The Fullness and Beauty of Black Music: The Fisk Jubilee Singers

Last updated on: February 14, 2023 at 8:30 am By Joey Cochran

Fisk University is a private, historically black university, founded in 1866 and located in Nashville, Tennessee. It opened its doors in the same year that a terrorizing race riot broke out in neighboring Memphis, Tennessee. The university is named for General Clinton B. Fisk, who had at one time been in charge of the Freedman’s Bureau in Nashville. The school grew rapidly in its early years, focusing on training educators for African-American schools throughout the South. Among Fisk University’s first... Read more

“Are Latter Day Saints Christians?”

Last updated on: February 12, 2023 at 5:48 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

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It’s a question that understandably vexes Latter Day Saints, but it lies behind an important LDS-evangelical dialogue that took place for many years beginning in the early 2000s. Spearheaded by the former president of Fuller Theological Seminary Richard Mouw and the LDS theologian Robert L. Millet, the dialogue is a model of interreligious engagement—irenic, candid, erudite, thoughtful, encouraging. Intervarsity Press published its fruit as Talking Doctrine: Mormons and Evangelicals in Conversation (2015), edited by Mouw and Millet. Having recently given... Read more

Marking Time: Holidays, Seasons, and Birthdays

Last updated on: February 10, 2023 at 6:01 pm By Lisa Clark Diller

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Everyone has their favorite holiday, season, or time of year. I love spring. I love the softness in the air, the energy it gives me, the way my garden grows. But I really only like it when we’ve had some really cold weather so that I feel like we “deserve” spring. So the dark and cold of winter, with the lovely Christmas lights, is perfect for a good set-up for spring—as long as it doesn’t take too long. I really... Read more

Age of the Spirit; or, How The Charismatic Renewal Changed Everything

Last updated on: February 9, 2023 at 7:52 am By Philip Jenkins

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John Maiden is a very good British scholar, whose new book strikes me as really interesting. This is Age of the Spirit: Charismatic Renewal, the Anglo-World, and Global Christianity, 1945-1980, just out from Oxford University Press. Anyone interested in modern US Christian history will know about the dramatic rise of Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of faith since the mid-twentieth century, but it is really useful to have this kind of comparative transnational dimension, to prevent us trying to see and... Read more

The Nonsense of Nonviolence (King Legacy Pt. 2)

Last updated on: February 8, 2023 at 3:38 pm By Malcolm Foley

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In the wake of the murder of Tyre Nichols and the continuing waves of violence in the world and in our communities, I regularly return to the ethical and political question of violence. I’ll go into more detail about this in my forthcoming book with Brazos Press (keep an eye out for Children of Mammon!) and I discuss it on my podcast, but it is important to note that my reflections were reshaped last year by a re-engagement with Martin... Read more

Sheep, Community, and Accountability: Lessons from a Medieval Parish for the Modern Church

Last updated on: February 6, 2023 at 8:01 am By Lynneth Renberg

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In one of my classes this spring, my students are reading one of the books that made me fall in love with medieval history: Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. When we start our class discussion of this book, the first question I always ask students is what stands out to them. And the answer is almost always the same thing: the sheep. Detail of a miniature of sheep and ewes. From British... Read more

People, Get Ready!

Last updated on: February 8, 2023 at 2:23 pm By Ansley Quiros

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Last month, Eerdman’s Press published People Get Ready: Twelve Jesus-Haunted Misfits, Malcontents, and Dreamers in Pursuit of Justice, a collection of theological biographies of prominent figures in American life. Some are household names–Flannery O’Connor, Pete Seeger, Toni Morrison, while others–Sarah Patton Boyle, Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, Bruce Klunder–are widely unknown. But each figure offers a reflection of the relationship between faith and society, between the eternal and the personal, a messy concoction of people who insist on being of some use,... Read more

Slavery and Redemption in the New Testament

Last updated on: February 11, 2023 at 9:24 am By Philip Jenkins

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“Well done, thou good and faithful slave!” That is certainly not a common rendering of a very well known Biblical verse (Matthew 25.21), and it is not one people are likely to favor for tombstones, holy cards, wall posters, or indeed anything else. The word “slave” is just too shocking, but it is a correct translation, and arguably, the only correct one. Translation is a difficult and devious process. You can render the individual words used perfectly and precisely, but... Read more

Is Religion Naturally Averse to Technology?

Last updated on: February 1, 2023 at 9:51 am By Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome a guest contribution from Michael Baysa. Baysa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. A scholar of religion and history, he is interested in the influence of cultural brokers, media management, and other publishing intermediaries on the material curation, production, and distribution of religious and racial discourse. Follow @MichaelBaysa on Twitter. Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) has dominated media conversations. In simplest terms, ChatGPT is a... Read more

Jonathan Edwards, An Enslaver and Progenitor of Abolitionism

Last updated on: January 31, 2023 at 9:36 am By Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome a guest contribution from John T. Lowe, Ph.D.. Lowe teaches American History at the University of Louisville as a Senior Lecturer. His research focuses on the intersection of race and religion in early America. Follow @johntlowe on Twitter. Over the past several decades, Jonathan Edwards has become the centerfold of American religious history. This should come to no surprise though. With research centers on every habitable continent in the world, and his completed works freely available online,... Read more