It’s good to be back at the Anxious Bench after a spring semester hiatus. As guests published a series of terrific posts in my place, I read them from Thailand, where my family and I spent over two months. We drove on the other side of the road, bathed elephants in mud pits, watched minor-league Thai soccer, canoed to an island in the Gulf of Thailand, ate fried bugs on the streets of Bangkok, and went to some amazingly low-cost... Read more
Let The Anxious Bench help you plan your summer travels, as we share some of our favorite historic sites in the eastern United States. Read more
Step away from that soundtrack! Last month Library of America released The Essential Hamilton by Yale professor Joanne B. Freeman, who has been writing and teaching about Alexander Hamilton and colleagues for over two decades. John Williams’s recent New York Times mention of the book describes it as “Hamilton Minus Music,” or, “a more direct (if less rhyming) way to learn about Alexander Hamilton.” I think that is meant as a compliment and the book certainly merits compliment. Freeman likely... Read more
I have been posting on the modern discovery of Biblical Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha, and suggesting that such texts were actually widely known and discussed long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or of the Nag Hammadi library. In fact, the existence of these texts was amazingly mainstream public knowledge. How mainstream? Well, how about the Women’s Home Companion, which during the 1930s had a paid circulation of some four million? In June 1939, the Companion published a knowledgeable... Read more
Today we welcome Will Katerberg to the Anxious Bench. Will is Professor of History at Calvin College, where he also serves as Associate Dean and Director of the Mellema Program in Western American Studies. The classroom reminds me about what’s possible. And what seems impossible. This year I taught a section of Developing a Christian Mind (DCM), a core course that Calvin College students usually take in their first year. The course combines learning the basics of Christian theology with... Read more
Several months ago I heard a catchy phrase preached in a sermon. But it wasn’t until recently, when I began to compare popular medieval bible verses with popular modern bible verses (thanks Bible Gateway!), that I began to think about the phrase more critically. So what is the phrase? “Information does not equal transformation.” Not especially earth shattering….. Well, just give me a few minutes. Because of the church context of the sermon, I assumed the phrase might originate with John... Read more
When Vice President Mike Pence told Naval Academy graduates on Friday that they should "submit... to the authorities," he revived an old American tradition of bringing Romans 13 into public discourse. Read more
I have been posting about the astonishing wave of scriptural and Bible-related discoveries at the turn of the twentieth century, and their cultural impact. Although not quite as sensational as the find of a new alternative gospel, one moment in particular demands our attention for what it suggest about the nature of the Bible and its canon. The text in question was the book that the King James version calls Ecclesiasticus, and which Catholic and other Bibles call Sirach (or... Read more
Many believe that only in recent times have we rediscovered the extraordinary breadth and complexity of early Christianity, with all the alternative gospels and apocalypses, all the heretical movements that vanished before the rise of the Great Church. As I have tried to show, that perception is just not correct. In fact, the great age of textual discovery was over a century ago, between about 1870 and 1930. And thinkers at the time definitely explored the implications of that polyphonic... Read more
“John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” According to one later account, so the Elizabethan and early Stuart poet chalked on the backside of his kitchen door the day of his secret marriage to Ann More. Indeed, by marrying a woman without her well-connected father’s permission, Donne scuttled his career and income. The scandal of his marriage and that of his salacious early poetry thwarted his persistent efforts to gain an appointment from King James, who eventually persuaded Donne to become a Church... Read more
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