New England Women and the Geographies of Power (Part One)

Last updated on: March 4, 2023 at 2:23 am By Joey Cochran

The First Peoples (Natives) viewed their geography as a space of spiritual interconnection between ecology and humanity facilitated by the force they called manitou (spirit). Natives approached their geography from the attitude of interdependence rather than dominance. They migrated seasonally to the resources they depended upon: men going on long hunts and women farming and raising children, while maintaining fisheries along the coast or major rivers. To the Natives, geography was not possessed or owned but sacred and shared by... Read more

Fire Fall Down: The Asbury Revival

Last updated on: March 3, 2023 at 6:57 am By Philip Jenkins

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The revival at Asbury University has been attracting intense excitement in the evangelical world, and a striking amount of attention in secular media. I myself have nothing new to add to that coverage, so I am delighted to include a personal account of this historic event by a participant and observer, in the guest post that follows. The author is Husezo Rhakho, who presented another guest post at this site last year. He does a terrific job of conveying the... Read more

An American in Amman: A U.S. Historian Visits the Middle East

Last updated on: March 1, 2023 at 4:05 am By Andrea L. Turpin

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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

Why Tim Keller Stays out of the Culture Wars

Last updated on: February 27, 2023 at 6:32 pm By Daniel K. Williams

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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

How Have American Christian Churches Responded to Anti-Asian Racism?

Last updated on: February 27, 2023 at 10:35 am By Melissa Borja

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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

How to Stop the Killing: Public Opinion and Racial Violence

Last updated on: February 23, 2023 at 6:12 pm By Malcolm Foley

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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

Three Temptations, and Three Triumphs

Last updated on: February 22, 2023 at 8:36 pm By Philip Jenkins

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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

Revival Fire and Small-Town Traffic Jams: A Photo Essay

Last updated on: February 22, 2023 at 7:32 pm By David Swartz

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A visual sociologist chronicles the Asbury Revival Read more

New Year, New Books: Readings for My Graduate Course Spring Syllabus

Last updated on: January 16, 2023 at 9:25 pm By Beth Allison Barr

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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

Hemispheric Histories for Racial and Ethnic Solidarity, Part I

Last updated on: February 20, 2023 at 9:57 am By Joao Chaves

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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