A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World

Last updated on: September 7, 2023 at 12:42 pm By Philip Jenkins

I am delighted to announce the publication of my new book, A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (Baylor University Press)! Here is the catalog description: In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in painting, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as... Read more

Will the Real Cultural Christians Please Stand Up?

Last updated on: September 7, 2023 at 11:58 am By Nadya Williams

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If you happen to be a Christian in America right now, I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: you’re probably a lot more like a first-century Christian than you had realized. Congratulations! This may be especially gratifying to hear if you are a member of a church that works hard to strip away all the unnecessary modern extras from worship and be just like the earliest Christians. Now for the bad news: you’re probably a lot... Read more

The Remarkable Account of the Freedman, Anthony Johnson

Last updated on: September 12, 2023 at 6:58 pm By Joey Cochran

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Antonio the Negro arrived in Virginia in 1621, which means he witnessed the devastating attacks of Opechancanough upon the Chesapeake settlers during the following year. He narrowly survived these attacks and continued to labor for the Bennett family for a dozen years. Due to his faithful service to the Bennetts, he eventually earned such favor from the family that he obtained a freedman’s status for himself, his wife, and his children, sometime after 1635. No longer known as Antonio the... Read more

History, Cancel Culture, and the Desire for Innocence

Last updated on: September 8, 2023 at 5:09 pm By Lisa Clark Diller

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In the 1980s when I was growing up as a pastor’s daughter in a conservative Christian context, I kept my ear to the ground for the whispers of the adults around me. As a budding scholar of history, I was already tuned in to the rumors of the world, understanding that what is often considered “mere gossip” can contain the most significant insights into human motivations, culture, and emotional experience. Often, what I was hearing was the evaluation of why... Read more

A Major New History of the Earliest Christianity

Last updated on: September 7, 2023 at 6:28 am By Philip Jenkins

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I want to announce and celebrate the publication of a really valuable new book, and I say from the outset that I had nothing whatever to do with writing it! My two Baylor colleagues Bruce Longenecker and David Wilhite are the editors of the newly available Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity, which is an indispensable contribution to the study of Christian life and thought in the first three centuries. Here is the publisher’s description: The first three hundred years of... Read more

What We Leave Behind: Objects, Priorities, and Faith

Last updated on: August 25, 2023 at 3:57 pm By Lynneth Renberg

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Summer for professors often means reworking classes or developing new courses, along with doing our own research. For me, this summer held a bit of both: time working on a new book project and time revising my course on the first half of world history, from the earliest civilizations to the present. And in working on both things, objects, material culture, and what we leave behind kept coming up as common themes. Material cultural naturally arose during my preparation for... Read more

A Labor Day conversation with Dr. Heath Carter

Last updated on: September 4, 2023 at 8:22 am By Ansley Quiros

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This Labor Day, I had the joy of talking with Dr. Heath Carter, Associate Professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, about evangelicalism’s historical relationship to the Labor Movement in America. Enjoy! Heath Carter! My dear friend. What a joy to talk to you this Labor Day. First, for those who don’t know you–yet–can you tell readers a bit about you? Of course! I grew up in evangelical churches in Kansas and California, studied Christian theology at a... Read more

Beyond Left Behind: The Lost Legacy of Tim LaHaye

Last updated on: December 13, 2023 at 2:49 pm By Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome Jared Stacy back to the Anxious Bench. Stacy is a PhD candidate in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research focuses on evangelicalism in the United States, right-wing politics, and neo-orthodox theology. Previously, he pastored in the United States both in New Orleans and near Washington D.C.. Currently, he lives in Scotland with his wife, Stevie, and their three kids. Evangelicalism has an apocalypse problem. Of course, the way you or I read... Read more

The Fragility of Religious and Racial Minorities

Last updated on: August 30, 2023 at 8:03 am By Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome Dr. Michel Sun Lee, an Assistant Professor of History and Political Studies and Director of the Southern Scholars Honors Program at Southern Adventist University. People sometimes ask, “What’s the most shocking thing you’re finding these days while doing research?” Just as often, I am bereft of a quick response. As any historian will attest, archival research and crafting a narrative can be ploddingly slow and sound even more so when described to those who don’t spend their... Read more

History’s Invitation to Belong

Last updated on: August 28, 2023 at 7:49 pm By Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome Holly Berkley Fletcher to the Anxious Bench. Dr. Fletcher is an American historian and the author of Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2008). For the past twenty years, she has worked for the US government on Africa issues and in her spare time writes on faith, missions, and cross-cultural identity. She is writing a forthcoming book on the missionary kid experience, which will be published with Broadleaf. You can find her on... Read more

Which Christian festival celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit?