Moors, Saracens, and Turks: Islam and Europe’s Deep History

Last updated on: January 18, 2015 at 5:31 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

Several years ago I was being interviewed by a journalist from Switzerland when the topic came to Islam in Europe. The interviewer identified herself as a fastidiously progressive and secular person, and insisted that she held nothing against Islam as a religion. Nonetheless, “when I see a mosque in Switzerland,” she confessed, “I have an overwhelming sense that something is not right about this.” Since the horrendous in attacks in Paris, a lot has been written about radical Islam and... Read more

The Slain God

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 12:47 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been enjoying the latest book by Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2014). At first sight, such a study of the rise of an academic discipline might seem like an odd topic for a scholar who has established such a splendid reputation writing on specifically religious and theological topics. (See for instance his Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, 2006, and A People of One Book: The Bible and... Read more

In Search of the Fall

Last updated on: January 16, 2015 at 12:45 pm By Philip Jenkins

The two centuries or so before Jesus’s time were a wildly productive era in terms of Jewish thought. It is in this time for instance that we find the full development of such ideas as Satan and angels, the afterlife and the apocalypse. I have been pursuing one concept in particular that would have enormous consequences for Christian thought, namely the hereditary taint of original sin traceable to Adam’s Fall. It’s a tough quest, and we must follow a route... Read more

Evangelical Anti-abolitionists

Last updated on: January 13, 2015 at 11:21 pm By johnturner

Even in slaveholding states, many white Americans were uneasy about the morality of black slavery in the decades that preceded the Civil War. However, there were two things such Americans disliked far more than slavery: black people and abolitionists. According to Luke Harlow’s recently published Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, those double hatreds explain much about the trajectory of religion and politics in the Bluegrass State between 1830 and 1880. Although Kentucky’s antebellum white evangelicals were divided... Read more

The Unintended Consequences of Evangelical Cooperation

Last updated on: January 14, 2015 at 2:35 am By Miles Mullin

Last year, Crossway announced the publication of David Wells’ God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World, promoting this new book as “a remedy for evangelicalism’s superficial theology.” Merits of the book aside–and I am sure there are many–claiming a remedy for evangelicalism’s superficial theology demonstrates both unflagging optimism, and, more importantly, a misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary evangelicalism. In reality, a superficial theology is endemic to evangelicalism. So I argue in my article, “Evangelicalism as Trojan... Read more

Is Islam Inherently Violent?

Last updated on: January 12, 2015 at 11:46 am By Thomas Kidd

The horrific attack on the staff of Paris’s Charlie Hedbo has renewed questions about Muslims and the besetting problem of Islamic jihadism and violence. Is Islam inherently violent, and is Islam itself to blame for such crimes? As delicious as anger and venom can be at times like this (and we certainly hope for justice to be done to all the murderers and their accomplices), we need to be careful – Christians need to be careful – about the way we... Read more

Determined

Last updated on: January 11, 2015 at 3:50 pm By Philip Jenkins

In his parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus spoke of the Devil sowing evil in the world, so that good and evil grew up together until the Judgment. Such texts seem to provide solid support for doctrines of predestination, which are difficult to find in the Old Testament except through intense proof-texting. As with the Devil and damnation, the idea is hard to find in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament that we know. Matters look very different, though, when... Read more

The Bounty of Keston

Last updated on: December 22, 2014 at 9:41 am By Philip Jenkins

For anyone interested in Christian history, Baylor University’s archives have rich holdings on all sorts of important topics. In this post, though, I want to focus on one astonishingly rich archive that clamors to be better known. This is the Keston Collection, a stunning collection of sources on European history, on religious persecution and religious freedom. Hard though it might be to recall today, for much of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union was a fanatical persecutor of all religions,... Read more

Creating Satan

Last updated on: January 4, 2015 at 8:58 pm By Philip Jenkins

In the last centuries before the Christian Era, the Devil enjoyed an impressive rise both in his professional status and his assigned areas of responsibility. From being a minor official at the Heavenly Court, he rose to become a fully-fledged adversary of God, almost an anti-God, and like the deity he acquired his own institutional hierarchy of inferior angels. Many of those operatives also bore individual names and titles. Satan’s authority extended to the material world, and he could rely... Read more

Why Mormons Love Margaret Barker

Last updated on: January 8, 2015 at 1:19 am By johnturner

Several years ago, a Latter-day Saint friend encouraged me to read British Methodist theologian Margaret Barker’s books. Now I understand why. A cautionary note. Barker has a large corpus of books to her credit, including The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God and The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy. I have only read her much briefer summary, Temple Theology: An Introduction. Not being a biblical scholar or a scholar of either ancient Judaism or... Read more