How a popular Hollywood movie celebrates the potential benefits of school choice, but obscures the historical causes and costs of that course of action. Read more
How a popular Hollywood movie celebrates the potential benefits of school choice, but obscures the historical causes and costs of that course of action. Read more
A new book on Woodrow Wilson illustrates that religious biography need not be hagiography. Read more
In my last post, I profiled Raymond Llull (1232-1316) as a forerunner of modern-day interreligious dialogue. In this one, and for the same reason, I profile Nicholas of Cusa (1401-61), a fascinating figure in the Christian intellectual tradition. A native of Kues on the Mosel river, Cusa received his education at Heidelberg, Padua, and Cologne. Absorbing diverse intellectual influences, he owed a special debt to Neo-Platonic thought and to theologians such as Augustine, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart. At Padua and... Read more
We hear a lot today about the effects of immigrants on American religion, and the rise of a majority-minority country. I am always surprised that in such discussions, writers rarely pay attention to an era of US history that is today more relevant than ever, namely the mass influx of immigrants in the previous great immigration, between 1880 and 1924. Of course, the analogies are not perfect, but they are richly informative, and they apply to all contemporary faiths and... Read more
Today at the Anxious Bench we welcome Bruce Berglund, professor of history at Calvin College. He is co-editor of the collection of essays, Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe. His book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age will be published this March by Central European University Press. As a historian, I usually don’t mind when pastors talk about history from the pulpit. Over the years, I’ve heard plenty of historical vignettes and... Read more
Today we are pleased to welcome Lynneth Miller to the Anxious Bench. Lynneth is a PhD candidate in the Baylor History department specializing in British and Women’s History. She holds an MLitt from St. Andrews and is writing a dissertation on Dance and the Church in England. It’s the climatic showdown at the heart of the movie. The rebellious teenager stands up nervously in a town meeting, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. A solitary figure facing off against... Read more
While most Baptists supported America's war efforts in WWII and Vietnam, some embraced the pacifism of their Anabaptist ancestors. Read more
Another in a series of posts about the many and various ways in which religions spread – often by people who originally had no intention whatever of becoming missionaries, or indeed of leaving their homes. Sometimes, people really do set out to spread their religion to new parts of the world, and they enjoy great success in doing so. They might be acknowledged missionaries, consciously pursuing evangelization, or else they are refugees and utopians seeking better conditions in which to... Read more
As you must have noticed, immigration has been much in the news of late, and mainly in the context of religion. This actually gets to a lot of work I have been doing recently about how religions move and spread – in this case, mainly Christianity. I’ll address various aspects of this in my next few posts. We regularly hear account of Christian missions from the Global South to the North, for instance of African or Asian churches seeking to... Read more
Who’s significant? As Chris Gehrz discussed in a recent post, his students — and most publishers — think that a “biography is a book written about a significant individuals.” Most of those individuals happen to be men in positions of political power. Presidents, kings, businessmen, and a few religious leaders thrown into the mix. This problem exists, but somewhat differently, within the subfield of Mormon history. Because Latter-day Saints believe in modern-day prophets, Joseph Smith and his successors loom very... Read more
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