Anxious Bench - Page 2 of 188 - The Relevance of Religious History for Today

Advent: The Most Apocalyptic Time of the Year

December 4, 2018 By Chris Gehrz

Reading a new collection of sermons by Fleming Rutledge got Chris thinking about the implications of Advent for the practice of history. Read more

Bleak Days for a Chosen People

December 3, 2018 By Agnes Howard

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Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, Thomas Jefferson famously opined in his Notes on the State of Virginia, adding, in what sounds like a snarky aside, “if ever he had a chosen people.” Jefferson maintained that God made the breasts of farmers “his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Champion of religious liberty and religious minorities, Jefferson in these words was making clear that, whether or not a Supreme Being was the source of farmers’… Read more

First and Second Comings

November 30, 2018 By Philip Jenkins

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The season of Advent begins this year on Sunday, December 2. I am adapting here a column I originally posted at this site several years ago. Advent is one of my favorite times in the church year. For many reasons, I relish the “O Antiphons,” which belong precisely to this season. They are so rich in the lessons they teach, with implications for Christmas, of course, but also for the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and (surprisingly perhaps)… Read more

If Trump were a Democrat: A Fantasy

November 29, 2018 By Kristin Du Mez

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Today we welcome George Marsden back to the Anxious Bench. One of the preeminent historians of evangelicalism, George previously weighed in on whether evangelicalism can survive Trump. Here he returns with a provocative thought experiment, adapted from a portion of an essay he is contributing to Evangelicalism, its History, and its Present Crisis, a forthcoming book (Eerdmans, 2019) he is editing together with David Bebbington and Mark Noll. For those who are (as I am) puzzled and sometimes troubled by how so… Read more

How To Get Into A History PhD Program

November 28, 2018 By Beth Allison Barr

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It is the most nerve-wracking time of the year. PhD hopefuls have uploaded finely-honed applications to their top choice doctoral programs and clicked submit. Now the waiting game begins. By mid-January programs with the earliest deadlines will begin notifying first-round candidates and extending offers for preview weekends, by March most offers will have been extended, and by April it will be all over (at least for programs with Fall entrance dates). Unfortunately, for most applicants, the news won’t be good…. Read more

Stay With Us: The Pietism of Hans Nielsen Hauge

November 27, 2018 By Chris Gehrz

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The story of Hans Nielsen Hauge, the peasant-turned-lay preacher who revived Norwegian Christianity, challenged conventional gender roles, and incurred the hostility of the state church. Read more

Church Crisis in Ukraine

November 26, 2018 By Thomas Albert Howard

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Sadly, because of the untowardly symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media covering him, many newsworthy stories remain untold or relegated to the back pages. One of these concerns the situation of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine today. It is a complicated story, but the gist is this: many in Ukraine are clamoring that a single autocephalous (self-standing, independent) Orthodox church be formed from the three divided churches that currently exist in the former Soviet Republic: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church… Read more

World War I and Christ the King Sunday

November 24, 2018 By Chris Gehrz

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Why Christ the King Sunday is a religious legacy of World War I and its political aftershocks. Read more

1918: Red Atlantis

November 23, 2018 By Philip Jenkins

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I have been writing about the cultural and spiritual impact of the First World War, and especially the cataclysmic end of that war in 1918. This takes me back to a topic that I have published about quite a bit, namely white American attitudes to Native peoples, to American Indians. Briefly, the years immediately around 1918 marked a historic cultural shift in the US, as elite white thinkers argued a position that is common today, but which was radically novel… Read more

Thanksgiving, Gratitude, and Augustine

November 22, 2018 By johnturner

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From the Anxious Bench archives… In Augustine’s Confessions, at the end of a discussion of infancy and childhood, there is a beautiful passage about thankfulness. [Note the quotations that follow are from Maria Boulding’s translation]. Much of Book I baffles contemporary readers, who think that Augustine is rather too hard on himself and others. Augustine insists that the “only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.” Babies glare “with livid… Read more