Beyond Playboy: The Inner Life of Jimmy Carter

Last updated on: March 31, 2015 at 4:50 pm By David Swartz

In 1976 Playboy magazine conducted its infamous interview of Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. The interview nearly cost Carter the election. Secular pundits mocked his confession of “adultery in my heart.” Conservative Christians not only disagreed with his use of the word screw but objected that Carter would grant the salacious magazine an interview in the first place. The distinguished historian Randall Balmer goes beyond this notable episode to explore the evangelical spirituality that underlay the controversy in the first... Read more

Can Evangelicals Become More Likeable?

Last updated on: March 30, 2015 at 10:34 am By Thomas Kidd

Over at the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof – one of America’s most open-minded liberal writers – says that secular left-wingers need to admit that many evangelical Christians do a great deal of good in the world, often at great personal expense and risk. He profiles the courageous work of Dr. Stephen Foster, who has labored in a rural Angolan hospital for thirty-seven years. Unlike some secularist critics who questioned the work of Dr. Kent Brantly during the Ebola crisis... Read more

The Minaret and the Bell Tower

Last updated on: March 30, 2015 at 8:00 am By Thomas Albert Howard

I’ve recently returned from some travels to the Andalusia province in Southern Spain. Under Muslim Rule in part or in whole from the arrival of “the Moor” in 711 until the completion of the Reconquista in 1492, the region has a special claim on our attention today in light of present-day misunderstandings and conflicts between Islam and “the West.” The name Andalusia is derived from the Arabic word Al-Andalus, which means the land of the Vandals (Vandalusia), the “barbarian” people... Read more

Messiahs by the Sackful

Last updated on: March 1, 2015 at 1:46 pm By Philip Jenkins

Some timely thoughts for Holy Week! In Jesus Christ Superstar, a mocking Pilate complains that “You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful!” Most popular histories take it for granted that Jewish thought was dominated by the eager expectation of a messiah, who would be an individual man, and the main debate concerned the nature of that role. Would he be a mighty conqueror, a new David? In his weakness and apparent worldly failure, Jesus, we are told, represented a truly... Read more

The Deist Revolution

Last updated on: March 15, 2015 at 2:43 pm By Philip Jenkins

I echo pretty much everything my colleague Tommy Kidd wrote in his recent column What is Deism?, but I would add a footnote. Perhaps the most important contribution the Deists made to religious thought was in terms of understanding the Bible, and in sparking the movement that became known as higher criticism. So much “higher” was it in fact, at a very early date, as to challenge conventional assumptions about modern approaches to Biblical scholarship, and when they developed. This... Read more

Hunting Heretics

Last updated on: March 25, 2015 at 9:44 pm By johnturner

The heresiography (or heresiology) is something of a dying genre among Christians today. For centuries, though, heresiography was a staple of Christian literature, as those who contended for their understanding of orthodoxy theology catalogued the theological sins of others. To give a recent example, through at least most of the twentieth century, conservative Protestants in the United States (and some elsewhere) wrote heresiographies about what they termed “heresies,” “isms,” and — increasingly the preferred term — “cults.” Walter Martin, perhaps... Read more

American Religion in the 1950s

Last updated on: March 24, 2015 at 11:58 pm By Miles Mullin

From the Archive. Originally posted July 31, 2013. In American memory, the 1950s are often portrayed as a mundane, picturesque prelude to the chaotic, transformative decade that would follow. Popular contemporary television portrayals of the decade such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Father Knows Best (1954-1960) and Leave It To Beaver (1957-1963) helped create the stereotype of the 1950s as an idyllic period of domestic bliss, perpetuating it through endless reruns when the shows came into syndication in the 1980s. In the past, American religious... Read more

What Is Deism?

Last updated on: December 2, 2017 at 8:07 pm By Thomas Kidd

The claim that any of the Founding Fathers were deists generates pushback among certain conservatives. This helps to account for the firestorm of controversy (which I covered for WORLD Magazine) over David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies and the book’s subsequent abandonment by Thomas Nelson Publishers. Barton argued that until late in life, Jefferson was an orthodox, Trinitarian Christian, but critics showed that Barton neglected evidence from early in life where Jefferson, among other things, denied the Trinity. When I get questions about... Read more

Making the Church of the East

Last updated on: March 21, 2015 at 7:53 am By Philip Jenkins

Christianity spread in the Persian Empire during the second and third centuries, when it became a major force, especially in western regions. Looking today at some of those early centers is multiply depressing, as they are today in the process of witnessing that ancient tradition being uprooted. From the fifth century through the fourteenth, the Church of the East was a mighty presence in Global Christianity, which saw itself as equal or superior to the churches of Constantinople or Rome.... Read more

Understanding the Islamic State

Last updated on: March 21, 2015 at 10:31 am By Philip Jenkins

Violence related to religion is obviously very much in the news right now. I want to address one aspect of the topic that I think has escaped the attention of virtually all commentators, and that has to do with raw numbers. Recently, Graeme Wood wrote an excellent piece in the Atlantic on the theme of What ISIS Really Wants. He stressed the specifically religious aspects of ISIS ideology, and how it fitted into one particular strand of extremist Islamic thinking.... Read more