Dying the Modern Death

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 9:34 pm By David Swartz

Welcome to this fourth installment of Death Wednesday here at the Anxious Bench. In my last post I described the nostalgic appeal of Trappist caskets and old-time burial practices at the bucolic Abbey of Gethsemani. For me and my students, Gethsemani seemed awfully appealing as we contemplated the likelihood of our own deaths in an antiseptic hospital while harnessed to a machine. For nineteenth-century Americans, the notion of death outside the home was inconceivable. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes this... Read more

Hope for Revival in Britain?

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 8:11 am By Thomas Kidd

My family and I just returned from two weeks in the U.K., and while we were there, several major British religion news events transpired. First, on a day we happened to be in Edinburgh, Church of Scotland delegates voted to allow gay ministers. Then, when we returned to London, came the appalling murder of a British solider by two Muslims, one of whom was arrested in Kenya in 2010 for seeking al-Qaeda training. Finally, a new study of U.K. census... Read more

“No Purely Feminine Woman”

Last updated on: January 3, 2015 at 4:47 pm By Agnes Howard

“While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, ‘men never.’” This statement appears in Megan Marshall’s new biography of Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). The quotation continues: men never “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women,” Marshall summarizes, since there was nothing enviable in women’s lot, no advantages to be had in that direction. Fuller is a fascinating character, well anthologized and covered in earlier biographies but deserving of broader familiarity. ... Read more

MAMELUKES AND JANISSARIES

Last updated on: May 30, 2013 at 3:41 am By Philip Jenkins

I recently wrote a piece for Realclearreligion on the Genízaros, native militias that the Spanish used to control the old Southwest. Their name is sometimes translated as “Hispanicized Indians,” and you can buy T-shirts today proclaiming “Genízaro New Mexico: Native Pride.” Oddly, though, the group offers a sidelight on early versions of globalization. It even helps us understand how European attitudes to Islam shaped their view of other non-Christian faiths around the world. Genízaros is a version of the Turkish... Read more

DUALIST CHRISTIANITY

Last updated on: May 23, 2013 at 8:30 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing on the persistence of alternative forms of Christianity through the long Middle Ages. In my next couple of postings, I will be focusing on one remarkable and powerful movement that flourished in South-Eastern Europe, namely the Bogomils, and their truly ancient ideas. When we look at the alternative Christian worlds of the second and third centuries, we find to our surprise that they never went away, but simply moved their centers of operation, and endured for... Read more

Christians on Campus

Last updated on: May 23, 2013 at 12:17 am By johnturner

“Christians are ousted wherever possible on campus,” complained Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) founder Bill Bright a few years before his 2003 death. With some regularity universities make news for de-recognizing student campus ministries that require their leaders to adhere to certain religious criteria (most often a statement of faith). This, a number of high-profile universities have maintained, violates policies of non-discrimination. In some instances, campus ministries have specifically excluded gay and lesbian students from positions of leadership; however, in... Read more

Recovering the Ars Moriendi*

Last updated on: January 11, 2015 at 10:23 am By Miles Mullin

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” – Luke 24:5b NRSV According to the accounts found in the Synoptic Gospels, the female disciples that travelled to Jesus’s tomb the first Easter morning expected nothing spectacular. They merely intended to finish preparing the corpse for its long-term entombment (Mark 16:1, Luke 24:1), a process that had been truncated due to the late hour of Jesus’s expiration and the impending approach of... Read more

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Last updated on: May 1, 2013 at 5:34 pm By Thomas Kidd

The Boston Marathon bombings and the faiths of the Tsarnaev brothers have renewed the debate about the nature of Islam, so this week I am reposting my review of Miroslav Volf’s Allah: A Christian Response, from the Patheos archives. — President George W. Bush created a boiling controversy amongst evangelicals in 2003 when he declared that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Many accused Bush of pandering to political correctness. Nearly 80 percent of evangelical leaders polled in 2003 disagreed... Read more

RED EASTER

Last updated on: April 15, 2013 at 1:36 pm By Philip Jenkins

I originally wrote the following piece for my church’s newsletter. Bear with me if my remarks are obvious. I hope it might be of interest. On May 19, the church celebrates the great feast of Pentecost, with all its rich imagery of fire from heaven, tongues of flame, and speaking in tongues. In the Western tradition at least, the day marks the church’s birthday. In old English, it was called Whit (White, or Holy) Sunday. Italians traditionally called it Pascha... Read more

THE GOSPELS OF ISLAM

Last updated on: July 11, 2013 at 3:13 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been tracking the ancient “lost gospels” through the Middle Ages, when these alternative scriptures continued to exercise a remarkably wide influence. This was especially true in the cultures of Islam, which emerged in a largely Christian world fascinated by apocryphal writings. Even in the fifth century, Arabia was proverbially haeresium ferax: the breeding ground of heresies. A century ago, Jesuit scholar Louis Cheikho stressed that the pre-Islamic Christian East was “literally inundated” with apocryphal works of both the... Read more