I recently posted about the construction of historical memory, and the debate over whether such histories were onions or olives – that is, whether such ideas arose from a genuine core, or if they were wholly imagined. Obviously, that can be a controversial issue, particularly in religious terms, but it is helpful to address it. Religions are after all masters (mistresses) of building traditions and memories. Not only do they stress traditions, but they usually give them an aura of... Read more
I recently had the pleasure of reading Stephen Webb’s Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints (Oxford, 2013). My review is up on the Books & Culture website — I characterize Mormon Christianity as “brilliant, provocative, and occasionally maddening.” The maddening, from my vantage point, is what I consider a rather needless critique of Calvinism that emerges strongly at the end of the book. On the other hand, Webb is not quite so unkind toward Calvinists... Read more
James C. Scott is a distinguished scholar who works on multiple topics and diverse eras. At Yale, he holds the intriguing title of Sterling Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Forestry, and Environmental Studies. Even he might be surprised, though, to find himself cited on matters of Biblical history and archaeology. He may well offer a provocative and surprising angle on the origins of ancient Israel – and even of contemporary mission history. In 2009, Scott published The Art of Not... Read more
Anthony Santoro’s Exile and Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourse on the Death Penalty features one of the more arresting book covers I’ve seen in recent years. A pierced and bloody Jesus sits in an electric chair, wearing a crown of thorns and a waistcloth. The photo is of a wax sculpture by Paul Fryer, who offers this explanation: Just as the cross was the preferred method of execution in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ, the electric chair was... Read more
When authorities in Montgomery, Alabama arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron on December 1, 1955, African Americans in the city formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) in order to organize a direct action campaign. Led by twenty-six year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., the MIA launched a boycott of the city’s public bus system. Since a majority of bus patrons were African American, the boycott financially stressed the public transportation department. Over a year... Read more
January 23, 2014 marks the 300th birthday of the remarkable but troubled Welsh revivalist, Howell Harris. Harris was one of the foremost preachers of the Great Awakening in Britain, and a close friend (for a time) of George Whitefield (the subject of my current book project), who was born later in the same year, 1714. Whitefield and Harris’s early lives and careers shared amazing similarities, including their near-simultaneous conversions in 1735. As I discuss in the Whitefield biography, Harris was a twenty-one-year... Read more
I’ve just returned from a month of travels in Italy—Orvieto, Ravenna, Rome, Naples. (The life of a scholar is sometimes tough, but someone has to do it.) One of the highlights of the trip was the opportunity to work in the Vatican archives for the first time; I read there the correspondence from the nineteenth century between various papal nuncios (i.e., ambassadors) in Munich and the Pope’s Secretary of State, one Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, for a book project currently titled... Read more
Some years ago, in The Lost History of Christianity, I wrote about the world of Asian Christianity during the first millennium. Now, an amazing body of documents throws light on that lost world. This material also demonstrates how the Internet can make historical information freely available. In the mid-ninth century, legal transactions were inscribed on a series of copper plates preserved at the great port of Kollam in southern India, modern Kerala. These have been known for many years, but... Read more
From the Anxious Bench archives: Especially because my colleague Thomas Kidd and I both like the genre of biography, we’ve touched on that topic periodically on this blog. A while back, he blogged about five compelling religious biographies. I was thinking about that subject again while reading my erstwhile University of South Alabama colleague and prolific author Frye Gaillard’s The Books That Mattered, a memoir of that books that have shaped his life. It’s a wonderfully written book and reflects... Read more
In my last post I described how evangelical missionaries were often agents of cultural sensitivity. William Taylor, for example, encouraged Xhosa converts in South Africa to continue using “Dala,” “Tixo,” or “Inkosi,” their native terms for God. For Jay Case, author of An Unpredictable Gospel, this was evidence of missionaries’ concern for native empowerment. “To be sure,” he writes, “many missionaries attempted to impose their will on others, and themes of resistance may effectively describe those who did not accept... Read more
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