This is the first post in a two-part series on the history Southern Baptist perceptions of Palestinians after the creation the state of Israel. The second part will be posted next month. “Neutrality is not an option.” These words stood out to me as I read the New York Times piece on American evangelicals and support for Israel. The statement came from Jared Wellman, a well-known Southern Baptist pastor in Arlington, Texas, as he tried to give his congregation... Read more
Our standard impression of the Medieval Christian world is distorted. The conventional picture suggests a rigidly-enforced church orthodoxy, any deviation from which meant torture and death. When heresies arose, we are told, they were ruthlessly suppressed, and any and all non-approved religious writings were torched. As I have suggested recently, such a picture works very poorly for the Byzantine world. In the eighth and ninth centuries, orthodoxy was indeed demanded at least in theory, upon pain of exile or death,... Read more
On Carter's so-called "malaise speech," the most theologically profound speech by an American president since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Read more
This post is part of a series at the Anxious Bench on ‘Contested Ideas in the History of Ideas’, which brings debates from contributors’ respective fields to the fore. Look for more posts in the series throughout the month of October. If you know anything about early church theology, you have probably heard of the arch-heretic: Arius of Alexandria. His theology claims that the Son of God is less divine than the Father, in particular that the Son was of a... Read more
Hi! I am a cultural sociologist on a tour of Texas Megachurches. Check out my first post here. Today I am covering Oak Hills Church and its celebrity pastor, Max Lucado. ************************************************************************************************************** First, Some Background Of all the notable figures in American evangelicalism, it is Max Lucado who, for me, best typifies the profound shifts that evangelical culture has sustained in its codes of masculinity. It is hard to fully explain how American Protestantism has found its way from Jonathan Edwards... Read more
This post is part of a series at the Anxious Bench on ‘Contested Ideas in the History of Ideas’, which brings debates from contributors’ respective fields to the fore. Look for more posts in the series throughout the month of October. In 1945, in Egypt, a long-lost collection of some fifty early Christian gospels and other writings came to light for the first time in some 1400 years. These Nag Hammadi texts aroused real excitement: For a world used to speaking... Read more
There is a street in Jerusalem whose history sheds a different, more personal and human light on the prolonged and continuing conflict that is the Arab-Israeli Wars. On the one hand, we see, as this weekend, terrorist organizations and state armies targeting each other, extending further Israel’s liturgy of national suffering—but that of the Palestinians as well. The death tolls are devastating, but seeing such numbers simply listed as tallies in news headlines lends a detached, impersonal air to wars.... Read more
Early on Saturday morning October 7, over a thousand Hamas attacked Israeli citizens and military, breaching over 30 sections of the Gaza-Israeli fence line and attacking by sea, air, and land. Hamas employed speed boats, parachute, motorcycles and attacked employing AK47s, M16, RPGs, while receiving rocket support on strategic targets like Tel Aviv. Hundreds of citizens were massacred at a musical festival alone, with the overall death toll exceeding 1,000 and wounded of over 2,500. Over 100 citizens have been... Read more
American evangelicals have a categorical problem. I’m not talking about our denominations, our broader theological traditions, or even our distressing and distracting intramural infighting over second and third order issues. I’m talking about how we think socio-culturally, politically, and even economically. Although I have no doubt that this has always been a struggle for Christians in all cultural contexts, this post will focus on evangelicals in the United States. The story about “ecclesiastical abolitionists” that Douglas Strong tells in Perfectionist... Read more
The Jesuits just won’t go away. In my classroom today, when discussing Christian missions in China during the 17th century, students started asking about Jesuits and how or why they might be responsible for terrible events from the Inquisition through the US Civil War and then atrocities in Argentina. While I’m never surprised at conspiracies involving Jesuits, this was the most exhaustive conversation I’ve experienced in a long time. I was both bemused and impressed when a student pulled... Read more
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