The Myth of 1453 and the Modern Political Right

Last updated on: April 30, 2023 at 6:14 am By Philip Jenkins

“The Fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.” Those are the closing words of an extraordinarily influential book written in 1973 that most readers of this site will likely not have encountered. The words perfectly illustrate the sizable mythology that gets attached to historical events and dates, and how they echo through later centuries, often in utterly unexpected ways. Last time, I wrote about the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman... Read more

A Western Woman at the Western Wall: On Breaking Down Barriers

Last updated on: September 19, 2023 at 12:47 pm By Andrea L. Turpin

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Several months ago I took my first trip to the Jewish and Christian Holy Land. As I wrote in March, I entered the West Bank (Palestine minus the Gaza Strip) and Israel via the Jordanian border after spending over a week with family there. This is quite a different experience than the one shared by the vast majority of American pilgrims who fly into Tel Aviv and go through the standard amount of foreign air travel security and customs. Crossing... Read more

The Churches That Honor Guns

Last updated on: April 24, 2023 at 7:00 pm By Daniel K. Williams

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This month at the Anxious Bench, a number of columnists are participating in a joint collaboration with the AACC (Asian American Christian Collaborative) to draw attention to the mournful history of gun violence in the United States. This post is part of this effort. Last week I toured a church whose doorways were graced with crosses flanked by revolvers and whose pillars featured sculpted pistols. You might think that a church that so flagrantly blended the cross with the gun was an... Read more

On God and Guns: Scenes from the 2023 NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis

Last updated on: April 25, 2023 at 2:25 am By Melissa Borja

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During the month of April at the Anxious Bench, a number of our columnists are participating in a joint collaboration with the AACC (Asian American Christian Collaborative) to draw attention to the history of gun violence in the United States. Since the shootings in Buffalo, Laguna Woods, and Uvalde, the AACC has been a crucial Christian organization that is actively pursuing advocacy and policy efforts to address gun violence in the United States, and the Anxious Bench is proud to... Read more

Keep Hope Alive

Last updated on: April 21, 2023 at 10:31 am By Malcolm Foley

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The Myth Of 1453, And How Empires Do Not End

Last updated on: April 24, 2023 at 11:36 am By Philip Jenkins

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This post concerns a year in which not much happened, or at least, far less than we often think. I’ll explain that cryptic remark. I have published quite a bit on Eastern Christian traditions, most recently in my forthcoming book A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (Baylor University Press). That dealt with the eighth and ninth centuries, but more recently I have been working on the Late Byzantine period, and the diverse manifestations of... Read more

The Tree Flag and Christian Nationalism

Last updated on: April 18, 2023 at 9:37 pm By David Swartz

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The Tree Flag is an almost perfect representation of Christian nationalism, especially in its use of history to valorize violence. Read more

My Career on The Anxious Bench–How it Started and How it is Ending

Last updated on: April 18, 2023 at 1:54 pm By Beth Allison Barr

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It was July 2014. My colleague Tommy Kidd and I were walking across Baylor campus (honestly, I don’t remember why). He was an Associate Professor and I had just received my promotion letter upgrading me to an Associate Professor, too. I have a piece, I told Tommy, on writing as a female academic with small children. Would he be interested in running it on his religious history blog site? (For those of you new to the Anxious Bench, Tommy Kidd... Read more

Hemispheric Histories for Racial and Ethnic Solidarity, Part III (Conclusion)

Last updated on: February 27, 2023 at 10:14 pm By Joao Chaves

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In my last two posts, I argued that the histories of the U.S. Black Church and Brazilian Protestantism have points of contact that could be fruitful for constructing a hemispheric Afro-descendant Christianity. The second post of this three-part series pointed to the example of 1840s Brazilian Protestant preacher Agostinho José Pereira, nicknamed the “Black Luther.” I also pointed to the overlaps between religiously-informed White supremacies that affect the US Black Church and Latin American Christians, mainly via the example of... Read more

A Hysterectomy during Holy Week: Reaching for the Hem of Christ’s Garment

Last updated on: April 20, 2023 at 3:08 pm By Verónica A. Gutiérrez

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Christ healing a bleeding woman, as depicted in the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter Now there was a woman suffering from a haemorrhage for the past twelve years, whom no one had been able to cure. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak; and the haemorrhage stopped at that very moment. Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, it is the crowds round you, pushing.” But... Read more