A committed evangelical, today I write out of and to my narrower ecclesiastical tradition (Baptist) as I address the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. All others are welcome to listen in or ignore me as they see fit. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling last Friday (June 26, 2015) should surprise no one who has been paying attention. In the wake of the second Clinton administration, by the turn of the twenty-first century the cultural tide on issues related to marriage and sexuality had... Read more
I have a pretty strong personal history of wrestling with the memory of the Confederacy. Having lived all over the South, I grew up hearing stories from relatives about the Lost Cause and how the Yankees took everything we had during Reconstruction. There was little mention of the role of slavery in the Confederacy. I pretty much accepted these ideas, and became more engaged in the country-music, southern nationalism, Hank Williams Jr. scene in high school (in South Carolina) and... Read more
People in the modern West are properly critical of the whole idea of imperialism, and suspicious of its rhetoric. That approach naturally influences religious thinkers, and there is no shortage of Bible scholars who apply strictly contemporary views to the New Testament world. We acknowledge the critique of Empire in the Gospels and in texts like Revelation, and sermons regularly imagine the people of Jesus’s age yearning to breathe free from Roman oppression. Those approaches can offer useful insights into... Read more
Bloggers and professors at the African American Intellectual History Society have put together a timely project titled #CharlestonSyllabus that offers a comprehensive reading list of African American history and literature, with special attention to South Carolina and Charleston. Here’s the section of the list on race and religion: Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1963) Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1967)... Read more
Reading Josephus’s history of the Jewish people in the century or so before the Common Era offers surprising insights into the era of Jesus and his first followers. It must for instance change our view of the factions that we think we know so well from the New Testament, groups like the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. From the Gospels, we know that the Jewish world was sharply divided between Sadducees and Pharisees, and that Jesus generally leaned towards the Pharisees,... Read more
What do you think of when you think of heaven? Is your first thought God and Jesus, or is it your loved ones (spouse, parents, children, and pets)? Over the past few years, I’ve dipped into Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang’s endlessly fascinating Heaven: A History, and I recently had the chance to read it straight through. M&L (as I will abbreviate the authors hereafter) explain that two major views about heaven have dominated Christian thought about the hereafter: the... Read more
The decade of the Seventies has a rather dismal reputation. In his creatively titled book The Seventies, Bruce Schulman chronicles the horrors: bad hair, vapid dance music, a rootless youth culture, Ford’s mysteriously exploding compact car called the Pinto, hostages in Iran, defeat in Vietnam, double-digit inflation and stagnant economic growth (called stagflation). The American people, according to cultural critic Christopher Lasch, had slid into an unrepentant narcissism with little regard for the common good. Writer Tom Wolfe derisively called... Read more
Last week at The Washington Post, Barry Hankins and I offered three reasons why Southern Baptists are on the decline, and three ways to address it. They include getting serious about evangelism, defeating “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” and making politics secondary. One of the most interesting “pushbacks” I got was against point #2 – aren’t there a number of “megachurches” who peddle theological pabulum and self-help therapy, and are growing in spite of it? Bad theology does not prevent growth, it... Read more
The 200th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s well-known defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 has recently been marked in Europe and elsewhere. In addition to commentary on the battle itself, much attention has focused on Napoleon’s politics, diplomacy, and military skills. It is for his actions in these areas that most of us know the upstart Corsican general. But Napoleon is also a significant figure in the history of Western Christianity. The period of his political ascendancy from the late... Read more
I have to share this. One of the classic works on Judaism and early Christianity is Alan Segal’s Rebecca’s Children (1986). Through the centuries, debate has raged over exactly what St. Paul was doing when he took the Jesus Movement on its new directions. I am struck, therefore, to find that the Harvard University Press page on Segal’s book lists the relevant chapter in the paperback edition as “Paul the Covert and Apostle.” I think it’s a typo. Or maybe... Read more
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