[Today’s post is taken from one of my author newsletters. It is a question that comes up so often that I thought I would share it here.] Many an academic author has had the experience of proudly announcing the publication of his or her new book, only to have someone ask “Why is it so expensive”? I’ve certainly had this experience with publications ranging from my first book The Protestant Interest (original list of $40) to my edited volume with Darren Dochuk and Kurt... Read more
Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on the Pope in America: Implications, Collaborations, Challenges. Read other perspectives here. In September 22-27, Pope Francis will visit the United States, making stops in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia. Most discussion in anticipation has focused on the Pope’s attendance at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia and what he might say (or not say) in light of conflicts within the Church over family policies and in light... Read more
Over the past few months, I have done quite a few posts on pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology. Without revisiting those topics in any detail, here are a couple of relevant items I recently enjoyed. One is an older (2013) book that was recently reissued, and beautifully reviewed by Wheaton’s Robert Bishop in Books and Culture (Paywall protected). This is Abominable Science by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, about the invention of the yeti, Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster. In other... Read more
When drawing the canonical limits of the Bible, Jewish sages strictly declared that the prophetic age had ended in the fifth century BC, and that the last prophets were figures like Zechariah and Malachi, whom Christians know from their own Old Testament. Henceforward, said the rabbis, Jews should seek instruction only from their learned sages. Yet prophets and prophecy continued long after those debates, in both Christianity and Judaism, and many believe that the tradition has never ended. The idea... Read more
Nathan Finn (an occasional Anxious Bench guest blogger) recently published a review essay in Themelios on the state of “evangelical history after George Marsden.” In it, he introduces the Marsden generation of scholarship and then comments on recent books by Steven Miller, Matthew Sutton, and Molly Worthen. My first thought when reading the essay is that “evangelical history” means many things. First, there’s history written by evangelicals. Second, there’s the history of American evangelicalism. Then, there’s the history of evangelicalism... Read more
Today’s guest post is from Heath W. Carter. He is an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University and the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford, 2015). These are the worst of times for organized labor, which during the post-World War II decades – the heyday of middle class expansion – represented more than a third of all private sector workers. Today, that number is less than 7%. This precipitous decline has, not... Read more
James Delbourgo’s A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America offers a remarkable account of Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist pastor who lost his Philadelphia church position due to his opposition to the Great Awakening. Kinnersley then improbably became the greatest popularizer of Ben Franklin’s discoveries in electricity. Kinnersley was born in Gloucester, England, the same hometown as Franklin’s friend George Whitefield, the greatest evangelist of the eighteenth-century revivals. As a three-year-old, Kinnersley came with his family to Pennsylvania... Read more
I posted about the rise of apocalyptic literature, and the theory that it evolved from the prophecy that we know from the Old Testament. For over a century, though, there has been a rival theory to explain apocalyptic, which suggests that its real origins lie in Wisdom literature rather than prophecy. Understanding this debate helps challenge and unsettle many assumptions we may have about the different genres we find in Biblical and post-Biblical literature. At first glance, this idea may... Read more
British media recently presented two unrelated columns that, each in its own way, raised alarming questions about religious violence and religious politics. Putting the two reports together frames some political dilemmas that are going to be with us for years, possibly decades, into the future. The first was a Daily Telegraph piece about the various nightmares imagined by French intelligence in the wake of the recent near-massacre on the Amsterdam–Paris train. Clearly, this is not just journalistic speculation: the authors... Read more
If you open the Old Testament at random, the chances are that you will find yourself reading in one or other of the prophets. Those prophets, who worked chiefly between the eighth century BC and the sixth, were clearly a major feature of Israelite religion, and they have been exhaustively studied. In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how and when prophecy ended, a matter of prime interest not just to scholars of... Read more
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