David Baddiel is a British comedian and writer, who is usually very funny. He is however deadly serious in a column in the January 29 Times Literary Supplement [paywalled] in which he complains about the widespread tolerance of vicious anti-Semitism when it comes from Left or “progressive” sources. (The column is an extract from his new book Jews Don’t Count). His argument has a great deal to say about contemporary debates over censorship and so-called “cancel culture,” and how we... Read more
My present research involves writing a biography of Psalm 91 as it has been read and used through history. That might seem a fairly limited and specific project, but in fact, I am being drowned in material. The psalm’s verses show up abundantly and centrally in the foundational texts of Christology, in the history of monasticism, and in Christian thinking through the centuries about war and politics, about plague and pestilence. It also appears very frequently on material objects of... Read more
35 years ago today, President Ronald Reagan eulogized the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion by quoting one of the pilot-poets Chris encountered in his research on Charles Lindbergh. Read more
When I began studying American history as a Ph.D. student at Brown University twenty years ago, I quickly realized that my professors and fellow students were operating by a different moral code than I was. It was not the purely secular moral code that I, as a conservative white fundamentalist Christian at the time, naively expected them to have. Instead, it was a rights-conscious moral code that seemed to draw on the moral fervor of Christianity, but without the name. ... Read more
Today we welcome Daniel Meeter to the Anxious Bench. Rev. Meeter has retired from nineteen years as the pastor and teacher of the “Old First” Reformed Dutch Church of Brooklyn, New York. During this month of January the world watched two remarkable expressions of American Civil Religion, two weeks apart, at the same location – the US Capitol. I don’t remember newscasters ever calling the Capitol “the temple of American democracy” before, but they certainly began to do so on January... Read more
Chris tells the story of the ASV, the Bible that was "common among mainline Protestants... in the early 20th century, but little loved in its own time and virtually unknown in ours." Read more
In our season of tumult, grief, and new hope, the film Pieces of a Woman, released on Netflix this month, strikes notes both disturbing and timely. One reviewer asks, on the film’s central question, “can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?” Based partly on the experience of filmmakers Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber, Pieces’ most noteworthy feature is the single-shot 24-minute scene of the character Martha’s (Vanessa Kirby) home birth, which ends with the death... Read more
We often encounter attempts to gauge the strength of faiths and denominations in the US, usually in the form of the maps and tables that appear in the news media from time to time. Those figures are based on careful studies by such reputable organizations as Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies who produce a U. S. Religious Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Survey, or RCMS (The 2010 Census was published in 2012, and another one is presently in... Read more
The subculture of American evangelicalism has shaped me deeply. My most formative spiritual experiences through my college years came through evangelical parachurch organizations and in an evangelical congregation that belongs to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Like many Americans, I was born again several times. I first made a public commitment to Christ at what passed for a revival in a Presbyterian context. At the end of a weekend of meetings focused on the Bible and conversion, I came forward. I... Read more
Today I am sharing a hard story of how a woman, simply because of her sex, faced significant barriers in following the call God placed on her life. But today I am also filled with hope because, for the first time in our nation’s history, a woman is being sworn in as our Vice President. May we soon have a world where women can not only serve in our highest political offices but be free to serve in whatever way... Read more
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