The River Empires of #VastEarlyAmerica

Last updated on: September 28, 2024 at 1:15 pm By Philip Jenkins

My present research involves the relationship between religion and American empire. Recently, I have been viewing that through the context of the idea of “vastness” that dominates current work on early American history, namely the urge to go beyond traditional frontiers, whether national, racial, or chronological. As I’ll show today, a geographical perspective brings those various themes together nicely, and actually has quite a bit to say about the foundations of quite diverse US religious traditions. American history has been... Read more

The problem with JD Vance

Last updated on: October 1, 2024 at 2:21 am By Erica Ramirez

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Tomorrow night, Tim Walz will debate JD Vance, fresh off his Saturday appearance in Pennsylvania. Vance took the stage at what the NY Times called “a Town Hall ‘hosted by The Lance Wallnau Show Courage Series.'” Lance Wallnau is an evangelical prosperity preacher from Dallas and a high profile leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Participants in the NAR hold “the belief that Christians should influence or even rule society, from politics to media to culture and the economy.”... Read more

The Faiths of #VastEarlyAmerica

Last updated on: September 26, 2024 at 8:56 am By Philip Jenkins

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As I outlined in my last post, contemporary scholarship on early America stresses its “vast” quality, in terms of the need to expand beyond traditional constraints of national boundaries, and chronological limits. That work is highly relevant to my contemporary project on the religious dimensions of American empire. What would such a “vast” history of this topic look like? To make an obvious point, one influential history makes a major step towards achieving something very like that, and it is... Read more

Women and Gender at the Conference on Faith and History

Last updated on: September 25, 2024 at 12:13 am By Andrea L. Turpin

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One of my favorite academic societies, the Conference on Faith and History, holds its biennial meeting in a couple weeks and I’m excited for the line-up! This society is a group of historians of faith rather than historians who study faith, although many of us do. This year’s theme is “Christian Historians and their Contexts.” The Conference on Faith and History features a lot of panels on historical topics of interest to me. But I also really enjoy the fact... Read more

Christian Third Parties

Last updated on: September 21, 2024 at 4:44 pm By Daniel K. Williams

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When Pope Francis observed recently that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are “against life,” and that American Christians will therefore have to vote for the “lesser of two evils,” it confirmed what many pro-life Christians have been thinking for a while: neither candidate fully represents their values. Millions of American Christian voters – whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox – will therefore cast their ballots for a choice that they consider far from ideal in the belief that they must... Read more

Asian American Religious Voters: Three Basic Things To Know

Last updated on: September 24, 2024 at 12:40 am By Melissa Borja

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Back in 2020, I met a local politician who asked for my advice about how she could better serve the Asian Americans in her district. During our conversation, this politician mentioned a large Korean American church perched prominently on a hill on a main thoroughfare in the city. Who are the people in this church? she asked. Do they even care about the election? In her view, these Korean American Christians were a cloistered community completely disengaged from American politics.... Read more

Teaching the Faith and Fomenting Contempt in the Reformation

Last updated on: September 20, 2024 at 12:31 pm By Jacob Randolph

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I have been preoccupied over the last few months by the subject of tradition in the Reformation—how it is constructed, where it is appropriated, and where the self-conscious breaks occur. As part of that preoccupation, I’ve turned numerous times to the question of transmission. How is the faith being passed on to the next generation when new beliefs and new ways of being Christian appear in the 16th century? One way this transmission happened frequently was in the writing and... Read more

Empires and Religions in #VastEarlyAmerica

Last updated on: September 18, 2024 at 2:47 pm By Philip Jenkins

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I have been posting on the religious dimensions of empire in American history, and I have stressed how the nation’s imperial expansion from earliest times must be seen in that imperial context. Over the past decade, one very influential approach to that story has been the idea of “Vast Early America,” which is commonly represented as a hashtag, #VastEarlyAmerica. Today I will describe the core idea and the debates that it has inspired, and next time, I will look at... Read more

Anabaptism Turns 500

Last updated on: September 17, 2024 at 2:56 pm By David Swartz

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That Anabaptism could turn half a millennium old would have shocked early Anabaptists. Read more

Augustine in Dialogue with Purity Culture

Last updated on: September 16, 2024 at 3:49 pm By Adam Renberg

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We were crammed into a large storage space retrofitted with old couches and Newsboys posters, sweaty and out of breath after the game of dodgeball we just played. What better time could there be to talk about sex? An older couple from the church arrived to speak to the youth group, discussing in awkward detail how amazing sex is, so long as you wait for marriage—if you don’t, your marriage will be broken, or at least not as good as... Read more