Who Is an Evangelical?

Last updated on: September 22, 2019 at 7:58 am By johnturner

It’s Founder’s Day at the Bench. Thomas S. Kidd is James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also the founding blogmeister of the Anxious Bench. We are very pleased to welcome him back for this discussion of his Who Is an Evangelical?, just published by Yale University Press. If you want more Kidd, he is a great follow @ThomasSKidd. The title of your book implies that American evangelicalism is... Read more

Unexpected Sites of Christian Pacifism: John Wimber Edition

Last updated on: September 24, 2019 at 9:09 pm By David Swartz

David returns to his series on Christians you might not know are pacifists Read more

“Teaching was unrighteous for a girl”: The History of Violence Against Women Preachers

Last updated on: September 22, 2019 at 8:05 am By Chris Gehrz

The title track from the current #1 country album — plus a tweet from the song's co-writer — got Chris thinking about the history of violence against women preachers in America. Read more

Death by Secularism?

Last updated on: September 22, 2019 at 7:58 am By Thomas Albert Howard

On November 22, 1967, in Decree 4377, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha declared religion officially dead. The measure coincided with a sweeping attack on religious institutions in the small Balkan state. Priests, bishops, imams were imprisoned or killed. Churches and mosques were vandalized, looted, and turned into dance halls, basketball courts, theatres, and the like. As one father remembered the time: “Parents were afraid to teach their children explicit words such as ‘love God and neighbor’ because a child might... Read more

What Did Luke Know, And When Did He Know It?

Last updated on: September 25, 2019 at 3:38 pm By Philip Jenkins

I am struggling with a celebrated New Testament passage, and I’ll use this blogpost as a way of working out my thoughts. It relates to the issue of the origins of the gospels as we have them, a topic about which I have blogged often enough in the past. As in most such cases, the issue at hand has a vast literature attached to it, and my main goal is not to be overwhelmed. Luke’s Prologue The text in question... Read more

“Faith Is Something They Can Take With Them”: The Importance of Religion in Refugee Resettlement

Last updated on: September 23, 2019 at 3:57 pm By Melissa Borja

In the past two years, the Trump administration has pushed aggressively for restrictive refugee policies. At present, the number of refugees admitted for resettlement in the United States is at a historic low—capped at 30,000, which is 70% less than during the Obama administration. That number could soon be even lower. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering a proposal that would “reduce refugee admissions to zero.” The Trump administration’s assault on the... Read more

Can Suffragists Teach Us About Religion’s Relationship to Politics?

Last updated on: September 18, 2019 at 1:32 am By Andrea L. Turpin

Suffragists fascinate me. I have always been impressed by their steadfast commitment to political equality for women during an era—the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that was not often receptive to their message. Specifically, I have wondered what drove such a commitment. Many of my students at Baylor come from religious backgrounds, so when I began teaching American women’s history here, I wanted to find out more about suffragists’ religious convictions. Could I connect their stories to my students’ lives? Did... Read more

The Heirs of 1918: WWI and Native American Life

Last updated on: September 16, 2019 at 9:58 am By Chris Gehrz

A recent visit to a museum on an Ojibwe reservation got Chris thinking about how the First World War affected the political and spiritual life of Native Americans. Read more

The Four Gospels, and the Through Four

Last updated on: September 26, 2019 at 11:57 am By Philip Jenkins

Not for the first time, I am thinking about gospels, and specifically the four gospels. After so much scholarship has been undertaken through the centuries, there is not much I can add on these matters that is new, but I will make one point that seems important to me. I’ll offer an argument for the antiquity and authority of those four that is worth remembering when you next hear claims bemoaning those lost alternative gospels we hear about from time... Read more

The Cremation Revolution

Last updated on: September 12, 2019 at 8:03 pm By Philip Jenkins

In my last column, I discussed how shifting perceptions of death contributed to weakening traditional religious faith. Today, I’ll pursue that theme in the context of burial and funerals. Like many other churches, my Episcopal parish has in recent years installed a columbarium, a wall of compartments or niches in which the ashes of the dead are preserved in their urns. It’s a moving place of peace and remembrance. But the more you know about the long span of Christian... Read more