Three more reflections from the 2018 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History consider the calling of historians and their relationship to the larger church. Read more
Three more reflections from the 2018 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History consider the calling of historians and their relationship to the larger church. Read more
Days after returning from Grand Rapids, I’m still digesting all the speeches, papers, and conversations I heard at the 2018 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. With five plenary addresses and more than fifty panels and roundtables taking place at several buildings on the campus of Calvin College, it’d be impossible to encapsulate so wide-ranging a program — one organized by our friend John Fea and featuring several members of The Anxious Bench. My time at the conference, for... Read more
The Puritan logic of the Sabbath does much better than our current advice to guard something important about human life from the insidious grasp of the world of work. Read more
I have blogged a great deal on a variety of topics we can loosely call esoteric – on Gnosticism, Theosophy, and alternative scriptures. I have recently been working on how progressive thinkers used those related topics in the first great wave of feminist militancy, between about 1880 and 1912. The resemblances to today are quite convincing. It’s fascinating to see how comprehensively those early feminists mined quite advanced scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity to make their arguments,... Read more
So, it turns out close to half of all white evangelicals think Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed even if Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault are true. (An NPR/PBS NewHour/Marist poll conducted last week, 48% of white evangelical Christians believed he should be appointed to the highest court regardless; an additional 16% were unsure, leaving only 36% of white evangelicals who would apparently have a problem with an unrepentant perpetrator of sexual assault serving on the highest court of... Read more
I teach and research sermons. Two weeks ago, on September 11, I had the privilege of preaching my first sermon at Truett seminary. I am so thankful for seminaries like Truett which affirm and actively support women in ministry. Although my sermon text stands as I originally wrote it (including the section I just jotted notes and filled out while preaching), I have included citation links. Even preachers need to make sure that their sermons are built on reputable stories... Read more
"No one can sing of the free gift of grace like Lina Sandell," said one 19th century revivalist. Yet Sandell is now known in English for only two or three of the 2,000+ hymns she wrote in her lifetime. Read more
This column grows out of my recent series on the city of Ravenna, and its amazing artworks. I mentioned there the poem Ravenna by Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), one of Russia’s greatest poets. Blok is best known though for another work, and one that really defies categorization. Just because a work addresses Christian themes does not make it Christian literature. And yet … I have written a lot about the First World War, and especially the end of that war in... Read more
September 29 is the feast of Michael the Archangel, Michaelmas, and the feasts of Gabriel and Raphael are now celebrated on the same day. October 2 marks the celebration of the Guardian Angels. In 2015, Pope Francis urged his listeners to pay close attention to the instructions they were being given by their holy guardian angels, “God’s ambassadors.” Such words startled some intellectual believers, who had largely consigned angels to the realm of greeting cards, or to New Age eccentricities.... Read more
Partly because they took church discipline so seriously, New England Congregationalists tended to act mercifully toward individuals who confessed their sins, suffered ecclesiastical penalties for them, and then begged forgiveness. Read more
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