I have been working on the topic of empires and their religious dimensions, and my new book Kingdoms of This World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions will be published next week. That book ranges very widely through time and space, but even so, it left a great deal to be said about one particular imperial setup, namely that of the United States. As I have argued in past posts at this site, it is impossible to understand the... Read more
“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience” (Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 78). I can still remember the thrill of starting my first classes at Fuller Theological Seminary. I never really drove... Read more
This is my first piece as a regular columnist for the Anxious Bench, and I’m going to deviate a bit from most of what I have written thus far for this blog. About a year ago “the crisis of masculinity” became the problem of American society—the discourse™ became centered on the question of masculinity in America. There were a series of articles, videos, and news reels wrestling with the problem of men. One such piece happened to quote me about... Read more
Almost anything by Robert Wilken is worth reading. I have benefitted immensely from his The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale University Press, 2003) and The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012). Wilken does not disappoint in Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019), which I have been rereading and pondering as we mark national independence day this July. Early on in the book Wilken... Read more
I was recently on a trip where we visited many Buddhist and Hindu temples. None of our guides were Buddhist or Hindu, though they were sympathetic and generous in their explanations of what we were seeing. Most of us on the tour, however, were Protestant Christians, and we really had to do business with how challenging it is in the modern world to engage in worship. There’s a history to Protestantism which aligns with modernity and its (paradoxical) focus on... Read more
A vast amount of coverage presently discusses the condition of Joe Biden and his likely future as Democratic presidential candidate. I am going to say something about these matters that really has not got enough attention. As events turn out over the next month or two, I might be proved totally wrong about everything I say here. Fools rush in… and I am that fool. I believe that issues of religion are going to be critical in the coming months,... Read more
Welcome back to the Anxious Bench Dr. Katherine Cooper Wyma! Dr. Wyma is an Associate Professor of English at Anderson University in South Carolina. She teaches several courses on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Her primary academic interest is in late medieval and early modern lay piety and devotional literature. Currently, she is writing a monograph on theological anthropology in CS Lewis’s and JRR Tolkien’s writings. Find her at https://www.katherinewyma.com/ NPR reporter and author Sarah McCammon opens her recent book... Read more
Last month, I traveled to Richmond for the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly. Otis Pickett, the University Historian at Clemson University, asked Dr. Malcolm Foley, Dr. Greg Perry, and I to present on a panel about our recent book By the Rivers of Babylon: Lament and Justice in African American History. I had some reservations. For one thing, for the past several years I have not attended the PCA church where I am a member. (I have very happily... Read more
A staggering array of human hands across continents and generations created the tradition of sacred song in the American South. Songs and hymns featured in nineteenth-century revival and church services—some of which are still familiar—were made by ancient Hebrew poets, enslaved African Americans, Jacobean translators, medieval monks, eighteenth-century English Nonconformists, shape-note transcribers, preachers, laypeople, composers, and musicians in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. These poems and tunes were memorized, recited, sung, hummed, and whistled by people—literate and illiterate... Read more
Around the year 200, Bishop Palut was an important leader of the church in Syria. Unless you study the church history of that region, there is no reason why you would or should have heard of him, nor of the weird-sounding sect of the “Palutians” that is mentioned in the mid-fourth century. But as I will argue, that Palutian name is actually critical for how we write Christian history in any time and place, right up to the modern day.... Read more
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