Of Wells, Springs, and Samaritans

Last updated on: October 24, 2016 at 6:33 am By Philip Jenkins

This continues some posts I have been doing concerning John’s Gospel. The Bible contains several stories of holy men and patriarchs encountering women at wells. The wonderful example in the New Testament tells how Jesus met the Samaritan woman at “Jacob’s well,” where they engaged in some sharp dialogue and some dazzling theological discussions. Undoubtedly, the reader is meant to hear echoes of those Old Testament precedents, but just possibly, Jacob is not the example the author has in mind.... Read more

Highlights from the 2016 Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History

Last updated on: October 23, 2016 at 8:04 am By Chris Gehrz

Race, gender, identity... and Donald Trump. Revisiting the 2016 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History - the first to be displaced by a presidential campaign rally! Read more

Lazarus and James

Last updated on: October 21, 2016 at 1:00 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting on the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, as told in Luke’s chapter 16, and puzzling out its possible relationship to the miracle of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Here, I will pursue that question by citing another curious source, namely the Epistle of James. James was for centuries something of an orphan in New Testament criticism, partly because Reformers like Luther took such a dim view of it. In recent decades, it has... Read more

Latter-day Saints and the Anointing of Jesus

Last updated on: October 19, 2016 at 2:54 pm By johnturner

My co-blogger Philip Jenkins is in the midst of a fascinating series of posts (most recently, here) related to the four gospel accounts of a woman anointing Jesus. In Luke’s gospel and also in John’s, a woman (Mary of Bethany, in John’s gospel) anoints Jesus’s feet and then wipes them with her hair. While writing my book on The Mormon Jesus, I came across several instances in which Latter-day Saint women reenacted the very details of that scene with their... Read more

Halloween: More Christian than Pagan

Last updated on: October 17, 2016 at 10:22 am By Beth Allison Barr

This is from my archives at the Anxious Bench, originally published Oct 31, 2015. Although I have previewed it this year with my recent 2016 posts Burning Witches in Medieval Europe? and The Modern Roots of Pagan Halloween , this post stands as I originally wrote it. We, of course, will carve pumpkins again very soon (next week)–my daughter has been practicing drawing her pumpkins faces. Happy Halloween! I carved pumpkins with my kids this week. My son is finally old enough... Read more

The Bonhoeffer Effect, “Unpleasant Parallels,” and the 2016 Election

Last updated on: October 17, 2016 at 8:57 am By Chris Gehrz

Christians on both sides of the 2016 election invoke the heroic example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but the history of Christian responses to Nazism is much more complicated. Read more

“Bulgarian Horrors”

Last updated on: October 17, 2016 at 10:00 am By Thomas Albert Howard

In the long history of conflict between “Islam and Christendom,” there have been many flashpoints. The Battle of Poitier (732), the fall of Constantinople (1453), and the Battle of Lepanto (1571) are three notable examples from the premodern era. Well before the conflicts and confusions of our own time, the modern age witnessed its own share of flashpoints. I have been reading about some of them in Andrew Wheatcroft’s engaging Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam,... Read more

L is for Lazarus

Last updated on: October 11, 2016 at 8:07 am By Philip Jenkins

John’s Gospel tells the unforgettable story of a family who lived at Bethany: Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, while his sister Mary anointed Jesus, and washed his feet with her hair. As I have discussed in earlier columns, John’s story has many similarities to versions in other gospels, but also differs substantially in detail. The accounts in Mark and Matthew, for instance, describe an anointing by an unnamed woman, but say nothing about her drying his feet with her... Read more

Perishing While Flourishing

Last updated on: October 12, 2016 at 2:48 pm By johnturner

A few years ago, I went through the painful process of winnowing down the stacks of books and journals in my office. I was moving, and it would cost too much to move everything. Most of the academic periodicals I could simply access online as needed, so many went into the recycling box. Books went to the public library sale. The one journal I kept was Books & Culture. I’ve been a subscriber since the late 1990s, and I have... Read more

The Culture Wars and Evangelical “Evangelism”

Last updated on: October 12, 2016 at 8:23 am By David Swartz

Christians, who are people of the Book, follow political scripts as well as biblical scripts. The Right preaches small government and identifies with the Republican Party. The Left preaches an interventionist government and identifies with the Democratic Party. There are almost exact religious analogues. The public face of the Christian Left matches the Democratic Party, and the public face of the Christian Right even more closely matches the Republican Party. It seems that subscribing to a political party traps you... Read more