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
Jesus and I were the only white people in the room. After my freshman year of college, I spent the summer on an uncompensated internship in the Washington, DC, area. (The experience gave me a lasting desire to be compensated for work performed). The internship did come with one perk — free housing in a cottage in the backyard of a suburban couple’s home. Being from up north, the cottage without air-conditioning was not exactly paradisiacal. It was a hot... Read more
I’m pleased to present a guest post by John Wilsey, an assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of the forthcoming American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea, which will be published by InterVarsity Press Academic. I had the privilege of reading it in manuscript form, and I hope my blurb for the book, which you’ll be able to purchase in November, reflects the high regard with... Read more
Fall is the time for students to put together their applications for graduate school. Many of these applications require an enigmatic-sounding “statement of purpose.” With due regard for differences between disciplines, here are the top three mistakes in statements of purpose by graduate applicants: 1) Failing to be specific enough. “I am interested in the history of colonial and Revolutionary America” is not enough, especially for those applying to a doctoral program. You need to at least tentatively identify a... Read more
Most people today ooh-and-aah when they experience or envision a trip to Rome. It was not always so. Until the era of modern tourism, trips to Rome were rare, undertaken only by the wealthy. For devout Protestants, encountering Catholicism’s Eternal City could often induce more revulsion than admiration. Prior to Italian unification in the 1860s-1870s, the Pope ruled as temporal monarch over Rome and the surrounding Papal States, a huge slice of Italian geography. Lurid stories of the Inquisition’s torture... Read more
The Biblical world at various eras is probably the most intensely studied society in human history. Just how many books, for instance, have been written about Palestine in the time of Jesus? Despite all that work, though, we still have major areas of ignorance about such a basic issue as population. If we look at a country today, that is such a critical theme. How many people are there to pay taxes, to serve in armies, to populate cities, and... Read more
From The Anxious Bench Archive. Originally posted October 8, 2014. “It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take.” -Alanis Morissette, “Ironic,” Jagged Little Pill (1995). As my graduate school days appear further and further in my rear view mirror, there are certain events, discussions, and conversations that remain crisp and clear in my memory–just as if they took place yesterday. Below, I present the top-four pieces of good advice I received around the time I was defending my dissertation proposal, and entering doctoral... Read more
I’m gearing up for the start of classes, so here’s another edition of my readings for the semester. This fall at Baylor I am teaching an introductory American history survey, and a history graduate course (doctoral and master’s students) on early American religion. What am I trying to do with the list of readings for the graduate course? Several goals overlap: first, I want to introduce students to some of the most important recent academic titles in colonial American (roughly pre-1763)... Read more
Quite by accident, I have stumbled across an excellent tool for scholarly analysis. My source is the comic strip ZITS, by Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott, which focuses on the teenager Jeremy and his permanently exasperated parents. It is so agonizingly realistic that it must be based on a writer’s personal experience of parenthood. In a recent strip, the mother complains that “That’s it! I’ve had it, Jeremy! Sometimes you’re so much fun to be around, and other times I... Read more
“Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7.20). Fictional treatments of Jesus commonly show faithful Jews wondering whether he is in fact the Messiah, the One who is to come. The problem, though, is that any conscientious messianic candidate would probably have had to ask for the question to be expanded. Which One? Which Messiah do you mean? I have written about the complex ideas about the Messiah as they developed rapidly during... Read more
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