Pilgrims and Puritans

Last updated on: May 9, 2018 at 9:45 pm By johnturner

“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

From Mennonite Pacifist to Marxist Revolutionary

Last updated on: May 9, 2018 at 8:32 pm By David Swartz

The journey of a Mennonite woman from rural Kansas to international radicalism Read more

Why Beth Moore’s Letter Makes Me Hopeful

Last updated on: May 8, 2018 at 8:32 am By Chris Gehrz

Chris reflects on the significance of Beth Moore as an emerging leader of evangelicalism in the age of Trump. Read more

After Genocide . . . in Bosnia

Last updated on: April 30, 2018 at 9:00 am By Thomas Albert Howard

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

Making Monks, Forming Souls

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 6:20 am By Philip Jenkins

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

Poisonous History and Its Antidote: Christian Nationalism, Black History, and New Beginnings

Last updated on: May 2, 2018 at 6:01 pm By Kristin Du Mez

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

The Myth of Biblical Womanhood?

Last updated on: May 2, 2018 at 8:51 am By Beth Allison Barr

In 2012, Rachel Held Evans—a New York Times bestselling author of American Christianity–wrote a stunningly provocative book titled A Year of Biblical Womanhood. In it, she vividly shows us how “biblical womanhood” is not a constant. It is a culturally constructed concept. For those of you unfamiliar with her book, she spent a year living out as many different versions of “biblical womanhood” as she could find throughout the Old and New Testament—from sleeping in a tent in her front... Read more

The Cold War Origins of a Christian Alternative to May Day

Last updated on: April 30, 2018 at 8:44 pm By Chris Gehrz

In May 1991 the Catholic Church marked the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Industrial Age encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII insisted that “It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.” Engaged in a “re-reading” of Rerum Novarum as Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Pope John Paul II warned against celebrating an unfettered capitalism that could “achieve a greater satisfaction of material human... Read more

From Justice, Good Lord Deliver Us

Last updated on: May 2, 2018 at 9:56 am By Philip Jenkins

In my last post, I criticized the idea that Christians should not cooperate with the criminal justice system, to the point that churches refuse to call police. That does not mean that churches should accept every aspect of contemporary ideas of crime and punishment, as they assuredly have so much that is useful and innovative to bring from their own distinctive traditions. Historically, so much of our criminal justice system has been shaped by Christian views and attitudes. Among other... Read more

When Churches Don’t Call the Police

Last updated on: April 27, 2018 at 7:07 am By Philip Jenkins

The Washington Post recently decided to create a radical church-based social movement. According to the headline, “Churches Make A Drastic Pledge In The Name Of Social Justice: To Stop Calling The Police” (The story was by Julie Zauzmer). Now, further examination reveals that we are dealing with a tiny handful of churches, most of which are in the San Francisco Bay area, where normal rules of consensus reality do not apply. In no sense is this some kind of widespread... Read more