While she drew on many other religious, philosophical, and literary sources for her post-Christian spirituality, Anne Morrow Lindbergh never entirely discarded her upbringing in the Protestant establishment. Read more
While she drew on many other religious, philosophical, and literary sources for her post-Christian spirituality, Anne Morrow Lindbergh never entirely discarded her upbringing in the Protestant establishment. Read more
This post strays a bit from the main theme of the Anxious Bench in that I am not discussing religion, particularly, but I will focus on history, and specifically the means by which history is presented to a general mass audience. After all, such popular presentations are the way in which most people learn about history. When can and should such histories omit key parts of the story? What is too toxic even to mention? I am thinking of Ken... Read more
Wired magazine recently published an excellent essay that overtly said next to nothing about religion. Even so, it made me think about the vast range of alternative and apocryphal gospels written through two millennia, and how we read them. Among other things, it raises the intriguing question of when we refer to a work as apocryphal as opposed to a forgery, or even a novel. Where do we draw lines? The provocative Wired piece was titled “We Can Be Heroes:... Read more
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
David returns to his series on Christians you might not know are pacifists Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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