On this rare occasion that major league baseball opens its season on Maundy Thursday, Chris recommends some of the best writing about the relationship between Christianity and America's national pastime. Read more
On this rare occasion that major league baseball opens its season on Maundy Thursday, Chris recommends some of the best writing about the relationship between Christianity and America's national pastime. Read more
“Mary A. young admited into the hiest orderer Preasthood,” Brigham Young wrote in his diary on November 1, 1843. The entry has long intrigued me, in part because Young apparently what he wrote above that sentence and because he married a plural wife named Harriet Cook on the same date. What did it mean for Mary Ann, Brigham Young’s only wife from 1834 until he married plurally in 1842, to be admitted into the highest order of priesthood? It certainly... Read more
Though she did not overtly situate her work within feminist conversations, L’Engle nonetheless points toward a vast spectrum of feminisms, some of which resonate deeply with Christian faith. Read more
In the 1920s eugenics was controversial but in the mainstream of American society — with many Protestant preachers as likely to support it as the Catholic hierarchy was to oppose it. Read more
Recently Christianity Today offered Kate Shellnutt’s report of a new baby boom: more evangelical women are serving as gestational surrogates, casting this as a sort of ministry to infertile couples. That trend disturbs on several counts. Well-meaning, generous women like those featured in Shellnutt’s favorable article, who wonder how women who don’t know God can get through the trials of “my belly, not my baby” for nine months, speak as though praying over the bump not only dispels problems but... Read more
I have been posting about the years around 200 as marking a decisive, formative, moment in the history of Christianity, at least as significant as the celebrated era around the Council of Nicea (325). It is difficult to exaggerate just how important this earlier period was for defining every aspect of Christian thought and belief. Figures like Tertullian, Bardaisan, and Clement of Alexandria indicate the real maturity of Christian thought around this time, and their impact on the larger intellectual... Read more
Do you approve of the way Trump is handling his job as President? If you’re an evangelical, chances are you do. In a recent poll, 78% of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance. This number, of course, comes remarkably close to the 81% who voted for Trump in the fall of 2016. Both of these numbers lead some evangelicals—those in the 18% or 19%–to despair that Trump evangelicals have sold their souls. How could followers of Christ throw their... Read more
Just a few years ago, my entire family (parents, siblings, aunts, and my grandfather) attended a church service together. The pastor was preaching through Ephesians and had reached chapter 5. Now, I have to tell you some about my grandfather. He was Baptist most of his life. After his family moved back to Texas from California, they joined Travis Avenue Baptist Church where he eventually met my grandmother. For most of his adult life, after the war, he served as... Read more
About a month after my editor first mentioned the name of Charles Lindbergh to me, our sabbatical travels took my family to the birthplace of aviation: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Sure enough, there’s a painting of Lindbergh in the National Park Service building at the site of the Wright Brothers’ first flights. But I’m starting to think there’s a decent “spiritual, but not religious” biography to be written about Wilbur and Orville Wright themselves. Embed from Getty Images That came... Read more
As I study the early history of Christianity, I become ever more interested by one critical era, namely the decade or so on either side of 200 AD. That is a time of terrific expansion, but more particularly, I have argued that this marks the point at which a sect becomes a church, or more specifically, when the Jesus Movement becomes the Christian church. This transition had powerful consequences for language and languages. That expansion had vital implications for the... Read more
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