Over Christmas break, I had the incredible privilege of visiting the Middle East for the first time. I spent a week and a half with family who live in Jordan. (We also spent three days visiting Bethlehem and Jerusalem, which will be the subject of a future post.) I had been abroad before, for decent amounts of time, in England, France, Japan, and Italy. But it had been more years than I am willing to admit publicly in this post.... Read more
A Review of Collin Hansen’s Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Zondervan, 2023) In a world of political and cultural polarization, Tim Keller is an enigma who defies easy categorization. He is a northerner raised in mainline Protestantism, yet as a young adult he joined a southern conservative denomination and became its most famous pastor. He is a white evangelical and registered Democrat who has criticized the Christian Right and Christian nationalism in the pages of the New York Times,... Read more
Last month a college student at Indiana University Bloomington was stabbed in the face by a woman who later confessed to police that she had attacked the student because the student is “Chinese.” The assailant explained that she wanted “one less person to blow up our country.” The brazen attack, which occurred on a public bus in the middle of the day, offered a stunning reminder to Asian Americans that they continue to be viewed as threatening foreigners and,... Read more
What stops racial violence? I won’t answer that question fully here (I’ve got a book to write to answer that question), but I want to point to a specific and perhaps complicated historical tactic for reducing this violence, particularly its instantiations in the last century, though obviously there are analogs in the centuries before. This tactic, in many ways, is the basis of a number of other tactics that resist racial violence. The tactic is the shaping of public opinion,... Read more
I just published the book He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91. Many things make that psalm highly distinctive among Biblical passages, not least the fact that it alone, among scriptural texts, is quoted by Satan himself. But Satan makes an odd mistake, or a fumble, one that has baffled curious commentators through the centuries. I happen to have the solution, and it is one that actually identifies a long arc in the... Read more
A visual sociologist chronicles the Asbury Revival Read more
In her Women and Power: A Manifesto, historian and bestselling author of SPQR Mary Beard explains why language used to describe women’s voices (such as “strident,” “whiney,” or, in regards to my own experience, “shrill,” “high octane,” “emotional,”) matter. “Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humor from what women have to say. It is an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere…;it... Read more
As an immigrant and Afro-Brazilian historian with a profound interest in the history of Christianity in the United States, I have been thinking about potential intersections between U.S. Black Church history and World Christianity. How race is imagined and discussed in U.S. Church History circles remains flagrantly limited to African American/White paradigms. I wonder if continuing to trace connections between U.S. Black Church history and World Christianity can help construct historical narratives that complexify the often-simplistic way race is framed... Read more
May my body be buried in the Church of San Gabriel in the said city of Cholula in the tomb that the father guardian or president of the said convento will indicate to me…. Bury me in the habit of the blessed one, San Francisco; it is for the said effect that I ask it. – doña María Tlaltecayoa, 1596 (Archivo de Notarías, Puebla, Cuaderno 18, No. 1276, folio 8r. Full doc: folio 7r-9v) During my first summer researching in... Read more
This is about a specific piece of art that powerfully illustrates the influence and reception of the Bible in Christian culture. It also gets to a much larger point about why we need to do a better job of incorporating the diverse aspects of that tradition, especially from Catholics, but also Orthodox. My new book is a “biography” of the many lives of Psalm 91, a vastly influential and much referenced text in Christian history. One of the most quoted... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In