Welcome New Anxious Bench Bloggers, Agnes and Tal Howard

Last updated on: September 1, 2012 at 1:58 pm By Thomas Kidd

A very warm welcome to the newest additions to our Anxious Bench roster of bloggers, Agnes Howard and Tal Howard of Gordon College! They’ll begin posting soon. Here are their bios: Agnes R. Howard teaches history at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, specializing in early America, particularly colonial New England. She holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. She has spent time in Washington, DC, working in the office of Vice President Dan Quayle and for the journal, The Public Interest. The birth of three... Read more

PRAISING FAMOUS MEN

Last updated on: September 10, 2012 at 7:27 am By Philip Jenkins

Following the recent untimely death of Marvin Meyer, I have been thinking of a dear friend who was his close contemporary, and who died at an even earlier age. This was Bill Petersen, who taught New Testament and Early Christianity at Penn State until his death in 2006, at age 56, and who was probably the greatest scholar I have ever known personally in any discipline. He also believed firmly that his particular academic area – New Testament and Early... Read more

Monotheism and Religious Pluralism

Last updated on: August 30, 2012 at 11:21 am By johnturner

This semester, I’m teaching an introductory course on “Religions of the West.” My initial hope was that the crafters of the curriculum meant the American West. I figured I could spend half the course on Mormonism, complementing that with units on native religions, Mexican-American Catholicism, and the development of eastern religions on the West Coast. Turns out that the title meant Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Fortunately, teaching is a great motivation for learning. In other ways, I found the course... Read more

Engaging the Past, Engaging History

Last updated on: August 28, 2012 at 11:38 pm By John Fea

I was going to write about the GOP Convention today, but I found the following topic more interesting: Over at Books and Culture, Nicholas Wolterstorff reviews Mark Noll’s Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. For Christian scholars, it doesn’t get any better than this. For the past generation, Noll and Wolterstorff have been two of the leaders–in both word and example–of what it means to cultivate a Christian mind. As expected, Wolterstorff praises Noll’s apology for Christian learning,... Read more

Jonathan Edwards on True Christianity

Last updated on: August 28, 2012 at 8:35 am By Thomas Kidd

Our church recently hosted a presentation by Owen Strachan, who teaches theology and church history at Boyce College in Louisville, Ky. Strachan is the co-author, with Douglas Sweeney (Strachan’s doctoral mentor), of the five-volume Essential Edwards Collection (2010). I happily came away from the session with a copy of one of these volumes, Jonathan Edwards on True Christianity. For those looking for a brief, practical introduction to Edwards, and the relevance of his ideas for local churches today, I can’t think of a... Read more

ALL GOSPELS WERE NOT CREATED EQUAL

Last updated on: August 27, 2012 at 5:45 am By Philip Jenkins

I just read an obituary of Early Christianity scholar Marvin Meyer, who died at the obscenely early age of 64. In recent years, Meyer was best known for his edition of the Gospel of Judas, which in his view portrayed Judas in vastly more positive terms than the conventional account. His translation was however controversial, provoking a vigorous attack by his doctoral supervisor James M. Robinson. Among other issues, Meyer seems to have omitted the word “not” in a crucial... Read more

RIOT GIRLS

Last updated on: August 21, 2012 at 8:12 am By Philip Jenkins

Well, this takes me back. Do you know how long it is since anyone accused me of being in the pay of the KGB? I have been taking some heat for a column I wrote over at RealClearReligion on the subject of the punk band Pussy Riot, and their demonstration in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Here’s the background. For excellent reasons, a lot of Russians are alarmed by the authoritarian direction of their post-Soviet government, headed by Vladimir... Read more

The Carnivore’s Dilemma

Last updated on: August 23, 2012 at 6:42 am By johnturner

I like to eat. My family was in the live-to-eat category while I was growing up. I sometimes worry that had we been there when Jesus fed thousands, there would only have been eleven (or maybe ten) baskets of food left over. One reason I was a terrible Boy Scout was because camping food was mostly awful. Who really wants to make peach cobbler in a reflecting oven? Actually, I was rather enterprising at locating good food while on camping... Read more

Stephen Covey: Mormon Theologian?

Last updated on: August 22, 2012 at 10:43 am By Thomas Kidd

Matthew Bowman, writing at the Religion in American History Blog, has a fascinating piece on Stephen Covey, one of the leading motivational/self-improvement writers of the past generation. Covey, who recently passed away, was the author most famously of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Bowman: It is perhaps no coincidence that Covey’s interpretation of Mormon theology appeared when it did, because Mormonism in the mid to late twentieth century was dominated by a process called “correlation,” which rationalized and streamlined the... Read more

Paul Ryan and the Curious Case of the Missing Evangelicals

Last updated on: October 25, 2016 at 10:32 pm By Thomas Kidd

We now have a presidential ticket without at least one candidate who is nominally Protestant. The Daily Caller‘s Matt K. Lewis saw this coming a couple weeks ago, and interviewed me about the prospect. “I don’t think it [will] be particularly important in this election,” says Kidd … “Evangelicals would be heartened by the selection of a conservative Catholic running mate by Romney, just as many of them supported Rick Santorum in the primaries … The Supreme Court, of course, now... Read more