2012-07-25T00:10:57-04:00

I am sure that the educated and informed readers of the Anxious Bench are making their  way through summer reading lists.   As for me, I have been mostly reading academic stuff.  Here is my list: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession.  I have not read this book since graduate school and I am getting much more out of it now than I did back then.   I have long been interested in the relationship... Read more

2012-07-03T11:34:28-04:00

Here’s a popular post I wrote last year at Patheos: Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of the American Revolution, was homeschooled. Born in 1736 as the second of eleven children, he attended a small common school until he was 10. After that, his father took primary responsibility for his education. He read classics of Greek and Roman antiquity (sometimes in the original languages), ancient and modern history, and of course, the Bible. He also worked on his family’s farm, hunted,... Read more

2012-07-21T06:45:45-04:00

Some of the world’s grimmest headlines these days are coming out of North Africa, and particularly the vast country of Mali, which few Westerners would be able to locate on a map. As I described in a recent column on RealClearReligion, the country has become a happy hunting ground for brutal Islamist militias, many claiming a connection to the al-Qaeda franchise. Apart from its assaults on local communities, the extremists have launched a hideous campaign to destroy the region’s cultural... Read more

2012-07-18T17:09:16-04:00

I recently did a column on RealClearReligion about a music-related topic that I think needs further exploration. This also segues nicely from John Fea’s post about 1980s Christian music, and John Turner’s piece on Explo ’72. Briefly, I noted that in the 1970s, America witnesses a religious revival with a strong youth focus, as ably described in a book like Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. This is among... Read more

2012-07-19T07:44:54-04:00

Earlier this week, Philip touched on Ross Douthat’s provocative — if not particularly original — NYT op-ed on the demise of the Episcopal Church, USA. As a member of the also rapidly dwindling Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the issues involved are both familiar and personal to me as well. (The PCUSA has lost about 20 percent of its members in the past decade). Douthat’s essay was not simplistic, contrary to the otherwise rather effective rebuttal of Diana Butler Bass. He recognizes... Read more

2012-07-18T01:11:14-04:00

Last week while I was in Ocean City, New Jersey, my family and I attended a concert by the Christian group GLAD.  Evangelicals of a certain age will remember GLAD.  They began in the 1970s as a progressive Christian rock band based in the Philadelphia area and sometime during the late 1980s reinvented themselves as an A cappella group.  The members of the band are getting older (and so are their fans), but they can still harmonize with the best... Read more

2013-01-30T22:59:48-04:00

I recently reviewed Michael Winship’s Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill, and thought I would use the occasion to offer a list of 5 all-time great books on the Puritans in America. The Puritans have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, so there are lots of excellent books not included here. I am also focusing (unsurprisingly) on books written by historians, not by theologians or pastors. 1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth... Read more

2012-07-14T18:44:21-04:00

I am a member of the Episcopal Church, USA (hereafter TEC). I am increasingly worried that in a few years, I might be THE member of the Episcopal Church, USA, the last of my kind. As Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat and others have pointed out, the church has just issued a summary of its attendance statistics from 2000 to 2010, and they are incredibly bad even by the standards of liberal mainline denominations. Nationwide, average Sunday attendance fell by 23... Read more

2012-07-14T06:41:30-04:00

I recently described the problem of finding useful novels that could be used to teach on American religion, and particularly evangelicalism. As I remarked, some books are wonderful as sources, but they are anything but friendly to evangelical Christianity. As a case in point,  I cite Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which a number of respondents to my original post suggested. This is a superb novel that is a treasure trove for many aspects of American religious... Read more

2012-07-12T06:37:07-04:00

Summer is an all-too-short season for making time to read items that have languished on the “to-read” list for too long. This year, I’ve found time for two books on my list (by the ingenious method of assigning them to my students): S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon and Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. The first is a compelling account of the nineteenth-century struggle between the Comanche bands of the southern plains on the one side... Read more

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