George Whitefield’s Christmas, 1739

Last updated on: September 19, 2014 at 4:08 pm By Thomas Kidd

As we observed George Whitefield’s 300th birthday last week, here’s a post on his 1739 Christmas travels and preaching, from the Anxious Bench archive: In December 1739, George Whitefield was completing a treacherous overland trip from Maryland to South Carolina, and he stopped for Christmas in New Bern (“Newborn”), a relatively new parish in North Carolina, which was also one of the newer southern colonies. He had already seen phenomenal crowds attend his outdoor meetings in England, and now he... Read more

A Muslim, an Evangelical, and Jesus Walk into a Bar …

Last updated on: July 12, 2019 at 2:19 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

It might well be that Jesus is the only one who would place an order. American Evangelicalism has longed harbored a strain of teetotalism while the Qur’an strictly forbids Muslims from drinking alcohol. Jesus, of course, turned water into wine, according to the Gospel of John. Relations between Christians and Muslims have been on my mind lately not only because of the daily deluge of anguish coming from many Muslim-majority nations (most recently Pakistan), but also because the honors program... Read more

Sons of Light and Sons of Seth

Last updated on: December 17, 2014 at 8:24 am By Philip Jenkins

I discussed Dylan M. Burns’s book Apocalypse of the Alien God, an account of the influential early Gnostic sect called Sethians. Burns’s arguments resonated because of work I have been doing recently on the origins of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, and the influence of the sectarian Judaism we know from Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Chronologically, those ideas originated in the late third or early second century BC, while the Qumran community survived until the Jewish Wars of the... Read more

Teaching American Religious History

Last updated on: December 17, 2014 at 11:53 pm By johnturner

15 weeks for the history and present of religion in the United States. “American Religious History” or “Religion in America” is a bread-and-butter course for me (and for several of my co-bloggers, and probably for some readers). I’ve taught it perhaps five or six times, in both a history department and a religious studies department. And I’m never sure exactly what to do. Where should one begin? I begin very unfashionably, I’m afraid, with John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian... Read more

Give the Gift of Spiritual Formation and Neuroscience for Christmas

Last updated on: December 17, 2014 at 2:09 am By Miles Mullin

I admit it. I like to go Christmas shopping. I really enjoy finding a special gift for someone else. Some years, my Christmas shopping goes exceedingly well. But, like many others in academia, end-of-the-semester festivities such as writing exams, grading essays, marking papers, entering grades, etc. too often derail my plans for shopping and other holiday merriment. Most years, I feel like I am caught between Arnold and Sinbad in Jingle All the Way. If you feel the same way, I... Read more

Happy 300th Birthday George Whitefield!

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 1:01 pm By Thomas Kidd

The day is finally here – the 300th birthday of George Whitefield, the greatest evangelist of the eighteenth century, and the best known person in colonial America prior to the Revolution. I have been waiting for this day for a long time, but I started getting serious about writing a Whitefield biography in time for his 300th birthday sometime after my 2007 book on the Great Awakening. There were fine biographies of Whitefield available from both Christian devotional and academic... Read more

Seth and the Alien God

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 2:35 pm By Philip Jenkins

The origins of Gnosticism are normally discussed in terms of debates within Christianity. However, one richly informative conflict occurred beyond the familiar realm of church history. One of the great minds of Late Antiquity was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, the leading figure of Neoplatonism, and a younger contemporary of Origen. Around the year 263, in Rome, Plotinus engaged in a furious debate with some Gnostic thinkers. Although the two sides shared many assumptions and terminology, Plotinus condemned his enemies for... Read more

Babylonian Baptists

Last updated on: December 10, 2014 at 9:41 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting about the emergence of Christianity in Iraq/Mesopotamia, and its possible inheritance from sectarian Judaism. Other continuities from the older Jewish world lay beyond the realms of orthodox Christianity, and these likewise tell us much about the importance of those Mesopotamian lands. During the third century, Mani founded a Dualist-Gnostic religion that drew on Christianity as well as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and his Manichaean faith endured through the end of the Middle Ages. In modern times, scholars... Read more

Grace and Apostasy

Last updated on: December 11, 2014 at 12:08 pm By johnturner

As a historian, I am grateful for anti-Mormon exposés. Admittedly, the genre poses obvious problems. Those who leave (and especially those who are expelled from) a religious organization often have an obvious axe to grind. At the same time, they have been inside the organization and know things about which outsiders are not privy. And while it’s easy to dismiss exposés as biased, all sources have their own points of view, some more obvious or distorting than others. Historians face... Read more

The Silence Exercise

Last updated on: January 7, 2015 at 12:32 pm By David Swartz

I’ve been trying of late to incorporate more diverse assignments and methods of instruction in my teaching. Each semester now in my World Civilizations course, I ask students to write a short paper on what I call the “silence exercise.” As odd as it may seem, merely maintaining silence for a while can be a way of inhabiting strange worlds of the past. And it seems like a fitting way to conclude the course as we assess the implications of... Read more