Heroes of the Faith: True, but not Accurate

February 9, 2017 By Kristin Du Mez

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

Dance and the Church: A History More Complicated than Footloose…

February 8, 2017 By Beth Allison Barr

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

Unexpected Sites of Christian Pacifism: Baptists during WWII and Vietnam

February 7, 2017 By Chris Gehrz

While most Baptists supported America's war efforts in WWII and Vietnam, some embraced the pacifism of their Anabaptist ancestors. Read more

Spreading the Faith: Daniel Syndrome

February 6, 2017 By Philip Jenkins

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

Spreading the Faith: Mission, Migration and Movement

February 3, 2017 By Philip Jenkins

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

Biographies Full of Females

February 2, 2017 By johnturner

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

A Report from the Women’s March on Washington

February 1, 2017 By Chris Gehrz

Guest blogger Mandy McMichael reflects on her participation in the Women's March on Washington in light of a course she taught on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama Read more

“…Not Hitler, But Still Kinda Like Hitler”

January 31, 2017 By Chris Gehrz

Should historians consider analogies between Donald Trump and fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler? While the differences are significant, the similarities are growing difficult to ignore. Read more

Birth and Eating as Resistance Movements

January 30, 2017 By Agnes Howard

Should Christians have any particular care about food and eating? Should Christians have any particular care about how women give birth? Those paired questions may not seem natural to treat together. Barbara Katz Rothman, though not addressing a religious angle, joins concerns about food and childbirth in her wittily titled new book, A Bun in the Oven. The very title seems to predetermine her audience–a book about food and babies must aim for female readership, no?–but at once tweaks expectations. As... Read more

Mixing and Merging Languages

January 27, 2017 By Philip Jenkins

One thing that makes me feel very much at home in Texas is the way people talk Spanish. To explain, I did not grow up in a Spanish speaking area, but the way Latino people navigate between languages reminds me so precisely of the sort-of bilingual environment in which I spent my childhood. Thinking about that world has taught me a lot about how people through history have operated in in such societies. If I describe that Welsh context, you... Read more