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
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
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
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
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
A short spiritual biography of a Hollywood celebrity Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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