Saints are not to be idolized, obviously, but nor are they supposed to be milked for their moral lessons. Read more
Saints are not to be idolized, obviously, but nor are they supposed to be milked for their moral lessons. Read more
I recently discovered a new word that will be really useful for me in writing about Christian history. It describes an important and enduring category or type of belief that I have long known about, and in various historical eras, but for which I have never really had the ideal term. I was in conversation with the excellent and widely published scholar of religion, Linda Woodhead, who is based at Lancaster, in north-west England. In correspondence, she mentioned an early... Read more
Female “purity” was highly prized in Victorian Christianity, but a sexual double standard let men off the hook. Read more
“Water You turned into wine; Opened the eyes of the blind; There’s no one like you; None like you; Into the darkness You shine; Out of the ashes we rise; There’s No one like you; None like you” In 2010 Chris Tomlin recorded these opening lyrics to “Our God” at a Passion Conference. He couldn’t get the words of the song out of his head–especially the chorus “And if our God is for us, who could ever stop us?”–so he named... Read more
With the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 Theses at hand, Chris looks back to the wisdom of pre-Reformation Christianity. Read more
Sometimes, scholarship from one era of history can throw quite unexpected light on a totally different time and place. Oddly, early medieval history can actually tell us something about Biblical events that happened a millennium or more previously. I have been reading Richard Elliott Friedman’s truly impressive new book The Exodus, in order to review it for Christian Century. Because of that forthcoming review, I won’t say much about the book here, but here is its main argument. Friedman argues... Read more
My church recently sang one of my favorite hymns, a hugely popular standard piece known and loved across the English-speaking world. It regularly shows up among the most popular three or four hymns in Christian use. Listening to it again, I thought of the larger poem from which the words were taken, a sprawling piece that ranges over Sanskrit scripture, Hindu ecstatic experience, Greek orgies, Orientalist racial stereotypes, dervishes, dusky maidens, anti-Catholic digs, nineteenth century church polemics, anti-clericalism, hashish, and... Read more
Each semester, I teach an introductory course on what my department not very accurately terms “Religions of the West”: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Especially as a historian of Christianity in the United States, the subject matter is a bit of a challenge for me. In a recent post, my co-blogger Philip Jenkins quite correctly observed that many Religious Studies textbooks “reflect a strong prejudice towards the textual.” They “commonly place too much emphasis on texts and scriptures, rather than the... Read more
Reflections on my grandma and Colin Kaepernick's encounter with civil religion Read more
Chris and his young son test out a new Reformation board game, with amusing results. Read more
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