EASTER STORIES

Last updated on: January 31, 2013 at 2:29 pm By Philip Jenkins

Felices Pascuas, Joyeuses Pâques, Buona Pasqua, Glad Påsk… Around the world, Christians use very similar words to wish each other a happy Easter, and with a couple of glaring exceptions, they call the feast by a variant of pascha, Passover. Even Tagalog uses pasko. The odd-tongues-out are of course English itself, and its close ally German, where believers wish Frohe Ostern! That oddity actually says a great deal about the process of inculturation, past and present. Astonishingly in retrospect, English... Read more

St. Matthew’s Passion

Last updated on: March 27, 2013 at 11:34 pm By johnturner

The furtherance and further enrichment of the medieval Christian heritage of music and art remains of the greatest legacies of the Lutheran wing of the Protestant Reformation. As Luther stated in the preface to the 1524 Wittenberg Hymnal, he was “not of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts, as some of the pseudo-religious claim.” He would “like to see all the arts, especially music, used in the service of Him who gave and made... Read more

What Does Jesus Look Like?

Last updated on: March 25, 2013 at 10:25 pm By Thomas Kidd

The History Channel’s hit miniseries “The Bible” offers us yet another on-screen depiction of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The honor this time goes to Diogo Morgado, whom the New York Post calls “a kind of surfer Jesus.” The Portuguese actor’s Jesus is not exactly Anglo (although his on-screen accent is); but basically, this Jesus is white. And therein lies a problem. My thoughts on what Jesus looks like were spurred by a fascinating lecture at Baylor by the University... Read more

HARROWING HELL

Last updated on: March 25, 2013 at 10:46 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have already posted on the remarkable survival of ancient apocryphal gospels through the Middle Ages and beyond. In terms of their actual impact on popular belief and practice, these texts had an influence at least approaching the canonical Big Four gospels, and for that reason alone, they demand to be remembered as major sources of Christian history. Some, though, have an added importance in addressing theological issues that remain hotly debated today. To see just how mainstream these alternative... Read more

BETWEEN THE EMPIRES

Last updated on: January 9, 2015 at 1:57 pm By Philip Jenkins

I posted recently about the network of small states that existed between the Roman and Persian empires, the two superpowers of Late Antiquity. Most of these buffer states are of little interest to non-specialists, but two of those middling powers in particular demand our attention for what they suggest about the early history of both Christianity and Islam. Arguably, early Islamic history makes little sense except in the context of these two remarkably influential tribal powers, which together represent a... Read more

The Rise of Liberal Religion

Last updated on: March 22, 2013 at 12:13 am By johnturner

I’ve recently cracked open Matthew Hedstrom’s recently published The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom’s book is providing me with an opportunity to reconfigure my thinking and teaching on the respective trajectories of twentieth-century (and beyond) Protestant liberalism and evangelicalism. In recent decades pundits and some scholars have made much of the post-WWII evangelical resurgence, coupled with a precipitous post-1965 mainline decline. For evangelicals, the post-WWII religious boom kept going for the rest of the century, whereas in terms of membership,... Read more

FROM CRANMER TO WELBY

Last updated on: March 20, 2013 at 10:26 am By Philip Jenkins

This year more than most, March 21 is a date of multiple significance in the Church of England. You might justly ask whether the English church still matters much on the world stage, but the wider Anglican Communion assuredly does: by the middle of this century, there could well be 150 million Anglicans worldwide. Historically, March 21 commemorates the burning of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer by Mary Tudor’s Catholic regime, in 1556. Cranmer has a fair claim to rank as the... Read more

With Signs Following: Baptists and the Holy Spirit

Last updated on: March 19, 2013 at 9:07 am By Thomas Kidd

One of the perennial struggles in church life is balancing our approach to the work of the Holy Spirit. On one side of the evangelical continuum, there are self-conscious “cessationists” who believe that the “sign gifts,” such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, ceased with the closing of the New Testament canon. On the other side, we have charismatics and Pentecostals who so heavily emphasize the sign gifts that they sometimes evaluate a believer’s commitment to Christ according to their... Read more

WHAT DO CHILDREN NEED? A THERAPIST OR A SHOVEL?

Last updated on: March 17, 2013 at 9:53 pm By Agnes Howard

That children should do chores might seem so obvious as to be unworthy of mention. I considered the question in a recent Boston Globe article. No suspense: I do think children should do chores. But revisiting an important book about the Reformation, of all things, strengthened that conviction. Considering “The Religious Beliefs of Teenagers” in a chapter of his book, Protestants, The Birth of a Revolution, Steven Ozment observes that the “adolescents of the Reformation grew up in a world... Read more

FAITH ON THE FRONTIER

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 7:03 am By Philip Jenkins

Some day, I would love to write a history on religion on the frontiers, and I don’t mean the frontiers of faith or rational inquiry. Governments throughout history have disliked regions that are difficult to control. They strongly prefer fertile lowlands over pastoral uplands or mountain regions. They dislike sprawling cities, especially cosmopolitan seaports. They especially loathe border regions, where foreign influences can penetrate easily, and where local people can easily flee where the writ of the law does not... Read more