One of the oldest elements of today's rather modern royal wedding - the liturgy - was itself a blend of old and new when written in the 16th century. Read more
One of the oldest elements of today's rather modern royal wedding - the liturgy - was itself a blend of old and new when written in the 16th century. Read more
I am here reprinting and adapting a column I wrote for this blog back in 2013. This coming Sunday, May 20, the church celebrates the great feast of Pentecost, with all its rich imagery of fire from heaven, tongues of flame, and speaking in tongues. In the Western tradition at least, the day marks the church’s birthday. In old English, it was called Whit (White, or Holy) Sunday. Italians traditionally called it Pascha Rossa, Red Easter, giving some idea of... Read more
Today we welcome David W. Congdon to the Anxious Bench. David is acquisitions editor at the University Press of Kansas, and author of The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch, two books on Rudolf Bultmann, and an edited volume on Karl Barth. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson’s latest book, Future Faith: Ten Challenges Reshaping Christianity in the 21st Century, aims to be an accessible and practical introduction to what the new shape of the global church can teach US Christians. As the director... Read more
My daughter and I were walking our new puppy when my phone buzzed. It was a twitter notification from my fellow blogger Chris Gehrz. He had tweeted about Beth Moore’s open letter. I stopped dead and started reading. This was a mistake. We had only had our new puppy a few days and hadn’t yet convinced her to stop teething on us (actually, we still haven’t succeeded in this…). But I was so stunned by Beth Moore’s letter that it... Read more
The same year that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, an Australian Presbyterian and a German Catholic began to experiment with using aviation for missionary purposes. Read more
I recently posted about a nineteenth century response to the rise of Biblical Higher Criticism. Here, I offer another literary example, a work that is splendid in its own right, but which also offers a very well informed perspective on how scholars read and discussed the Bible then – and what they do today. In 1864, Robert Browning published his lengthy poem “A Death in the Desert.” Let me summarize the work here, and then say more about why it... Read more
In the early nineteenth century, German scholars launched an intellectual revolution that transformed attitudes to the Bible, and to Christian origins. Just how fundamental that change of attitude was is difficult for us to appreciate precisely because that revolution has today become so familiar and institutionalized. I want to describe a couple of contemporary literary responses to that transformation – partly because they raise interesting questions, but also because they are such fascinating items in their own right. In the... Read more
“Pilgrim” just has a much nicer ring to most eyes than “puritan.” On one level, the Pilgrims (who didn’t become the Pilgrims until the early nineteenth century) receive far more attention than they deserve. Every November, school children and many other Americans hear about the brave band of religious refugees who stepped onto Plymouth Rock and then celebrated a First Thanksgiving. The reality is rather more disappointing. The band was brave, but the rock is tiny and the thanksgiving wasn’t... Read more
The journey of a Mennonite woman from rural Kansas to international radicalism Read more
Chris reflects on the significance of Beth Moore as an emerging leader of evangelicalism in the age of Trump. Read more
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