Between my own blog, this one, and a couple others, I’ve written about 1,500 posts in the last six years. I try to do it well, with a less formal tone and much greater pace than typical academic writing but still reflecting a reasonably careful degree of prior research. But I’m afraid that my haste sometimes leads me to sloppiness — worse yet, sloppiness on topics where I’m writing outside of my fields of direct expertise and already at risk of stepping heedlessly into... Read more
Bruce Feiler has put Adam and Eve back in vogue with his book The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us, reading that couple’s story as a classic–no, as the classic love story. For Feiler it is not just classic but useful, the pair as role models for relationships today. He thinks theirs is a great love story because it is a tale told together, from what he calls the first “meet cute” to the joint, “long term practice of... Read more
This is a slightly updated post from my Anxious Bench archives. Happy Easter! I bought Easter candy for my students. It was a mistake. Although the students made a valiant effort to eat as much as possible, they left a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs (a particular weakness of mine) in the candy basket. Needless to say, they didn’t last long. Reese’s eggs are just one of many newer adaptations of older Easter traditions. Recent twitter posts have made me... Read more
How you can purchase or screen Come Before Winter, a new docudrama on the last days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Read more
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was an exceptionally violent country, which really stood alone among advanced nations. I have been trying to account for this American Difference. As an illustration, let me take a series of events that occurred in the late 1890s, and which actually happened about a block from where I am writing presently. The affair really has little wider political significance, but it is a perfect illustration of the kind of violence... Read more
As you may have heard, Princeton Seminary decided to award Tim Keller the prestigious Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness. But then it revoked that honor after an outcry from faculty, students, and alumni who objected to Keller’s defense of complementarian theology and to his opposition to the ordination of women and LGBT individuals. All of this has raised a host of questions: Would Abraham Kuyper himself be eligible to receive an award named in... Read more
I bet that, for those of you attending church on Easter Sunday, at least half of you will sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia! Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia! Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia! Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia! Vain the stone, the watch, the seal; Alleluia! Christ has burst the gates of hell: Alleluia! Death in vain forbids his rise; Alleluia! Christ... Read more
I have been posting about the extreme violence that characterized US life around the turn of the twentieth century, roughly between 1877 and 1917 – all the private armies and paramilitary activity, the massacres and ethnic wars, the prevalence of political murder and assassination. These currents set the US far apart from most other parts of the advanced world at this time, and I’d like to explore the reasons why. Europeans at the time were very conscious of this American... Read more
Why baseball fans like Chris get so excited about Opening Day — and why it's so hard to explain that excitement to non-fans. Read more
I posted on the extreme violence that characterized the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Many of the examples we might think of from that era concern the so-called Wild West, but we should be very careful in applying that label. Often, those conflicts mimicked exactly the same kind of ethnic and partisan battles then raging in the industrial East and the post-Reconstruction South. They pitted Republicans against Democrats, Irish against Nativists, and often, the struggles harked... Read more
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