Rock the Desert: Evangelical Activism in Texas and Sudan

Last updated on: September 30, 2013 at 10:46 am By David Swartz

In 2001, just one month before 9/11, 32,000 evangelical youth invaded Midland, Texas. Drawn to a Christian music festival called “Rock the Desert,” they clapped and danced to the rock anthems of Newsboys and Skillet. Festival organizers also highlighted a social and diplomatic crisis in Sudan, then a war zone with one of the worst global records of religious persecution and human rights violations perpetrated by the Sudanese government and Janjaweed Arab militias. Over the next several years, as the... Read more

Five Great Books on George Washington

Last updated on: September 30, 2013 at 10:22 am By Thomas Kidd

Last week saw the opening of the long-awaited George Washington National Library at Mount Vernon. Washington himself seems to have had such a project in mind at the end of his life, when he wrote in 1797 that “I have not houses to build, except one, which I must erect for the accommodation and security of my military, civil and private papers, which are voluminous and may be interesting.” More than two hundred years later, that vision has become reality.... Read more

The Promise of America’s Religious Colleges

Last updated on: September 28, 2013 at 12:10 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

As a new academic year gets underway, the writing is on the wall: higher education might well be lurching toward a period of creative destruction of the sort that has affected many other sectors of the economy in recent decades. Mention of “the University of Phoenix” or “MOOCs” or “the Minerva Project” strikes fear in the heart of the tweed-wearing set, just as hand-loom weavers once trembled at the sight of textile mills. But the present moment offers religious college... Read more

THE SECRET RESURRECTION OF SALVATOR ROSA

Last updated on: September 29, 2013 at 7:54 am By Philip Jenkins

I think I’ve discovered a long-lost secret society that transmitted its religious message through coded paintings. No, I have not lost my mind, nor have I changed my last name to Brown. The main problem in studying the history of secret societies and underground ideas is that they are all so, well, secret. On the positive side, for some writers, the absence of solid evidence means that you can speculate widely and, often, irresponsibly, wandering into bizarre conspiracy theories. Sober... Read more

FORGETTING EZRA

Last updated on: July 5, 2013 at 1:05 pm By Philip Jenkins

In October, 1555, the regime of Mary Tudor burned two former English bishops for their stubborn Protestant convictions. As they went to the flames, one of the martyrs, Hugh Latimer, addressed his comrade, Nicholas Ridley, in stirring terms that have inspired successive Protestant generations. He urged him, “Be of good cheer, master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle in England, as I hope, by God’s grace, shall never be put out.” The words... Read more

Das Buch Mormon

Last updated on: September 25, 2013 at 6:08 pm By johnturner

About a year ago, I asked for advice about how to structure a course on American evangelicalism. Many first-rate suggestions were forth-coming. This fall, I’m teaching a course on Mormonism in Heidelberg, Germany (gluecklicherweise auf Englisch, sonst waere es mir sehr peinlich). For the next year, I am residing at the Heidelberg Centre for American Studies, in the heart of Heidelberg’s Altstadt. My HCA office is next to that of Jan Stievermann, one of the editors of the Biblia Americana... Read more

From Graduate Student Learner to Teaching Professor

Last updated on: September 24, 2013 at 10:16 pm By Miles Mullin

Like many professors, I work at an institution where I teach broad survey classes. At Southwestern Seminary, this means I regularly teach the standard Church History sequence—Church History I and II—in the Master of Divinity program. The recent addition of a B.S. in Biblical Studies at our Houston campus and in our prison extension required that I also add the bachelor’s level one-semester Survey of Church History to my repertoire of broad survey classes. Each semester as I prepare to... Read more

Paleo Evangelicals and the Plight of Prisoners

Last updated on: September 23, 2013 at 10:09 am By Thomas Kidd

It’s tough to get people to stand up for prisoners. Disproportionately poor, black, and Hispanic, America’s prisoners typically lose whatever minimal public influence they once had when they vanish into our country’s vast detention system. What’s more, they (generally) vanish by their own fault, forfeiting whatever sympathy the public might have had for them. Republicans have typically been the “tough on crime” party, and while Democrats may take a more nuanced view of incarceration, no one wants to be tarred... Read more

ENOCH ABIDES

Last updated on: January 23, 2015 at 10:47 am By Philip Jenkins

Although the Book of Enoch was highly regarded in the early Christian church, it fell out of favor by the fourth century. From the ninth century, it virtually disappeared from European churches at least, and the text would be lost for a millennium. But the work proved surprisingly durable. Centuries after it was denounced by Church Fathers – especially Augustine – it continued to surface in surprising places and contexts. Enoch offers a case-study of the extreme difficulty of suppressing... Read more

THE FOUR BEASTS

Last updated on: September 1, 2013 at 10:53 am By Philip Jenkins

Crowded, isn’t it? I don’t suppose the four evangelists ever met under one roof, but if that marvelous event ever occurred, it’s highly unlikely that they would have assembled like they did in this painting, by Rubens. An extra guy in the group is fine, even if he is an angel. But an ox? A lion? An eagle? Even more remarkable, such menagerie images are a mainstay of Western religious art. Let me say what others might be thinking. Who... Read more