“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
A book review of mine on Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York Review of Books) appeared a while back in the journal Commonweal. I thought Anxious Bench readers might also have an interest. Herewith: The problem with being a public intellectual, the late Jean Bethke Elshtain once quipped, is that over time one tends to become more “public” and less “intellectual.” Fortunately, this does not apply fully to Mark Lilla. Unfortunately, to a degree it does.... Read more
I have now watched the whole of the PBS documentary series on The Vietnam War. While I have lots of comments and criticisms, I acknowledge the near impossible task faced by the film-makers in trying to cover such an enormous range of material, and so many viewpoints. But I do make one critical point, about the war’s unpopularity. I would argue that, in terms of public attitudes, the Vietnam War was not so radically different from other American conflicts. What made... Read more
It was the morning of October 16, 1893. The day dawned bright and frosty, and excitement was in the air with just two weeks remaining of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. It was also the opening session of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, organized in conjunction with the world’s fair. The Memorial Art Palace was adorned with flowers, international flags, and a banner depicting the Union’s motto: “Christ for the world.” Susan B. Anthony and other dignitaries ascended the platform,... Read more
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