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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Forgive a second post from me in the same morning, but I’m reeling from some news I woke up to find in my inbox, at the end of editor John Wilson’s e-newsletter for the Christian review Books & Culture: The November/December issue of B&C will be at the printer by time you are reading this newsletter, and will mail in mid-October. Alas, this will be the last issue of the magazine. (In that issue, look for a Note to Our Readers from... Read more
For my fall sabbatical, my family has been blessed with the opportunity to spend four months living in one of the most beautiful parts of the country: the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. It’s an area I know fairly well; my parents moved here from Minnesota twenty-three years ago. (The other reason for this move: lots of Oma and Opa time for our kids!) But while I knew this to be one of the reddest parts of a largely blue state, I... Read more
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad many evangelicals are lining up to condemn Trump’s vulgar behavior, revealed most recently (and incontrovertibly) in the appalling video tape released by the Washington Post last Friday. Jerry Falwell Jr., a staunch Trump supporter, had this to say about the video: “…it was reprehensible. We’re all sinners, every one of us. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t….We’re never going to have a perfect candidate unless Jesus Christ is on the ballot. I’ve... Read more
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