I love spending time in the American southwest. Many years ago, I was talking with a New Mexico historian who introduced me to the concept of the Genízaros, people of mixed Native American heritage who followed aspects of the Hispanic lifestyle. (More on exactly who they were below). But at the time, I had one simple question: why are we talking Turkish? Empires play a critical role in spreading ideas across vast swathes of territory. Imperial servants or officials might... Read more
Today’s guest post is by Christina J. Lambert. She is a doctoral student in English literature at Baylor University, studying the poetry and fiction of literary modernism. Her writing gives attention to questions of embodiment—discussing the ecological imagination, feminism, and sacramental theology within literature. Her writing has been published in Christianity & Literature, and she has forthcoming publications in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and Modern Fiction Studies. In a season where we are met with story after story uncovering... Read more
What do evangelicals in the U.S. think about the Russian invasion of Ukraine? You might expect the American Christians most supportive of Donald Trump to share that former president’s oft-stated admiration for Vladimir Putin. Or given how often they watch Fox News, you might assume they’d repeat Tucker Carlson’s Kremlin-ready talking points. But overall, American evangelicals seem to be at least as horrified as most other people around the world by the invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps more so. For over... Read more
Empires move or deport populations, often against the will of those subject peoples. Such movements can have the quite unintentional result of fostering and spreading new religious developments, often of a kind that imperial authorities strongly disfavored. The consequences can last for centuries. The Heretics on the Borderlands … Empires are deeply concerned abut maintaining public order and stability, and such concerns are all the greater in border regions, where a revolt might open the door to foreign invasion. When... Read more
Another comment about the ongoing horrors in Ukraine. Or rather, three thoughts in particular, respectively: 1.Why Putin’s Campaign Really Was, and Is, As Dumb As It Looks When the Ukraine invasion started, I felt rather humbled by my obvious ignorance. By common report, Putin had planned his assault for around February 10, but Xi Jinping ordered him not to begin until after the Winter Olympics ended on the 20th, as that would distract from Chinese glories. Putin obeyed, and saved... Read more
Today’s guest post is by Emma Fenske. Emma is a current MA student and incoming PhD student in the history department at Baylor University. She studies conservative evangelical women and their thoughts and theology through Christian historical fiction romance novels during the rise of Billy Graham and the Christian Right. By analyzing this genre of evangelical print media consumer culture, she hope to bring to light the ideas and theologies that answer the question “Who is an Evangelical?” from the... Read more
I have been posting about the borderlands of empire, territories beyond the tight control of rival realms. Some of those buffer states, those often-neglected liminal kingdoms, have a special significance in the history of religion. Arguably, early Islamic history makes little sense except in the context of two remarkably influential tribal powers, which together represent a lost Christian realm. The new religion of Islam emerged from these embattled borderlands. A familiar myth suggests that it was mainly the force of... Read more
I don’t often dip into my archives and reprise a post. But since the U.S. Congress may (underline may) be on the verge of making Daylight Saving Time a permanent fixture, I thought the post I originally wrote for “falling back” might be actually be more helpful now that we may have “sprung forward” for good. It’s been lightly edited. Daylight Saving Time (DST) is not the farmers’ fault, explained the New York Times last November. On the contrary, DST is “a... Read more
When I was pregnant and finishing my dissertation, a beloved dean told me about one night when she was writing hers. Her husband decided to take the kids out for ice cream, but she couldn’t go because she had to finish a chapter, so after he piled them in the car, she put her head down on the table and cried. She told me this as an encouragement–one day you too will be cleared to go out for ice cream!–but... Read more
Empires commonly have religions that enjoy an established or favored status, and in many cases, those empires suppress rival forms of faith. When we write the history of empires and religion, we often have to look beyond the heartlands of a given regime, and turn to the borderlands, and to the smaller states or statelets on the periphery. Those border states can serve as refuges for groups fleeing official persecution, and they become hothouses and laboratories, from which new movements... Read more
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