March 1 is the feast of David, the early medieval bishop and missionary who became patron saint of Wales. We actually know strikingly little of David apart from that date, of March 1, but I’m going to suggest that represents a good deal in its own right. And I will use that fact to make a general point that I hope people don’t find too solemn or grim. It does fit the Lenten season. Through the Middle Ages, Christians cultivated... Read more
I recently read a column that impressed me, in a source that Anxious Bench readers might not know. Anything by Joel Kotkin is going to be significant. He now turns his attention to issues facing American Judaism, and in so many ways, what he says speaks to the concerns of Christian congregations, especially mainliners and Catholics. The work gets to issues of the current state of religion during and after the present virus crisis, a theme on which I have... Read more
What’s the most disliked religion in the contemporary United States? Until recently, “Islam” would have been the runaway answer to this question. Back in 2002, less than half of Americans held favorable views of Muslims, compared to the nearly three-quarters who had favorable views of “[some] Protestants,” “Catholics,” and “Jews.” In 2017, half of Americans asserted that Islam is “not part of mainstream American society.” In the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, Mormons were almost universally disliked by other Americans. The Latter-day Saints... Read more
My Ph.D. dissertation advisor taught at Brown University for thirty-three years. Two of the other professors for whom I TA’ed in my graduate years were probably at Brown for even longer. And some of the younger faculty, who had been at Brown for only a few years when I arrived at the university in 1999, are still there more than two decades later, and will almost certainly stay until their retirement. This, of course, is not unique to Brown, and... Read more
Today we are pleased to welcome former Anxious Bench blogger Tim Gloege back to the blog. I started listening to Rush Limbaugh at the beginning of his national radio career in the late 1980s. I was in high school, raised in a white evangelical community and part of Reagan’s conservative wave. I lived in Minneapolis, which identifies as a progressive town, despite its ongoing failures of racial justice (a story for another time). I was convinced that... Read more
Readers of the New York Times were greeted yesterday with a full-page paid advertisement, notifying its readers of the 100th anniversary of the Ahmadiyya or Ahmadi Muslims’ presence in the United States: on 21 February 1921 their first missionary arrived in Philadelphia. The Ahmadi community—possibly as high as 20 million strong worldwide today, existing in 210 countries—traces its roots to the Punjab region of northern India and Pakistan in the late nineteenth century, then under the British Raj. It was... Read more
Through the years, I have often taught courses on Christian history, and I have always tried to give fair coverage to different churches and denominations, and to different parts of the world. Have I succeeded in that? Probably not, despite sincere efforts. But a quick numerical exercise suggests just how far I fell, and fall, short. And I suspect I am not the only one. I am presently working on a particular Bible text, namely Psalm 91, and how it... Read more
“Are you going rogue?” The question startled me. It had come from a professor at another Christian university, someone I hadn’t met before. This was in the months before Jesus and John Wayne published, but she was responding to some of my online writings. Behind the question was an implicit assumption that a Christian institution could not or would not stand behind my work. I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t work at that kind of Christian university,... Read more
“Why do you think that is?” he asked. The steady stream of hungry students forked around our lunch table, flowing towards the sandwich bar on the left and the hot lunch items on the right. Time has blurred the students into a current of faceless forms. But Dr. Talbert’s piercing eyes gaze just as intently through my memory as if he still sits across that table. It was 2006 or 2007, and I held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Baylor... Read more
Miles Mullin reviews John Wilsey's new religious biography of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose "liberal Protestant faith informed and formed his thinking about diplomacy and the international order." Read more
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