In the 1980s when I was growing up as a pastor’s daughter in a conservative Christian context, I kept my ear to the ground for the whispers of the adults around me. As a budding scholar of history, I was already tuned in to the rumors of the world, understanding that what is often considered “mere gossip” can contain the most significant insights into human motivations, culture, and emotional experience. Often, what I was hearing was the evaluation of why... Read more
I want to announce and celebrate the publication of a really valuable new book, and I say from the outset that I had nothing whatever to do with writing it! My two Baylor colleagues Bruce Longenecker and David Wilhite are the editors of the newly available Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity, which is an indispensable contribution to the study of Christian life and thought in the first three centuries. Here is the publisher’s description: The first three hundred years of... Read more
Summer for professors often means reworking classes or developing new courses, along with doing our own research. For me, this summer held a bit of both: time working on a new book project and time revising my course on the first half of world history, from the earliest civilizations to the present. And in working on both things, objects, material culture, and what we leave behind kept coming up as common themes. Material cultural naturally arose during my preparation for... Read more
This Labor Day, I had the joy of talking with Dr. Heath Carter, Associate Professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, about evangelicalism’s historical relationship to the Labor Movement in America. Enjoy! Heath Carter! My dear friend. What a joy to talk to you this Labor Day. First, for those who don’t know you–yet–can you tell readers a bit about you? Of course! I grew up in evangelical churches in Kansas and California, studied Christian theology at a... Read more
Today we welcome Jared Stacy back to the Anxious Bench. Stacy is a PhD candidate in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research focuses on evangelicalism in the United States, right-wing politics, and neo-orthodox theology. Previously, he pastored in the United States both in New Orleans and near Washington D.C.. Currently, he lives in Scotland with his wife, Stevie, and their three kids. Evangelicalism has an apocalypse problem. Of course, the way you or I read... Read more
Today we welcome Dr. Michel Sun Lee, an Assistant Professor of History and Political Studies and Director of the Southern Scholars Honors Program at Southern Adventist University. People sometimes ask, “What’s the most shocking thing you’re finding these days while doing research?” Just as often, I am bereft of a quick response. As any historian will attest, archival research and crafting a narrative can be ploddingly slow and sound even more so when described to those who don’t spend their... Read more
Today we welcome Holly Berkley Fletcher to the Anxious Bench. Dr. Fletcher is an American historian and the author of Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2008). For the past twenty years, she has worked for the US government on Africa issues and in her spare time writes on faith, missions, and cross-cultural identity. She is writing a forthcoming book on the missionary kid experience, which will be published with Broadleaf. You can find her on... Read more
(Before I begin, I’d like to note that my last article has proven prescient: in response to the arrest of Trump, his supporters have embraced him as a anti-hero, an outlaw. Read here.) I am back this week with the first installment of a promised series about Texas megachurches. About 70% of the church-going public attends only 10% of existing churches– many of these are megachurches. Often evangelical and charismatic, often non-denominational, these hugely influential churches get left off landscape... Read more
One of the privileges of writing for the Anxious Bench is that when I read a book I appreciate, I sometimes get to interview the author! So I am thrilled to share this conversation with Karen Swallow Prior about The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023). Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is a reader, writer, and professor. In addition to writing The Evangelical Imagination, she is the author of On Reading Well:... Read more
If you ask the average educated American Christian what new academic idea presented the greatest challenge to the faith of students at northeastern and midwestern colleges in the late nineteenth century, it’s quite likely they will say Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. After all, anyone who knows about the Scopes trial or who is familiar with any of the legal battles over intelligent design or creationism is aware that Darwin’s theory initiated a controversy among Christians that has only continued... Read more
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