My present work concerns the topic of Lived Religion, which will be the subject of my next few posts. To simplify, this is the study of religion as it is actually practiced by ordinary people, rather than as is laid down by organized institutions, faiths or churches, and that kind of approach has attracted a huge amount of scholarly concern over the past couple of decades. By observing lived practice, as opposed to prescribed institutional forms, the approach offers rich... Read more
In 2021 I published the book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Driven Religious Upheaval (Oxford University Press). I argued that throughout history, climate-driven disasters have had dramatic and often destructive effects on human societies worldwide. Those traumas have often manifested in spiritual forms, driving great revivals and apocalyptic movements, and inciting the persecution of minority groups and scapegoats. Most scholars would accept that basic argument about the effects of climate, but here I am going to venture... Read more
I am presently revising my textbook on the History of the United States, for a sixth (!) edition. Through the span of American history, certain themes surface repeatedly, even obsessively, and among those is the nature of the country’s founding: what exactly were the foundations and values on which it was built? Godly and Puritan? Secular and Enlightenment? Slave-holding or free? Of the country’s nature, such historical debates have always resonated in political debate, and they continue to do so.... Read more
Every Halloween for several years, I have posted something that is oriented to horror, weird fiction, or the supernatural, preferably with some direct relevance to religious history (which is never actually that hard to connect). Here, I offer one historical case study at length, and I think it is a really impressive ghost story. I will also offer links to quite a few very diverse posts I have done here over the past decade. Some of my posts have concerned... Read more
This is the first of two Halloween offerings from me this year. Earlier this year I published a book on the reception of Psalm 91 through history: this was my He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford University Press). Over the past couple of millennia, that psalm has enjoyed a robust career as a protection against demons and evil forces. Depending on the translation, it has multiple references to evil forces, both... Read more
by Janine Giordano Drake Lucas Miles, author of The Christian Left: How Liberal Thought Has Highjacked the Church, thinks that left-leaning Christians don’t take sin seriously enough. He thinks that in our willingness to conform to the faddish principles of “justice” and “inclusivity” in the world, we have turned our back on the “core principles of the gospel”—the good news of personal responsibility, repentance, forgiveness, and personal salvation. While Miles makes an attempt to explain the longer history that has... Read more
As I have remarked in a couple of recent posts, I am currently writing a new and fully revised sixth edition of my History of the United States, which originally appeared in 1997: the new version will be published by Bloomsbury. Looking back at those earlier versions brings out some points about recent American history that really strike me. They also have a large effect on just how we produce history books during a revolution in teaching as much as... Read more
I am delighted to welcome Lucy S. R. Austen to the Anxious Bench to talk about her new biography, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. Austen is a writer, editor, and teacher who has spent over a decade studying source materials on Elisabeth Elliot. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. Andrea Turpin: For readers who are not familiar with Elisabeth Elliot—or perhaps are familiar with only one aspect of her—how would you briefly summarize her life and significance? Lucy... Read more
“Nones” now comprise 28 percent of the American adult population, according to survey data that the Pew Research Center released this month. Sixteen years ago, in 2007, only 16 percent of Americans in 2007 said they had no religion. But if secularization (that is, a shift away from religious affiliation among a substantial percentage of the population) is happening in the United States, it hasn’t proceeded along the lines that secularization theory predicted. According to this frequently recited theory, which... Read more
Last weekend, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois, was stabbed to death in his home. The alleged killer was his landlord, who stabbed him 26 times with “a military style knife” while shouting “you Muslims have to die” and “you are killing our kids in Israel. You Palestinians don’t deserve to live.” His mother, Hanaan Shahin, had repeatedly asked the attacker, “let’s pray for peace”; she, too, was stabbed and seriously injured in the attack. According... Read more
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