Of all the holiday-themed romantic comedies that I consume in abundance this time of year, my favorite is Dash & Lily, a Netflix series about a budding romance between two teenagers who trade messages and dares during the Christmas season. There’s much to love about this series: its setting in the Strand (the best bookstore in the world) and in New York City (the best city in the world) during the holidays (the best season for cozy romantic comedies).... Read more
This is the second post in a two-part series on the history Southern Baptist perceptions of Palestinians after the creation the state of Israel. Read the first part here. It wasn’t until 2002 that Southern Baptists offered up official language for their majority pro-Zionist position, but a pro-Israel faction had been operating in SBC life for at least 20 years prior. At the same time Dean and Dona Fitzgerald were ministering in Gaza City on behalf of the Southern Baptist... Read more
Janine Giordano Drake We’ve all heard the story: Abe Lincoln created the national holiday we call “Thanksgiving” in 1863. In the midst of incredible carnage due to war and disease, the “Great Emancipator”—at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the Godey Lady’s Book and Magazine—urged Americans to set aside a day of “thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the Beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe.” What we perhaps spend less time thinking about are the motivations for the... Read more
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of a evangelical road less traveled Read more
As I walked through the book room at the Society of Biblical Literature conference this weekend, I drooled over the vast array of books. Tables after tables of history, theology, exegesis—a nerd’s dream. In order to guide the viewer through this massive surplus of literature, most publishers have broken these works into categories: biblical studies, systematic theology, church history, etc. This phenomenon, of course, is not unique to publishers, but is also seen in the formation of the modern university... Read more
Early on the first Friday of October, as whispers of mist drifted over the mountains from the sea, chilling the Sonoma County air, my children and I hurried down two flights of stairs in the mountain cabin where we had arrived late the night before. On the wooden porch just outside, we found Roxanne, Art Director for Ignatius Press, who handed me three sets of shears (the six-year-old being deemed too young to use them), and directed us to the... Read more
My current work on Lived Religion constantly reminds me of how very similar are the things that people do in different religious traditions, however widely separated by place or era. This in turn has got me quite deeply into the very sizable literature on the scientific explanations for religious behavior, including the Cognitive Science of Religion. What I can say here in a blogpost or two is pathetically slim when set against the very large literature, but let me list... Read more
I remember the first time I read the New Testament book of Acts. It was the spring semester of my first year of college, and I was taking an introductory survey of Roman History. This was at a secular state university, and we read Acts simply as a primary source about the early church in its original historical context—the Roman Empire. Twelve years after that, I came to Christ. Reading the Gospels was what convinced me ultimately that Jesus’s claims... Read more
Today I have the pleasure of welcoming a guest contribution from my Wheaton College colleague and friend, Nathan Luis Cartagena (Ph.D., Baylor University). Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, whose teaching and scholarship focus on Thomas Aquinas, James Baldwin, Critical Race Theory, Military Ethics, Evangélic@ Theology, and Christian Pedagogy. During Holy Week of 2001, the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Discovery Channel coproduced the documentary Jesus: The Complete Story. The documentary chronicling Jesus’ life included a visual rendering of... Read more
One of the challenges of writing intellectual history is the task of summing up large works in a relatively small amount of space. Doing this for Karl Barth’s multivolume Church Dogmatics, proclaimed by many as “the most important theological work of the twentieth,” has proven especially daunting for me as I continue to work on a current book project. I include here my attempt to do so. Did I do justice to the work? Did I capture its general shape?... Read more
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