Megachurch Pastor Canvasses The Frankfurt School

Last updated on: September 2, 2023 at 9:16 am By Erica Ramirez

(Before I begin, I’d like to note that my last article has proven prescient: in response to the arrest of Trump, his supporters have embraced him as a anti-hero, an outlaw. Read here.) I am back this week with the first installment of a promised series about Texas megachurches. About 70% of the church-going public attends only 10% of existing churches– many of these are megachurches. Often evangelical and charismatic, often non-denominational, these hugely influential churches get left off landscape... Read more

The Evangelical Imagination: An Interview with Karen Swallow Prior

Last updated on: August 23, 2023 at 3:16 pm By Andrea L. Turpin

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One of the privileges of writing for the Anxious Bench is that when I read a book I appreciate, I sometimes get to interview the author! So I am thrilled to share this conversation with Karen Swallow Prior about The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023). Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is a reader, writer, and professor. In addition to writing The Evangelical Imagination, she is the author of On Reading Well:... Read more

Historicism Was a Greater Challenge Than Darwinism to Some Late 19th-Century Evangelicals’ Christian Faith

Last updated on: August 21, 2023 at 9:17 pm By Daniel K. Williams

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If you ask the average educated American Christian what new academic idea presented the greatest challenge to the faith of students at northeastern and midwestern colleges in the late nineteenth century, it’s quite likely they will say Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. After all, anyone who knows about the Scopes trial or who is familiar with any of the legal battles over intelligent design or creationism is aware that Darwin’s theory initiated a controversy among Christians that has only continued... Read more

My Body, Their Baby: Grace Y. Kao on the Christian Ethics of Surrogacy

Last updated on: August 22, 2023 at 3:43 pm By Melissa Borja

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While assisted reproductive technology has made it possible for many people to welcome children into their families, these technologies and the associated practice of surrogacy have been controversial. Grace Y. Kao, Professor of Ethics and Sano Chair in Pacific and Asian American theology at Claremont School of Theology and herself a surrogate mother, explores these complex issues in her new book, My Body, Their Baby: A Progressive Christian Vision for Surrogacy, published this month by Stanford University Press. As... Read more

Medieval Christians’ Most Burning Questions Answered: “Why do we say ‘Amen’ to end a prayer?”

Last updated on: August 18, 2023 at 5:09 pm By Jacob Randolph

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Have you heard the one about Bernard of Clairvaux, the peasant, and the horse? The abbot Bernard, so the legend goes, is riding down a country road one day when he meets a peasant. Now, being the friendly friar he is, Bernard strikes up a conversation with his new agrarian amigo, bemoaning the fact that his human condition, being incurvatus in se as they say, makes it hard to focus in prayer. “Not me,” the peasant boasts; “my heart’s good-to-go... Read more

World Values, Western Values, and the Fate of Religion

Last updated on: August 17, 2023 at 6:46 am By Philip Jenkins

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I have a long-standing admiration for the very influential scholar Ronald L. Inglehart. A couple of years ago, I posted at this site about Inglehart’s book on Religion’s Sudden Decline. My blog raved about the book, and Inglehart’s editor said he would pass it along to the great man himself, who would be pleased – not realizing that sadly, Inglehart had died just the previous day. That story has nothing directly to do with a recent media piece about Inglehart’s... Read more

Infinite Fountain of Light: Reclaiming Jonathan Edwards from the Theobros

Last updated on: August 16, 2023 at 11:52 am By David Swartz

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George Marsden explains that Jonathan Edwards preached other sermons. Read more

Mothers of the Church: Macrina the Younger

Last updated on: August 14, 2023 at 6:39 pm By Adam Renberg

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Icons, pictures, and mosaics of the “Three Holy Hierarchs”, also called “the Cappadocians”, are common in churches throughout the east—three theologians immortalized as wise figures with books in hand. Indeed, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa deserve admiration for many of their contributions to the church: they aided in the theological formulations that led to the Creed at Constantinople (known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), created one of the first welfare hospitals (the Basiliad), and combated the... Read more

Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict

Last updated on: August 7, 2023 at 2:53 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

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I have been at work on a book project, Modern Christian Theology: An Intellectual History, for Princeton University Press for about six years now, and I have finally made it to the twentieth century! Trying to capture the Barthian revolution in modern theology in about thirty pages (a summertime task) presents challenges, to say the least. But I’ve been immensely aided by reading Christiane Tietz’s biography Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict. First published in German in 2018, the work... Read more

Walking Among Early Citizens: 19th Century Stories in a Dilapidated Graveyard

Last updated on: August 12, 2023 at 12:19 am By Verónica A. Gutiérrez

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Perspiration, gathering into rivulets, slid into the folds of my clothing as I gazed at a faded headstone beneath the mottled shade of an aging tree. The incessant chirping of cicadas and the drone of passing cars on the I-35 freeway reverberated loudly against the silence of the stones. It was a blistering July afternoon in the middle of a Texas heat wave when I found myself at the First Street Cemetery in Waco, the city’s oldest place of internment,... Read more

Which book of the Bible contains the Ten Commandments?