All four of the New Testament gospels include the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus. In each gospel, after his final meal with his disciples, Jesus predicts that before the rooster crows (or crows twice, according to the most accepted manuscripts of Mark) Peter will deny him three times. A horrified Peter vows that he will never deny his Lord. Instead, he will die with him. When Jesus is arrested, all of the disciples — according to Mark and Matthew... Read more
Another story from Asia in which evangelicals sing Hallelujah in protest of totalitarian regimes Read more
Guest blogger Emily Wenneborg considers how "old hymns and the history of Christianity can work together to deepen our love for Christ’s church." Read more
Almost anything by Robert Wilken is worth reading. I have benefitted immensely from his The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale University Press, 2003) and The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012). Wilken does not disappoint in his most recent book, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019). Early on Wilken offers the following quote: “It is only right . . . that every person... Read more
I recently wrote about Nicodemism, the Reformation and Early Modern practice of keeping one’s real religious views secret in an age of potential persecution and violence. As I will explain, that Nicodemite idea was linked to the theme of lost and rediscovered scriptures, real or bogus, which was a major theme of the time. The veracity of documents was a paramount concern in the Renaissance era, and even more so in the Reformation, when scripture supposedly marked the path to... Read more
Today we welcome Monica L. Mercado to the Anxious Bench. Monica is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University, affiliated with Women’s Studies and Museum Studies. She will spend the 2019-2020 academic year in residence at Harvard Divinity School as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program. Monica is currently at work on her first book, The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism. In the introduction to Brett... Read more
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but shortly after I began teaching American history, I learned to love the bomb. More accurately, I learned to love teaching about the nuclear bomb. Maybe it was the day I suddenly realized that none of my students knew what USSR stood for (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!)—because they were all born after the Cold War. Maybe it was the day I realized I had shown the “Duck and Cover” film enough times... Read more
Check out a map of our most recent and popular blog posts! You might find that your summer travels will bring you close to important, but relatively unknown historical sites... Read more
Call it a guilty secret of Christian history: a secret about secrecy. As I have been describing over several recent posts, a great many Christian believers have held their faith in secret, even to the point of denying that they were really Christians. On the one hand, we think of the martyrs who stood up and proclaimed their faith at risk of torture and death, but there were also plenty of others who remained private and clandestine. In the modern... Read more
Are food photos on Instagram a kind of mealtime prayer? Chris thinks about the meaning of table graces. Read more
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