The story of evangelicals' attempt to launch an Ivy League-quality research university in the 1950s Read more
The story of evangelicals' attempt to launch an Ivy League-quality research university in the 1950s Read more
Chris considers the role of religion in the life of Ulysses S. Grant, the first U.S. president with strong connections to Methodism. Read more
Dorothy Sayers once quipped that attempting to grasp Dante’s Divine Comedy only from reading the Inferno would be like understanding Paris only through its sewer system. Unfortunately, if students are assigned any Dante in high school or college, it is usually the Inferno, possibly some bits of the Purgatorio, and rarely ever the Paradiso. This is a pity for Dante’s reserves some of his richest insights for the Paradiso, which I have taught for the first time in an upper-level,... Read more
My blogs normally address some kind of religious issue, and this one, strictly speaking, does not. What I do want to discuss, though, unquestionably has massive implications for ethics as much as politics. How exactly are we going to respond to the likely prospect of international crisis within the next couple of years, when that crisis stands an excellent chance of evolving into military conflict? How will we respond to the threat of war? How should we? Looking around the... Read more
From evangelicalism to Trump to #MeToo... the 25 most-read Anxious Bench posts of 2017 Read more
“I hate Paul.” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that from female undergraduates. Young women scarred by how many times passages from the Pauline epistles have been used against them: women be silent (1 Corinthians 14), wives submit to your husbands (Ephesians 5), women cannot teach or exercise authority over men (1 Timothy 2). Christian women, according to conservative “evangelicals”* (as the news media keeps labeling them), are designed to follow their husband’s lead and focus... Read more
Why the second day of Christmas is a good moment to contemplate a topic New Testament authors mostly avoid: the childhood of Jesus. Read more
Christmas is at once a feast of Creation and Incarnation, as the two stories are so intimately integrated in the Prologue to John’s Gospel. On Christmas Day, then, it seems appropriate to quote one of the great poems about the Creation, but this particular one has a special story attached to it. Not only is this a truly ancient poem, dating back some 1400 years, but it is regarded as one of the first literary works in the English language,... Read more
Yes, there is another son of God in the gospels. Read more
There’s a reason why Hollywood loves to caricature evangelists as money-grubbing, secretly sex-crazed hypocrites. It’s because some famous evangelists have played true to type. Read more
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