The End of American Evangelicalism

Last updated on: May 10, 2017 at 8:43 pm By johnturner

Amid the semester’s end, the following is adapted and slightly updated from the Anxious Bench archives… One of the big surprises of 2017 was the extent of evangelical support for Donald Trump. During the Republican primaries, evangelicals might well have divided their support among a number of candidates who spoke persuasively about their Christian faith, including Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and the now-defunct Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush. Nevertheless, in many early primaries, Trump attracted a plurality of the Republican... Read more

Why Bother With “Diversity” in Christian Higher Education?

Last updated on: May 10, 2017 at 12:03 am By Chris Gehrz

Guest blogger Andrea Turpin reflects on the value of diversity in Christian higher education, as seen in two of her courses this semester at Baylor University. Read more

Teaching as an Act of Wonder

Last updated on: May 8, 2017 at 4:40 pm By Chris Gehrz

Teaching as an act of wonder: wondering at, wondering if, wondering while, wondering with, and wondering into existence. Read more

Could Protestants Reclaim Purgatory?

Last updated on: May 7, 2017 at 4:11 pm By Agnes Howard

George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo springs from an actual historical event, but ends up with more to say about loss and the afterlife than historical record. Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. President Lincoln made nighttime visits to the boy’s tomb, and around that report Saunders builds a strange world of souls in denial of death–literally and conceptually—who greet the boy in Oak Hill Cemetary. Saunders renders this a bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism a liminal stage between... Read more

Alternative Scriptures and Necessary Amnesia

Last updated on: May 8, 2017 at 8:39 am By Philip Jenkins

It is difficult to think of a modern "radical" theory about Christian origins that was not pretty standard and mainstream in the decades before the First World War. Read more

Fairness for All: A Call for Culture Peacemakers?

Last updated on: May 4, 2017 at 10:48 am By Kristin Du Mez

For nearly half a century, American Christians have, to greater and lesser degrees, embraced the role of culture warriors. As evangelicals began to stake a claim on American culture and politics, they invoked the language of rights while lamenting the purported decline of “Christian America.” They pushed back against encroaching secularization and federal government “overreach” as they sought to carve out space to live out their faith in the manner they saw fit. Issues such as abortion, the ERA, school... Read more

Spreading the Faith: Other Paths

Last updated on: May 4, 2017 at 9:09 am By Philip Jenkins

Recently, I was writing about issues of mission, migration and religious change. It occurs to me that some polymath should write a global, cross-religious history of mission and evangelism. Yes, I know that last word is Christian, but let’s take it in the general sense of “spreading the good news,” however defined. Historically, I can think of three great religions that at various times invested heavily in expanding their flocks by evangelizing non-believers, namely Buddhism, Islam, and Manicheanism. Together with... Read more

Top Ten Bible Verses in Medieval England

Last updated on: May 5, 2017 at 6:23 am By Beth Allison Barr

The verses we emphasize say a lot about what we believe as Christians. So what were the top verses in medieval Christianity? Read more

The Three Journeys of the Christian Liberal Arts

Last updated on: May 1, 2017 at 9:43 pm By Chris Gehrz

Over the weekend I gave the keynote address for the annual Honors Symposium at Crown College, a Christian and Missionary Alliance school west of Minneapolis. (Thanks to Michial Farmer for inviting me to speak!) Here’s a slightly abridged version of my remarks. There are many ways we could talk about the importance of the liberal arts in a Christian setting like this. I should probably share statistics on salary and employment, or quotations about citizenship and civic virtue. But the most liberal artsy... Read more

Languages of Command

Last updated on: April 29, 2017 at 7:58 am By Philip Jenkins

I posted recently about how people in many (most) societies mix and match different languages, usually in a situation where one language is much more esteemed and respectable than another. Often, the way such languages are used tells you a lot about that society, in terms of social status and prestige, power relations and ethnic interactions. And as in my earlier post, modern day examples point to realities in ancient societies. Language speaks power. You see that phenomenon today in... Read more

What sea did Moses part?