A Response to “#Woke Evangelical Timeline”

Last updated on: May 25, 2019 at 2:40 pm By Beth Allison Barr

Today we are so pleased to welcome Otis Pickett, an Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi College, to the Anxious Bench. Otis is also co-founder of the Prison to College Pipeline program. I recently came across a piece on Patheos by D.G. Hart entitled “#Woke Evangelical Timeline.” While I have tremendous respect for Hart as a historian, I also have relationships with the individuals mentioned in the piece and on Twitter.[1] I have also taken both a personal and professional interest in... Read more

The Sinner Finds Peace

Last updated on: May 25, 2019 at 7:57 am By Philip Jenkins

I have a literary discovery to report, and I think I can claim a first here. It involves a work by one of the great modern Christian novelists, and an older author who wrote a stunning work on one particular tradition of the faith. The modern writer is Gene Wolfe, who died last month. He is often misleadingly called a science fiction or fantasy writer, but he was far more than that. He was a brilliant stylist and a dazzling... Read more

The Myth of Puritan Intolerance (Part II)

Last updated on: May 22, 2019 at 2:45 pm By johnturner

A few weeks ago, I suggested that the “myth” of puritan intolerance is “not very useful for understanding the history of seventeenth-century New England” in part because “it implies that New England’s leaders were outliers within the trans-Atlantic world they inhabited.” The reality is that the Congregational ministers and magistrates of New England “were quite ordinary in their desire for religious uniformity and their determination to punish stubborn heresy.” In this week’s post, I will flesh out these suggestions. It... Read more

The Latin American Evangelical Left: An Interview with David Kirkpatrick, Part II

Last updated on: May 3, 2019 at 4:48 pm By David Swartz

David Swartz interviews David Kirkpatrick about his new book on the Latin American evangelical left. Read more

Rachel Held Evans, Beth Moore, and the Power of Evangelical Coalitions

Last updated on: May 20, 2019 at 11:38 am By Kristin Du Mez

As news spread of Rachel Held Evans’s death, one quote continued to pop up in my social media feed, a quote from her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church: But the gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This... Read more

Again with the Evils of E-cigarettes

Last updated on: May 20, 2019 at 9:59 am By Agnes Howard

Someday, soon perhaps, the Juul e-cigarette will pass into the heap of cast-off youth fads and we may breathe sighs of relief that that’s over. Until then, fuel for wild-eyed screeds against the product needs to come from somewhere. Religious and moral opposition to smoking has a long and varied pedigree, from the “Counterblaste to Tobacco” of England’s King James I, to the seventeenth-century papal rulings against tobacco use at Mass, to calls by long-skirted ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.... Read more

The Missing Paul

Last updated on: May 17, 2019 at 5:43 am By Philip Jenkins

Not long ago, I posted about the Book of Acts, suggesting that some very early reader of that text went out and collected what all later ages now know as the collection of Paul’s letters. Specifically, I suggested the collector responsible was “Theophilos,” either the actual name or pseudonym of the person to whom Luke dedicated his writings. Following up on that, I returned to one of the very best scholarly works on Acts, which is of course by Ben... Read more

Don’t Balance Budgets on the Back of History

Last updated on: May 15, 2019 at 8:22 pm By Chris Gehrz

Chris writes his first letter to a member of the U.S. Congress. Read more

Because Christian Patriarchy Isn’t Christian

Last updated on: August 3, 2021 at 2:45 pm By Beth Allison Barr

In 215 B.C., a defeated and cash-strapped Rome passed a new law. The context was their greatest military defeat ever. As the first century Roman historian Livy cried, “For according to the reports two consular armies and two consuls were lost; there was no longer any Roman camp, any general, any single soldier in existence; Apulia, Samnium, almost the whole of Italy lay at Hannibal’s feet. Certainly there is no other nation that would not have succumbed beneath such a weight... Read more

When Churches Were Left in Ruins

Last updated on: May 14, 2019 at 9:56 am By Chris Gehrz

About a month after the fire that nearly destroyed Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral, it's clear that medieval church will rise again. But some of the churches obliterated in the two world wars were left in ruins, as memorials. Read more