Angels from the East?

Last updated on: October 30, 2014 at 7:42 pm By Philip Jenkins

In the two or three centuries before Jesus’s time, Jews became highly interested in angels, to whom they assigned identities and personal names. That represents a major shift from the well-known scriptures of the sixth and fifth centuries BC that we find in the canonical Old Testament. Something had happened between those periods, but what? Exploring this question actually tells us a great deal about how we write our religious history, and how we treat influential ideas like Dualism. One... Read more

The Beginning and End of Mormon Polygamy

Last updated on: October 29, 2014 at 10:54 pm By johnturner

Many observers of Mormonism have offered their thoughts on the recent statements on plural marriage published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They discuss the origins of plural marriage and Joseph Smith’s own practice of polygamy; the living out of polygamy in early Utah; and the church’s abandonment of plural marriage between 1890 and 1906. You can access the three essays here. I find the essays remarkable for their detail, especially in discussing topics previously eschewed by... Read more

Serendipity in the Stacks: A Case against Bookless Libraries

Last updated on: January 7, 2015 at 12:46 pm By David Swartz

Several months ago Florida Polytechnic University opened a brand-new library. Its architecture, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is striking. Even more striking is what this library lacks: books. I’ll repeat that: you can’t check out any physical books at FPU’s library. You can, however, read from a screen. Staffers say that electronic workstations give students access to over 135,000 e-books. Director of Libraries Kathryn Miller says, “It’s the information that’s key, not its form.” I confess to considerable ambivalence over the... Read more

George Whitefield: Bridging the Evangelical and Academic Gap

Last updated on: October 27, 2014 at 9:46 am By Thomas Kidd

Today is the official publication date for my book George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. Thanks to all of you who have already bought the book, as well as those who have so kindly posted and tweeted about it! Why do we need this George Whitefield biography? Aside from the fact that he needs to be better known as the key evangelist of the First Great Awakening, and that this December 16 marks his 300th birthday, I believe that my... Read more

The Axe that Severed the Bishop’s Head

Last updated on: October 26, 2014 at 5:24 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

. . . also brought the Protestant Reformation to Iceland. Recently I’ve had a chance to travel to Iceland for the first time. The small island republic in the middle of the Atlantic is best known for its beguiling landscape: a plethora of active volcanoes (one now erupting), glaciers, lava beds, waterfalls, thermal baths, geysers, fjords, and more. But the history of Christianity there equally fascinates—and disturbs. Iceland was the last “European” land mass to convert to Christianity. Irish hermits... Read more

Of Monks, Mounds and Massacres

Last updated on: October 27, 2014 at 8:11 am By Philip Jenkins

In my undergraduate years, I studied early and medieval Celtic history, with a heavy concentration on matters Irish. A couple of lessons from those days help understand contemporary academic debates, not to mention our appreciation of Christian history. The first issue arises from an excellent recent issue of American Archaeology, about the important Native American site of Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma, which operated from the ninth century through the fifteenth. Elizabeth Lunday has an article with this subheading: “For years Spiro... Read more

Angels at the Dead Sea

Last updated on: October 19, 2014 at 8:38 am By Philip Jenkins

My recent posts concerned angels, and specifically when and why they acquired names and individual identities. Angels are fully developed characters in 1 Enoch, probably from the third century BC, and that text was well known in the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. That group had a special interest in angels and their doings, and their role in cosmic warfare. Time and again, we find linkages between the Dead Sea sect, the Essenes, and the world of 1... Read more

America’s Spiritual Founding Father

Last updated on: October 22, 2014 at 11:06 am By johnturner

In time for the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Whitefield (pronounced Whit-field), my co-blogger Thomas Kidd has just published a biography of the man he terms America’s Spiritual Founding Father. [Yale University Press identifies October 28 as the book’s release date, but it is already shipping]. Kidd’s George Whitefield is an eminently readable and informative book. It begins with a simple yet critical argument: “George Whitefield was the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical... Read more

Leadership: American Style

Last updated on: January 17, 2015 at 12:28 pm By Miles Mullin

Two men, born twenty-six years apart and moving within different circles, followed remarkably similar and typically American paths to the pinnacle of fame and leadership. The first came from humble origins and endured a challenging childhood. His father died in an car wreck while his mother was pregnant, leaving her as a single mom. At the time of his birth, that situation meant social stigma and the stresses of providing for a family as a single parent. In order... Read more

C.S. Lewis, Public Intellectual

Last updated on: October 20, 2014 at 3:24 pm By Thomas Kidd

This week’s post is a review I wrote of Alister McGrath’s C.S. Lewis: A Life, from the Anxious Bench archives: Alister McGrath’s C.S. Lewis: A Life comes with endorsements from Eric Metaxas, Timothy Keller, N.T. Wright, and perhaps most weightily given the topic, from my Baylor colleague Alan Jacobs, who calls it “a meticulously researched, insightful, fair-minded, and honest account of a fascinating man’s life.” As I have written earlier, I admire Jacobs’ own Lewis biography, The Narnian, and his assessment of McGrath’s book is apt. McGrath’s... Read more