Today we are pleased to welcome Lynneth Miller to the Anxious Bench. Lynneth is a PhD candidate in the Baylor History department specializing in British and Women’s History. She holds an MLitt from St. Andrews and is writing a dissertation on Dance and the Church in England. It’s the climatic showdown at the heart of the movie. The rebellious teenager stands up nervously in a town meeting, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. A solitary figure facing off against... Read more
While most Baptists supported America's war efforts in WWII and Vietnam, some embraced the pacifism of their Anabaptist ancestors. Read more
Another in a series of posts about the many and various ways in which religions spread – often by people who originally had no intention whatever of becoming missionaries, or indeed of leaving their homes. Sometimes, people really do set out to spread their religion to new parts of the world, and they enjoy great success in doing so. They might be acknowledged missionaries, consciously pursuing evangelization, or else they are refugees and utopians seeking better conditions in which to... Read more
As you must have noticed, immigration has been much in the news of late, and mainly in the context of religion. This actually gets to a lot of work I have been doing recently about how religions move and spread – in this case, mainly Christianity. I’ll address various aspects of this in my next few posts. We regularly hear account of Christian missions from the Global South to the North, for instance of African or Asian churches seeking to... Read more
Who’s significant? As Chris Gehrz discussed in a recent post, his students — and most publishers — think that a “biography is a book written about a significant individuals.” Most of those individuals happen to be men in positions of political power. Presidents, kings, businessmen, and a few religious leaders thrown into the mix. This problem exists, but somewhat differently, within the subfield of Mormon history. Because Latter-day Saints believe in modern-day prophets, Joseph Smith and his successors loom very... Read more
Guest blogger Mandy McMichael reflects on her participation in the Women's March on Washington in light of a course she taught on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama Read more
Should historians consider analogies between Donald Trump and fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler? While the differences are significant, the similarities are growing difficult to ignore. Read more
Should Christians have any particular care about food and eating? Should Christians have any particular care about how women give birth? Those paired questions may not seem natural to treat together. Barbara Katz Rothman, though not addressing a religious angle, joins concerns about food and childbirth in her wittily titled new book, A Bun in the Oven. The very title seems to predetermine her audience–a book about food and babies must aim for female readership, no?–but at once tweaks expectations. As... Read more
One thing that makes me feel very much at home in Texas is the way people talk Spanish. To explain, I did not grow up in a Spanish speaking area, but the way Latino people navigate between languages reminds me so precisely of the sort-of bilingual environment in which I spent my childhood. Thinking about that world has taught me a lot about how people through history have operated in in such societies. If I describe that Welsh context, you... Read more
Today we welcome Jonathan Couser to the Anxious Bench. Jonathan received an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Notre Dame. He teaches history at Plymouth State University and Granite State College in New Hampshire. The first week of Donald Trump’s presidency has provided ample grist to the mill of political argument, online and otherwise. As we all know, the campaign was unprecedented. Confounding the pundits, he proved impervious to landmine after landmine that... Read more
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