I love nativities. Every Thanksgiving my mother gives me a new nativity set to display. She gets them from the local Fair Trade store, so we now have scenes crafted by artisans in Kenya, Indonesia, Haiti, Guatemala, Vietnam, Peru, Nicagarua, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, as well as the United States. The clean lines and naked beauty of the carved African soapstone contrasts with the vivid fabric colors from Peru. I especially love the set from India; it includes the wives of... Read more
“In a culture dominated by sharp opinions, admitting uncertainty comes at a cost.” So concludes Jonathan Merritt, in his Atlantic story on Christian musician Lauren Daigle. Daigle had come under fire from fellow Christians after expressing uncertainty on whether “homosexuality was sinful.” “I can’t honestly answer on that,” Daigle admitted. “I can’t say one way or the other. I’m not God.” As Merritt describes, Daigle’s response didn’t play well among some evangelicals: When the clip of her interview was posted... Read more
Why Chris' favorite World War I memorial is the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols held every Christmas Eve at King's College, Cambridge. Read more
What follows is adapted from a blogpost of mine at this site some years back. The earliest Christian communities varied substantially in their ideas about the birth of Christ. Here, I want to explore the implications of that fact for our understandings of the Christmas celebration. Let me begin with a familiar enough observation. Not until half a century after the Crucifixion can we find any recorded evidence of stories concerning Jesus’s birth, nor any reference to Bethlehem in that... Read more
I have posted here before about issues of predicting the future, specifically in religious matters. Based on what I have been doing in my current book project on the US in the 21st century, I offer a couple of new concepts to add to that discussion. As I have argued previously, predictions of America’s near-future have a very mixed record of accuracy, although some seemingly wild prophecies have turned out far more accurately than their authors dared believe. As early... Read more
I am not among the Twitterati, so this post is rather far outside of my field of expertise. But when former contributors and blogmeisters of The Anxious Bench face criticism and get swept up in controversy, one has a certain responsibility not to shrink from the field of, er, bloggle. Last week, Jonathan Merritt took issue with a post written by Thomas Kidd, our founder who later apostatized left for The Gospel Coalition. Kidd wrote about Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century... Read more
We all give thanks that the excesses of the Reformation didn’t kill Christmas in the end. Read more
Chris reviews the stunning new World War I documentary by Peter Jackson, a filmmaker better known for battle scenes involving orcs and elves. Read more
A noble impulse lurks in the heart of the young when they take “capitalism” to task in the name of “socialism.” Certainly many aspects of a free-market economy merit criticism, as no less a figure than Adam Smith trenchantly recognized. I only wish these criticisms today came with more discerning historical knowledge about the miserable record of real-existing socialism, especially the Marxist species: the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and, more recently, Venezuela. How many times can Marxism be said... Read more
History never looks like history when you are living through it. John W. Gardner I have just completed a book titled Rethinking a Nation: The United States in the 21st Century. Yes, that’s 21st, not 20th. The whole project raises some interesting questions about just what history is, how we define it, and how we separate it from (for instance) journalism or political science. This has important implications for how we define and study contemporary religious history, the kind of... Read more
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