If you haven’t run across the Babylon Bee yet, check it out. It’s the evangelical version of the satirical online news source The Onion, and it’s made a big splash. In its first three weeks, the Bee has scored more than one million page views. Even the Washington Post has noticed, last week running a profile of the evangelical Onion. The Bee’s popularity is well earned. It’s really quite funny. Take, for example, the following fake headlines: “Witty Church Sign... Read more
Back in 2012, when Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, many disappointed supporters – including a number of evangelicals – suggested that his defeat spoke to an American culture in decline. For politics to change, they say, culture must change. Glenn Beck, for example, tweeted that “the time for politics is over. I’m doubling down on my efforts to shift the culture.” Yet here we are again, in 2016, trying to coalesce around the “right” candidate who will “take America... Read more
These are days of decision. This span of weeks in April and May can be fraught ones for families with children of a certain age, when colleges await commitments from those who hope to start next fall, and as the clock winds down for students four years or so on the other side, about to be sprung from the groves of academe to workaday life. Deciding what to do about all this can be difficult for young people. These decisions... Read more
The centennial of the First World War means that we have plenty of grim events to commemorate, and none more so than in this present year. 1916 was the point at which the war moved into the full-scale industrial mass production of death. We are already reading the accounts of the horrors of Verdun and the Somme, and other atrocities abounded. One in particular demands our attention, although it is not well known beyond the ranks of specialist historians. Briefly,... Read more
“Nebuchadnezzar’s malady was not unlike a lycanthropy,” wrote Cotton Mather in his Biblia Americana. The Book of Daniel informs that the king of Babylon and conqueror of Jerusalem lived as a beast. He grew claws and feather-like hair. How? God smote him. Was this a disease of the mind? Mather noted passages in the gospels in which people act like animals, and he allowed that he himself had seen possessed persons “bark like dogs, mew like cats, clack like a... Read more
The Roman Pantheon is awesome. And I mean “awesome” in the sense that my good-English-professor-friend would approve: it evokes feelings of awe and wonder. I caught my first glimpse of this 2000 year-old building after stepping from a stone-paved street into the Piazza della Rotonda. We were on our way back from the Roman Forum and, I confess, I was actually looking for a coffee shop (the Sant’ Eustachioe, if you are interested). Suddenly my son stopped and said, “Mom. Look.”... Read more
Politicians and pop history writers squabble endlessly about whether America was founded as a “Christian nation.” Skeptics routinely point to the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, in which American officials declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of [Muslims].” A little-noticed letter to Benjamin Franklin from America’s agent in Morocco, the Italian Francisco Chiappe,... Read more
This year, we are of course commemorating the centennial of the First World War, and specifically the titanic battles of Verdun and the Somme. My 2014 book The Great and Holy War discusses the religious aspects of the war, but one thing that really struck me about that theme was the very large range of behaviors that I genuinely did not know how to classify as religious or not. That brings me to one wonderful source that still remains woefully... Read more
I recently blogged on the many and various ways in which translators subtly (and usually unconsciously) change the meaning of a text by capitalization and punctuation. Here is an illustration that seems quite powerful to me. Around 170 BC, the former high priest Onias III was murdered as a result of intrigues within the Jerusalem priestly elite, working with officials of the Seleucid Empire. The whole ugly story is told in 2 Maccabees 4. But the affair had a long... Read more
In today’s post I am talking with fellow Anxious Bench blogger, Baylor University historian, and prolific author Thomas Kidd about his new book, American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths. His previous books include biographies of George Whitefield and Patrick Henry and a history of the Great Awakening. JT: You write that two major themes organize American Colonial History: religion and conflict. What’s new about the way that you approach these two themes? TK: Too many historical overviews throw every conceivable topic... Read more
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