This is a post about the history of evangelicalism. But as with many things these days, it starts with the election of Donald Trump. Or, more precisely, with the night before the election of Donald Trump. ‘Twas the evening of November 7, 2016, when then-candidate Trump descended upon my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I didn’t attend the rally. That afternoon I’d been a few miles away at Hillary Clinton’s last-minute campaign event. I’d brought my daughter, thinking it might... Read more
David Swartz reviews David King's book on World Vision Read more
What the books collected in the Lindbergh House tell us about the intellectual world of Charles Lindbergh's parents, who read widely at the intersections of philosophy, religion, and science. Read more
Pulitzer-prize winning writer Timothy Egan takes to the road as a pilgrim not because it is easy but because it is hard. His book,, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of Faith, admits the cluster of concerns that set him out on the path: his family’s mixed and painful experience with Roman Catholicism; personal intentions, including prayers for a sister-in-law’s cancer; desire to hear from Pope Francis. But perhaps most compelling is his hopeful searching for evidence... Read more
I recently posted about the decade of the 2010s that is now so swiftly passing into historical memory, and what aspects of it we think demand commemoration. How did the religious world change in those years? I also want to open a discussion about films from this same decade, and other artistic productions on Christian themes. This seems so important to me because cinema actually reaches a far wider audience than literary or book-based discussions, and genuinely does influence mass... Read more
Among the many memorable and educational things Sesame Street provided me as a preschooler—skills for counting in Spanish and knowledge about processing sugar beets—perhaps the most important was the first opportunity to invite a Jewish person into my home: Mr. Hooper, Big Bird’s friend and beloved owner of the Sesame Street corner store. Read more
Every few years I switch up the readings for my U.S. history survey course. Recently, a colleague suggested I assign Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South, a memoir by American historian Melton McLaurin. I have not been disappointed. Reading the book for class discussion this week, I was struck with the simple but profound lesson of McLaurin’s teenage years in the 1950s: spending substantive time getting to know “the other” is one of the most effective ways... Read more
Chris recalls how a guitar-slinging Pentecostal gospel singer named Sister Rosetta Tharpe helped develop rock 'n' roll. Read more
This blog is unusual in format in that I am not so much making a case as seeking ideas, in an open-ended way. There are no correct answers to my question, and I am genuinely looking for guidance. My questions specifically concern the 2010s, an important and action-packed era that comes to its end in a month or so. That decade, I fear, also falls short of getting the attention it deserves. I am presently writing a couple of retrospective... Read more
In my last post, I discussed the 1888 English novel Robert Elsmere, which was vastly influential in its time. Briefly, it describes the crisis of faith of an Anglican clergyman, who suffers a deconversion experience inspired by contemporary Biblical criticism. How does the book stand today? Have Christians come to terms with these questions? What can we learn from the book today? Looking at the novel today, several major points come to mind. One, as I remarked last time, is... Read more
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