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
J. Christopher Edwards has a new book out this week entitled Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press). He has kindly agreed to present a guest post on that theme. Here is the publisher’s description of the book: Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter play and remember Roman soldiers hammering... 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. It’s football season, and in the southeast (and for large parts of American society), that means traditions. Tailgates, lucky gameday attire, foods, gatherings… Even before we get to the holiday season, the fall is saturated with traditions that shape the... Read more
Last month I had the privilege of talking with Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor of Sociology at IUPUI and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. He is award-winning author, most recently of the new book American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. We had a great conversation about that book, his scholarly interests, and his hope for the American Church which follows below,... Read more
by Janine Giordano Drake If you peruse the new books section of Christian book catalogs these days, you’ll find yourself beset with jeremiads about false messiahs and the imminent collapse of the American church. First, there’s Ryan Burge and his team of pastors and political scientists who have been arguing that “We are experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US History.” They use research going back about fifty years to claim that the number of Americans who do... Read more
Can we create a perfect world? That was the title of a talk I gave last semester for “Tipsy Orthodoxy,” a “Theology on Tap” event put on once a month for the Waco community by the Brazos Fellows, a theological postbaccalaureate program hosted by my church. The subtitle was “Lessons from American Utopias.” When we ask whether we can create a perfect world, we can mean one of two things: Can we create a perfect entire world, which is to... Read more
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