This summer I’m teaching a course on the Bible as Literature. Once in a while, we do a brief sample of the Bible within literature. The subject, of course, is without limit. One of the texts I assigned is Rudyard Kipling’s concise and poignant short story, “The Gardener.” I am thankful to Alan Jacobs for introducing me to it through his newsletter just when I was planning my summer syllabus. That is one of the joys of reading. One never... Read more
Monuments to flawed heroes of the past are spiritually dangerous – but removing them may lead to even greater spiritual blindness. At a time of new expressions of deep anger over a centuries-long history of racial injustice, perhaps it is not surprising that calls for the removal of Confederate monuments – calls that are based on a legitimate historical argument that those monuments are symbols of white supremacy – have, in at least a few cases, morphed into a... Read more
Kristin's new book on militant masculinity has Chris rethinking his evangelical heritage. Read more
What is school for? To answer that question Massachusetts Bay colonists invoked the devil. The devil had a stake in ignorance, so school was a tool to fight that evil. “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures,” somebody should teach children to read and write. To nudge people to do so, a 1647 law later nicknamed the “Old Deluder Satan” act ordered all towns with at least fifty households... Read more
Historians can use American poetry as valuable primary sources, not least to illustrate nineteenth century events and trends. I have talked about authors like John Greenleaf Whittier and Herman Melville, but another great example is Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who was very well known indeed in the early part of the last century. His “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” was published in 1919, but it was an autobiographical recollection of the events of 1896. The 1896 election was one of the great... Read more
A couple weeks back, evangelical Twitter erupted with the drama unfolding around Aimee Byrd and her new book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose. Byrd is no liberal. A member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Byrd wasn’t arguing for women’s ordination or for women in formal church leadership. She simply wanted to challenge the strict separation of women and men in evangelical spiritual formation and to encourage women to gain theological literacy.... Read more
Racism wasn’t a word I knew as a child. Yet racism churned all around me. The small Texas town I lived in was almost 40% non-white. But my everyday life of school, church, family, and friends was mostly white. Yes, I played with black children on the playground, and set next to black teenagers in the band hall. These were aberrant splashes of color on a mostly pale canvas. Rarely did I attend a non-white friend’s birthday party. All my... Read more
Guest blogger Benji Rolsky reviews a new book on the Religious Left. Read more
I have been posting on how historians can use American poetry as valuable primary sources, and I have discussed Herman Melville’s Clarel (1876). Another example came rather pressingly to my mind as a result of recent headlines. In his day, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) was an immense public celebrity. He was extraordinarily influential, and was the house bard of the abolitionist movement, especially its religious components. To use an anachronism, the guiding principle of his whole religious creed and political... Read more
I am happy to announce the publication of my new book, Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020). As you may recall from earlier blogposts, I have been working on this topic for a while now, so I am delighted to see this book in print. Here is a summary of what it is all about: Fertility and Faith addresses a critical theme for the future development of all the world’s religions.... Read more
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