A Response to Kevin DeYoung on John Witherspoon

Last updated on: January 3, 2023 at 2:34 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of welcoming a guest contribution from Jacob Huneycutt, a history M. A. student at Baylor University. You may follow @jacobhuneycutt_ on Twitter. “If the measure for memorializing men and women from the past is perfection, we won’t be left with many heroes.” In an essay written last week for Princetonians for Free Speech, Kevin DeYoung offered that advice on why we should continue to honor John Witherspoon (1723-1794), one of America’s Founding Fathers and the sixth... Read more

Enjoyable History Books of 2022

Last updated on: December 30, 2022 at 4:59 pm By Joey Cochran

I’ve been long in the habit of sharing enjoyable reads from the last year. For the past few years I’ve done this on social media. This is the first time, in a bit, that I’ve put together an article about my reading from the past year, so it’s worthwhile to share my reading habits, interests, and goals. Since I’m a historian, my reading predominantly favors this discipline, and the list I craft each year is on history books. That’s not... Read more

Priests on Screen in Multi-Ethnic America

Last updated on: December 29, 2022 at 3:13 pm By Philip Jenkins

Through the years, I have worked on how media portrayals reflect changing attitudes towards religion, and in turn do a great deal to shape those attitudes. In fact, I have a piece in the current Christian Century on “Priests on Screen,” looking at some recent European representations of clergy. Given that background, I was struck by one American production this past year, from a surprising source. The TV series in question was Mo, starring comedian Mohammed Amer, who also created... Read more

Women in the Christmas Story, as Translated by a Woman

Last updated on: December 26, 2022 at 2:27 pm By Andrea L. Turpin

One of the wonderful things about working on a book about how women navigated theological debates in the early twentieth century has been the opportunity to learn about so many faithful Christian women. One who was new to me was Helen Barrett Montgomery. Montgomery served as president of the Northern (later American) Baptist convention during the years 1921–1922, the height of its fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the early twentieth-century split between theological and sometimes social conservatives and liberals that still reverberates today.... Read more

What We Learned about Abortion Politics This Year

Last updated on: December 28, 2022 at 2:47 pm By Daniel K. Williams

2022 was the most momentous year in the history of American abortion politics since 1973. It was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the year that the strictest antiabortion laws in American history went into effect in several states. As of this month, near-total abortion bans are in effect in thirteen states, and highly restrictive laws have been passed in several others. That hasn’t happened in half a century. And yet the number of abortions... Read more

When You Can’t Be Home For the Holidays: Refugee Policies, Family Separation, and the Disruption of Ritual Life

Last updated on: December 26, 2022 at 11:21 pm By Melissa Borja

The winter holidays are a time when Americans celebrate home and family. Consider the songs that are part of the season’s soundscape—“I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” for example, and “Home for the Holidays”—and the feel-good stories of family festivities that we admire and share on social media: all of these things are expressions of how family is central to the religious and secular rituals that mark this time of year, to the point that family time takes on a sacred... Read more

The Gloomy Vaults of Mammon

Last updated on: December 26, 2022 at 1:00 pm By Malcolm Foley

Merry Christmas and Christmas season! As I have been preparing to write my first book (more news on that to come), I have begun to put together some of the thoughts that I have been ruminating on for the last year. The most significant of those is this: that the history of race and racism is fundamentally a history of greed. In many evangelical (and non-Christian) circles, the narrative tends to be that race and racism are best battled by... Read more

The Prayer Against the Darkness

Last updated on: December 23, 2022 at 12:02 pm By Philip Jenkins

My new book is He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford University Press). That particular psalm has been used widely throughout Western history, as a political manifesto and a means of understanding plague and pestilence, and also as a definitive protection against demons. Here, I want to talk about its use in the nightly prayer service of Compline. Such a prayer in the darkness seems a highly appropriate thing to discuss at... Read more

A Very Not-So-Merry Christmas: How Protestantism Nearly Killed St. Nick

Last updated on: December 20, 2022 at 9:34 am By David Swartz

We all give thanks that the excesses of the Reformation didn’t kill Christmas in the end. Read more

My Christmas Writing Montage

Last updated on: December 19, 2022 at 11:48 pm By Beth Allison Barr

For the past three weeks I’ve been leading my Sunday School class through the history of Christmas–not the history of Jesus’ birth but rather the history of us celebrating the birth of Jesus. I confess one of my sources for preparing lessons was the nine Anxious Bench posts I have written about Christmas during the past eight years. So I thought I would pull these posts together for you as well as provide some commentary and reflection. I hope you... Read more