What Will Evangelicals Say to Jesus?

Last updated on: January 8, 2019 at 10:02 pm By Beth Allison Barr

“White Jesus has blood on him.” Angela Tarango, Associate Professor of Religion at Trinity University, said this during the Conference on Faith and History’s 2019 panel for the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago last weekend. The panel (which I was so excited to have organized) featured Jennifer Graber’s excellent and provocative book The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. Dr. Tarango’s statement startled me. On the one hand, she is spot on. Christians,... Read more

Before “true love waits” there was Josh McDowell and Petra

Last updated on: December 26, 2018 at 12:42 pm By Chris Gehrz

Thanks to Jared Burkholder for writing this morning’s guest post on the history of evangelical purity culture. A history professor at Grace College and Seminary, Jared blogs at The Hermeneutic Circle and can be followed on Twitter @jsburkholder. Those of us who experienced the evangelical youth group subculture of the 1980s and 90s are now in mid-life, and some of my fellow mid-lifers are reflecting back on the “purity movement” that began in those years. The conversation has been led largely by... Read more

Extinction Rebellion

Last updated on: January 6, 2019 at 2:52 pm By Philip Jenkins

Recently, a couple of semi-humorous stories made me think about a far graver set of issues, and one that might be one of the major ethical and religion-related issues of the coming years. When does a political cause become such a matter of life and death that it demands illegal actions? The main news story concerned the truly bizarre affair at England’s Gatwick airport, where reported drone activity shut down this hugely busy transit point just before Christmas. Many flights... Read more

Roma, Race, and Faith

Last updated on: January 3, 2019 at 8:32 am By Philip Jenkins

Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma has been universally praised as a major work of cinema, a triumph of cinematography no less than acting, and it will assuredly win Academy Awards. But the film raises some worrying points about how we read and report history, not to mention some intriguing religious issues. If you have not seen the brilliant Roma, you must. It tells the story of an upper middle class family in Mexico City in the 1970s, focusing on their housemaid,... Read more

Mitt Romney and Mormon Studies

Last updated on: January 3, 2019 at 12:14 am By johnturner

Mitt Romney has done more than just about anyone else (save my Doktorvater) for my career. By coming close to the Republican nomination in 2008 and then being the presumptive nominee for the next four years, Romney made Mormon Studies great. The creators of The Book of Mormon: The Musical also deserve ample credit, but the man from Michigan Massachusetts Utah enhanced popular interest in his religion just in time for my first book on the subject. Some people wondered... Read more

Serendipity in the Stacks: A Case against Bookless Libraries

Last updated on: January 2, 2019 at 7:14 pm By David Swartz

Why I'm not ready to leave behind real books in real library Read more

Is New Year’s Day a Christian Holiday?

Last updated on: December 30, 2018 at 4:07 pm By Chris Gehrz

Greetings from London, England, where I’ve just arrived to start Bethel University’s World War I travel course. Ringing in 2019 in this former outpost of the Roman Empire and former capital of the British Empire is a good reminder that celebrating New Year’s on this first day of January is both a vestige of colonialism and, even in Britain, a relatively recent innovation in history. In the English-speaking world, it wasn’t until the mid-18th century that January 1st replaced March 25th. As... Read more

Why Raising Chickens Should Not Be Your New Year’s Resolution

Last updated on: December 26, 2018 at 3:32 pm By Agnes Howard

Who doesn’t long for an integrated life? A life that holds together the varied offices, desires, communities, and works we each carry, rather than leaving them in rueful compartmentalized state? With a nod to David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, that annual tribute to each year’s worthy articles, I call attention to Peter’s Meilaender’s essay from earlier this year, “Against the Integrated Life” in The Cresset. Meilaender offers good theological reason why we might put aside that holistic vision. If you haven’t read... Read more

In Search of Crypto-Jews, Again

Last updated on: December 28, 2018 at 7:51 am By Philip Jenkins

The Atlantic just published a potentially important piece called “The Genetic Legacy of the Spanish Inquisition” by Sarah Zhang. I am not saying outright that the article (and the research it reports) are wrong. But I think I see gaping holes in the evidence, at least as it was presented. Among other things, this suggests some issues in applying genetics to the study of history. Some years ago, researchers claimed to find evidence of “crypto-Jews” in the Americas, most conspicuously... Read more

2018: The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Evangelicalism

Last updated on: December 27, 2018 at 11:27 am By Chris Gehrz

Reviewing our most popular posts of 2018, Chris found one topic popping up again and again: evangelicalism. Read more

For you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its what?