It has been a tumultuous June in Hong Kong, where a proposed bill that would allow China to extradite fugitives has prompted widespread protest. Seeing the measure as a tool for apprehending political dissidents and a threat to Hong Kong’s freedom, opponents of the bill have taken to the streets, with over one million people participating in marches this month. The protests have been peaceful, but tensions have risen, to the point that on June 12, police clad in riot... Read more
I love to study people who don’t fit in boxes. These people explode our assumptions about which ideas or which actions go together. They help us think outside our own boxes in productive ways, whether we totally agree with them or not. To a certain extent, everyone I study as a historian doesn’t fit in my boxes: people in the past had different assumptions about the world than we do today. But I particularly like to study the people who... Read more
To this point it’s primarily been mainline denominations like the United Methodist Church and Anabaptist groups like the Mennonite Church USA that have faced schism over sexuality and same-sex marriage, what religion journalist Richard Ostling calls “Protestants’ most divisive issues since slavery.” But evangelicals’ turn is fast approaching. Last week the 2019 synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America debated the interim report of a committee tasked “to explore biblical conceptions of sexuality and gender,” with a final vote... Read more
Through writing about church history in many different eras, I have acquired a long standing interest in apostates and apostasy. In so many ways, apostates stubbornly refuse to fit into our normal assigned categories. We spend a huge amount of time addressing why people convert to particular faiths and causes, but rather less on why they leave. In the history of Christianity, this latter angle is actually a vast topic, and one that hugely occupied the minds of church councils... Read more
I am so pleased to welcome Dr. Melody Maxwell to the Anxious Bench today. Melody’s post today will add to our growing conversation on the Anxious Bench about how evangelicalism, at least in some ways, has evolved differently in Canada–first Chris Gehrz’s post on Hockey and the Future of Evangelicalism and second my recent post on Canadian Baptists. Melody is an Associate Professor of Church History at Acadia Divinity School in Nova Scotia. Acadia is the official seminary for the Canadian... Read more
In 1815, John Quincy Adams purchased six small busts of classical philosophers and poets: Cicero, Homer, Plato, Virgil, Socrates, and Demosthenes. They stayed with him for the rest of his long life, sitting on the White House mantel and eventually resting in the Stone Library on the family’s Quincy property. Referred to by generations of Adamses as their Household Gods, they inspired the title for Sara Georgini’s portrait of one family’s centuries-long religious journey. Georgini’s story begins with the decision... Read more
Translation is a bugbear of mine. In many types of literature, I don’t worry too much if translators play a little fast and loose with the original, but in sacred texts, where the author’s intent matters so much, that does bother me. This point came to mind when reading a recent post by the fine classicist, Mary Beard. It made me think of a word that I would like to see more widely used, namely, “paraphrase.” Beard was specifically addressing... Read more
I am used to thinking of the New England colonies as commonwealths, as what Michael Winship (in Hot Protestants) calls “quasi-republics.” Mark Peterson, in his remarkable City-State of Boston, uses this language as well. The Massachusetts Bay founders “erected a commonwealth remarkable for its autonomy,” he writes, “including an independent religious order free from the Church of England’s scrutiny, and a self-governing republic centered in Boston.” Peterson’s lens is different, though. He traces “the long-term fate of the efforts that... Read more
Chuck Redfern: "It’s time for evangelical myth busting. I say that as the not-so-secret secret unravels: White American Evangelical Christianity has plunged into a theological, spiritual, and moral abyss. Many claiming the evangelical label laud an obviously decadent president while jettisoning the movement’s time-honored convictions: Lifeway Research found that majorities believe the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, that Jesus was a created being, and that family worship is an acceptable swap for regular church attendance. I gladly pinned on the evangelical badge in the early 1980s as liberation’s insignia. The term signaled a more ecumenical, gracious, and intellectually viable species of back-to-the-Bible Christian. Wesleyan-oriented nineteenth-century evangelicals pushed for reform. They advocated abolitionism; they intentionally dwelled in slums and befriended the poor; they were the first to ordain women. Now? Not so much. Two questions: What went wrong and what’s the remedy? An inevitable third question flows from the second: Should we fight to preserve the evangelical tag or was Russell Moore right in 2016: “In many ways the word itself is at the moment subverting the gospel of Jesus Christ.”" Read more
Just last week I found myself at the corner of Burrard Street and Nelson Street in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was making my way from the airport to my hotel, via the Vancouver metro system. I know most folk just grab a cab, especially when luggage is in tow. But using public transportation orients me to a new city and I really wanted to get my bearings as quickly as possible. The Canadian Society of Church History had invited me... Read more
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