life and Morals... Read more

An Evangelical Defense of Institutions

Last updated on: September 8, 2020 at 9:15 pm By Daniel K. Williams

Why are evangelical Protestants so often opposed to established institutions, especially in government? And should they be? I thought about this question this past week, as I led graduate students in a course on the history of American religion through a discussion of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity. Hatch’s book is now more than three decades old, but its argument has stood the test of time, and it has long been one of my favorite works on nineteenth-century... Read more

Adventures in Religious Biography Writing

Last updated on: September 7, 2020 at 9:13 pm By Chris Gehrz

Now that Chris' spiritual biography of Charles Lindbergh is nearing publication, he looks back at a 2016 series to reconsider some problems facing biographers. Read more

On Secularisms

Last updated on: September 6, 2020 at 11:37 am By Thomas Albert Howard

For a current project, I am trying to identify three forms of political secularism that arose on the European Continent in the nineteenth century after the French Revolution and explore their consequences in the twentieth century. The first I call passive secularism, which is basically the type of secularism secured by US First Amendment (1791)—the modèle américain–and in Europe in the Belgian Constitution of 1831. In it, the federal government assumes a largely passive stance toward religious communities, allowing them... Read more

Wall, Church, and Chalice

Last updated on: September 4, 2020 at 8:36 am By Philip Jenkins

I have often posted at this site on British history during the post-Roman and Anglo-Saxon era, the time that we are absolutely not supposed to call the Dark Ages (but which they actually were). Partly, this is from my keen interest in the Christian era of that age, a time when a significant provincial church was snuffed out, and when congregations were forced to hide their liturgical treasures, which they sadly never lived to recover. I was very interested then... Read more

Evangelist Billy Graham’s Granddaughter and Son Rail Against Public Health Measures Older Than Grandpa

Last updated on: August 30, 2020 at 2:21 pm By Kristin Du Mez

Today we’re joined at the Anxious Bench by John Schmalzbauer, a sociologist and professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University who holds the Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies. He is the author of People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education, and, with Karen Mahoney, The Resilience of Religion in American Higher Education. We are in the midst of the worst public health crisis in living memory, with over 180,000 Americans dead from COVID-19.... Read more

Abby Johnson and the Problem of Biblical Womanhood

Last updated on: September 2, 2020 at 11:30 pm By Beth Allison Barr

I checked my map to be certain it was the right stop. It was. Caledonian Road station on the Piccadilly line of the Underground in north London. In 1906, it was brand new. Turn-of-the century glazed tilework spell out “Caledonian Road” on the inner walls while red faience brick frames the large arched windows on the outside. I know now that these distinctive “Edwardian Baroque” architectural features mark the station as one of 40 designed by Leslie Green, Architect to... Read more

MLK, Mike Pence, and the Great Cloud of Witnesses

Last updated on: August 31, 2020 at 11:59 pm By Chris Gehrz

I’m now one day into my experience of teaching on a college campus in the middle of a pandemic, and I’ve already sensed a pattern: the more things stay the same, the more they change. As usual, the semester started with me helping to introduce Christianity and Western Culture (CWC), Bethel University‘s venerable team-taught, multi-disciplinary, first-year, general education course. But I’m usually in a lecture hall, not a socially distanced multi-purpose space with a disco ball hanging overhead. Awkward as... Read more

When Was the Cold War?

Last updated on: August 30, 2020 at 6:44 am By Philip Jenkins

The labels and limits we apply to historical periods do much to shape how we define and study them, and sometimes, those labels are really misleading. On occasion, multiple competing labels exist, but one becomes important enough to swamp the others, to the extent that we forget that those competitors ever existed. As a case in point, I am presently writing a history of the Cold War, which is a very well studied topic in all fields – we study... Read more

Shakespeare, Honor, and Reformation

Last updated on: August 30, 2020 at 8:50 pm By Philip Jenkins

So that Shakespeare really is that good… Like many of us, my life has been quite constrained in the past few months, and I have taken advantage of the situation with a major project, namely to watch my way through all Shakespeare’s plays. Now, I know lots of the plays intimately, certainly all the standards, and have read probably all of them (Pericles? Troilus and Cressida? Probably not). But I have never actually seen all performed, and now has been... Read more