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
Only out of the past can you make the future,” says a character in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. And yet some pasts are dreadfully dark and tangled, and how one wrings a future from them is anyone’s guess. This thought gnawed at me during a recent trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan states. I had gone in search of interviewees for a research project on interreligious dialogue. I wanted to talk with people removed from the tired... Read more
I have been reading an important new book called Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity: Cognition and Discipline (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This is by my former colleague Paul Dilley, an excellent scholar whose work I have discussed in the past. The book is important because of its Egyptian setting, using many texts that are only available to those scholars with a knowledge of Coptic, besides the familiar Greek. Egypt is so critical to the making... Read more
On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, opened its doors. The memorial is visually stunning. Around 800 rusted iron columns hang from above, each representing a county where a lynching took place. In a recent essay in Religion News Service, Jemar Tisby recounts just a few of the horrors that the memorial represents: “The memorial reminds visitors that lynching victims are real people, not simply anonymous figures from history. They have heart-wrenching stories such... Read more
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