Dear John, So I imagine you’ve been caught by surprise at the popularity/notoriety of that little audio clip released last week. I mean, it wasn’t as though you weren’t expressing something you haven’t said, in one form or another, for decades now. More people than I can count have already taken to Twitter and the blogosphere to call you out for disrespecting Beth Moore, and rightly so. But Moore said she’s ready to move on, and besides, I’m guessing the... Read more
David R. Swartz reflects on last week's announcement about the first nonwhite president of the National Association of Evangelicals Read more
The Pew Foundation has just released a significant report concerning the state of American religion. As with anything done by Pew, both the research and the analysis are exemplary, and the findings are convincing. I will challenge one small but important thing in the report, namely its title – but I will be arguing a great deal with the way in which it has been represented in the media. We are seeing substantial changes in religious attitudes and beliefs, but... Read more
Present day visions of motherhood may feel so askew that we might look in many directions–religion? the past? other places?–for correction. The current issue of the journal Image carries an arresting art piece, “Motherhood: A Visual Contract,” aiming to find some use in religious imagery of motherhood from the past. The art and text from Israeli-born London artist Leni Dothan engage contemporary perplexities in ways that echo a noteworthy book from earlier this year, Sarah Knott’s Mother is a Verb.... Read more
I need to declare an interest in what follows. I am writing here about a new book called Voices of the Voiceless: Religion, Communism and the Keston Archive, edited by Julie deGraffenried and Zoe Knox, published by Baylor University Press. I teach at Baylor, where Julie is a colleague of mine in the History Department. Having said that … I am describing the book because it addresses such a critical topic in modern Christian history, and it does so through... Read more
He was the first student to ever visit my office. I wasn’t expecting him to visit. In fact, I wasn’t expecting anybody to visit. I wasn’t holding official office hours that day. My office was nearly impossible to find, set apart from the main corridor and hidden in the back corner of the building. And I was a new professor, only a few weeks into my teaching career. The students barely knew me, and I barely knew them—or anything, for... Read more
Last week I got an unusual opportunity to live out the tagline of The Anxious Bench: “The Relevance of Religious History for Today.” A colleague asked me to guest lead a discussion in his education department graduate course “Foundations and History of Higher Education.” I have lots of experience using religious history to train graduate students—who plan to go on to be historians like me! It was fascinating to instead use religious history to train graduate students who plan to... Read more
For the second year in a row, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is an African Pentecostal: Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia. What's the history of Pentecostalism in Ethiopia, and is it related to evangelicalism? Chris did some research. Read more
I deeply respect my friends who are Biblical literalists, but I do have some quarrels with their approach. Above all, we need to be careful about defining the exact limits and boundaries of the Bible and the books it contains, which is not as obvious as we might think. I’ll illustrate this point by adapting and expanding a couple of columns that I published at this site several years ago. When we say that the Bible is the Word of... Read more
Aristion was a prestigious and influential figure in the early church, about whom we know very little. But what we do know has some far-reaching implications for early attitudes to the making of the gospels, and the authority of scripture. Most of what we know about Aristion comes from the early/mid second century writer Papias of Hierapolis, whose work survives only in small fragments. Hierapolis was a critical center of the peimitive church, located in what is now south western... Read more
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