How does God still speak?

Last updated on: May 15, 2013 at 6:28 am By johnturner

Until recent decades at least, nearly all Americans have believed in an unchanging God, “the same yesterday, today and forever.” If God does not change, does God’s manner and rate of revelation change over time? Typically, those who have wrestled with the issue of canon in the history of American religion have made only crude differentiation among different groups. In colonial America, there were the Quakers and nearly everyone else. In antebellum America, things became a bit more complex, but... Read more

Bourbon Fudge and Trappist Caskets

Last updated on: May 15, 2013 at 8:09 pm By David Swartz

This past semester for me focused inordinately on death. I taught a course called “War in the American Memory” and covered the Holocaust in World Civilizations. And then—even though commencement was already over—fellow blogger Miles Mullin piled on with a terrific post on how modern Americans outsource death and dying. It’s the semester that won’t die! Death even pervaded an annual trip that I take with a group of Asbury students to the Abbey of Gethsemani, located about an hour... Read more

Benjamin Franklin, George Whitefield, and the Founding of the University of Pennsylvania

Last updated on: May 1, 2013 at 5:37 pm By Thomas Kidd

Many people are not aware of the vital friendship between Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield. Franklin became Whitefield’s key publicist and printer in the colonies in the early 1740s, and their relationship lasted until Whitefield’s death in 1770. They also exchanged friendly letters on many topics. One of the most fascinating exchanges between them came in 1750, when Whitefield replied to Franklin’s plans for the Philadelphia Academy, the forerunner to the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin and the academy trustees had... Read more

Protestant Reformation Approaching 500

Last updated on: May 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

On October 31, 2017, the Protestant Reformation will turn 500. How ought one commemorate such an epochal, complex, and influential historical development? While the date is still a while off, I have been thinking about the question a lot lately. In part, because my colleague Mark Noll at Notre Dame and I received a grant a year ago to host a conference around this question. (It will take place this November on the campus of Gordon College; if interested, click... Read more

Welcome New Anxious Bench Blogger David Swartz!

Last updated on: May 1, 2013 at 5:19 pm By Thomas Kidd

This coming week we are welcoming another new blogger to the Anxious Bench roster, David Swartz of Asbury University. From David’s website : David R. Swartz is an assistant professor of history at Asbury University. He earned his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Notre Dame under the direction of George Marsden and Mark Noll. His areas of expertise and teaching interest include American religious history, twentieth-century American politics, global religion, and issues of war and peace. In... Read more

FINDING THE DIATESSARON

Last updated on: April 3, 2013 at 4:04 pm By Philip Jenkins

My current research involves the history of alternative gospels and scriptures, and how these supposedly “lost” works in fact survived and exercised their influence many centuries after they supposedly disappeared. One classic example of a “lost” text is the Diatessaron, a valuable harmony or synthesis of the four canonical gospels composed around 170. Because the work was so convenient and accessible, it became immensely popular. Some church leaders disliked it, though, given the personal theological views of its compiler, Tatian.... Read more

Evil, Evil, Everywhere

Last updated on: May 9, 2013 at 1:32 am By johnturner

Evil has seemed everywhere over the past several weeks. The Boston bombings. Gruesome murders of babies who survived failed abortions. The kidnappings, forced rapes, and forced miscarriages of the women in Cleveland. Sometimes I’ve found that my students — often steeped in relativism — have to be prodded to consider “evil.” The word has religious connotations. It sounds judgmental (unless applied to the Religious Right, I’ve noticed, because it’s evidently fine to judge judgmental people). It invites self-righteousness, because if... Read more

Outsourcing Death and Dying in America

Last updated on: January 11, 2015 at 10:22 am By Miles Mullin

Once an intimate family affair, death and dying are now outsourced in America. Set in different centuries, stories from two of America’s greatest storytellers highlight the manner in which American encounters with death and dying have changed over the last two hundred years. Culled from Stephen King’s novella The Body (1982), the plot in the 1980s coming-of-age film Stand by Me (1986) revolves around a quest by four adolescents to find a dead body. Set in 1959, the narrator reflects... Read more

“An Army of the Living God”: Stonewall Jackson’s Death and Southern Memory

Last updated on: May 6, 2013 at 10:09 am By Thomas Kidd

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the tragic death on May 10, 1863, of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson from wounds sustained at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Along with Robert E. Lee, Jackson occupies a special place of veneration in the memory of the Confederate cause. It is hard to say how many southern boys today share a childhood like Don Williams’s, who sang in “Good Ole Boys Like Me” about growing up “with a picture of Stonewall Jackson above”... Read more

JEWISH-CHRISTIAN GOSPELS

Last updated on: May 6, 2013 at 9:53 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting recently about the survival of the so-called lost gospels into the Middle Ages and beyond. When scholars discuss these texts, they pay special attention to the so-called Jewish-Christian gospels as precious survivals of the earliest Jesus movement. Actually, this Jewish-Christian tradition can also tell us a great deal about how we got our present standard texts of the canonical four gospels. According to a common interpretation of Christian origins, most of Jesus’s first followers saw themselves... Read more