Anointed with Oil

Last updated on: September 13, 2019 at 12:04 pm By johnturner

Today I discuss Darren Dochuk’s recently published Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. Darren is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where we met as graduate students back in the late 1990s. – Cameron Townsend, the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, went to Mexico in the 1930s, met President Lázaro Cárdenas, secured permission for evangelical missionaries to operate in the country, and defended Cárdenas’s decision to... Read more

The Many Faiths of Alex Trebek

Last updated on: September 10, 2019 at 9:52 pm By David Swartz

A short spiritual biography of a Hollywood celebrity Read more

The Sky Pilots of the North Woods

Last updated on: September 8, 2019 at 3:43 pm By Chris Gehrz

Chris tells the story of Minnesota's "sky pilots" — itinerant preachers whose ministry to lumberjacks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought them into conflict with labor organizers. Read more

Being Naked and Unashamed

Last updated on: September 8, 2019 at 11:09 pm By Agnes Howard

Funny–our realtor did not point out the nudist camp around the corner from our new house when we were getting ready to sign the papers. Location, location. Lake o’the Woods dates from the 1933 when a group of Chicago-based investors settled their club on a parcel of farmland and marshy woods they bought in Valparaiso, Indiana, around some small, attractive lakes. Proud to be the second oldest nudist club in the US, the camp “advocates social and recreational outdoor nudity... Read more

The Decline of Death

Last updated on: September 2, 2019 at 8:56 am By Philip Jenkins

Whenever I taught my long-running course on World Religions, I would always greet my students on the opening day with a simple yet encouraging statement: “You’re all going to die.” Although some assumed that I was announcing a new and rather harsh grading policy, I soon explained my meaning. Death is inevitable, yet we cannot contemplate the extinction of our identities, and therefore – through most of human history – we contemplate various forms of survival or continuity. Awareness of... Read more

The Problem of Timeless Sexual Morality

Last updated on: September 5, 2019 at 7:28 am By Kristin Du Mez

It’s been a difficult stretch for traditional Christian sexual morality. Values once held dear are being tossed aside with abandon. One after another, Christians are “slipping from the grounded banks of orthodoxy into the current of the times,” as Andrea Palpant Dilley lamented in her recent editorial at Christianity Today. According to Dilley, two-thousand years of church history, the Holy Spirit, the words of Scripture, and “other forms of extra-biblical evidence” (i.e. rather dubious sociological and psychological findings) together form... Read more

The Weight of Words–Medieval Jangling to Modern Tweeting

Last updated on: September 4, 2019 at 12:15 am By Beth Allison Barr

I am so pleased to welcome back Lynneth Miller Renberg. Lynneth is an assistant professor of history at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. She teaches a range of courses, including classes on medieval Europe, Europe in the Reformation, and the history of women in the church. She is currently working on a monograph on dance, sacrilege, and gender in late medieval England and an edited collection on the tale of the cursed dancing carolers. I’ve been thinking a lot about words lately.... Read more

Red State Christians

Last updated on: September 2, 2019 at 7:57 pm By Chris Gehrz

Chris talks to journalist-pastor Angela Denker about her new book, based on extensive interviews with evangelicals and other Christians who voted for Donald Trump. Read more

Shifting Images of Terror: The Road from Arlington Road

Last updated on: September 2, 2019 at 8:59 am By Philip Jenkins

This is the voice of historical memory speaking, through the channel of Professor Jenkins. Last time, I described how views of terrorism have shifted over time, between internal enemies (usually domestic far Right) and external (Communists or Islamists). Such oscillations are dangerous when they involve a kind of blindness toward the kind of terror we decide to underplay or ignore. In the 1990s, the total focus on white supremacist and far Right terrorism led to a catastrophic official neglect of... Read more

Shifting Images of Terror

Last updated on: August 29, 2019 at 6:41 am By Philip Jenkins

For some thirty years, I have written and taught about the topic of terrorism, including in my 2003 book Images of Terror. I talk about specific movements and actions, but more broadly about the larger issues of interpretation that are so vital in determining official responses. Centrally, how do we know what we think we know about terrorism? We presently stand at a critical turning point in attitudes to terrorism, although the core issues at stake are receiving nothing like... Read more