I have been posting a lot in recent weeks on Christ’s Resurrection, a topic that Christians should really be considering and contemplating in the forty days or so following Easter Day. That was, the New Testament tells us, the time that the Risen Jesus remained with his disciples in order to teach them, prior to the Ascension. I am particularly interested in determining how far we can reconstruct the earliest claims and ideas concerning that event. Beyond debate, the Christian… Read more
May 25, 2019
A Response to “#Woke Evangelical Timeline”
May 25, 2019 By Beth Allison Barr
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Today we are so pleased to welcome Otis Pickett, an Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi College, to the Anxious Bench. Otis is also co-founder of the Prison to College Pipeline program. I recently came across a piece on Patheos by D.G. Hart entitled “#Woke Evangelical Timeline.” While I have tremendous respect for Hart as a historian, I also have relationships with the individuals mentioned in the piece and on Twitter.[1] I have also taken both a personal and professional interest in… Read more
May 24, 2019
The Sinner Finds Peace
May 24, 2019 By Philip Jenkins
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I have a literary discovery to report, and I think I can claim a first here. It involves a work by one of the great modern Christian novelists, and an older author who wrote a stunning work on one particular tradition of the faith. The modern writer is Gene Wolfe, who died last month. He is often misleadingly called a science fiction or fantasy writer, but he was far more than that. He was a brilliant stylist and a dazzling… Read more
May 23, 2019
The Myth of Puritan Intolerance (Part II)
May 23, 2019 By johnturner
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A few weeks ago, I suggested that the “myth” of puritan intolerance is “not very useful for understanding the history of seventeenth-century New England” in part because “it implies that New England’s leaders were outliers within the trans-Atlantic world they inhabited.” The reality is that the Congregational ministers and magistrates of New England “were quite ordinary in their desire for religious uniformity and their determination to punish stubborn heresy.” In this week’s post, I will flesh out these suggestions. It… Read more
May 22, 2019
The Latin American Evangelical Left: An Interview with David Kirkpatrick, Part II
May 22, 2019 By David Swartz
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David Swartz interviews David Kirkpatrick about his new book on the Latin American evangelical left. Read more
May 21, 2019
Rachel Held Evans, Beth Moore, and the Power of Evangelical Coalitions
May 21, 2019 By Kristin Du Mez
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As news spread of Rachel Held Evans’s death, one quote continued to pop up in my social media feed, a quote from her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church: But the gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This… Read more
May 20, 2019
Again with the Evils of E-cigarettes
May 20, 2019 By Agnes Howard
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Someday, soon perhaps, the Juul e-cigarette will pass into the heap of cast-off youth fads and we may breathe sighs of relief that that’s over. Until then, fuel for wild-eyed screeds against the product needs to come from somewhere. Religious and moral opposition to smoking has a long and varied pedigree, from the “Counterblaste to Tobacco” of England’s King James I, to the seventeenth-century papal rulings against tobacco use at Mass, to calls by long-skirted ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union…. Read more
May 17, 2019
The Missing Paul
May 17, 2019 By Philip Jenkins
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Not long ago, I posted about the Book of Acts, suggesting that some very early reader of that text went out and collected what all later ages now know as the collection of Paul’s letters. Specifically, I suggested the collector responsible was “Theophilos,” either the actual name or pseudonym of the person to whom Luke dedicated his writings. Following up on that, I returned to one of the very best scholarly works on Acts, which is of course by Ben… Read more
May 16, 2019
Don’t Balance Budgets on the Back of History
May 16, 2019 By Chris Gehrz
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Chris writes his first letter to a member of the U.S. Congress. Read more
May 15, 2019
Because Christian Patriarchy Isn’t Christian
May 15, 2019 By Beth Allison Barr
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In 215 B.C., a defeated and cash-strapped Rome passed a new law. The context was their greatest military defeat ever. On August 2, 216 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal destroyed their army at Cannae during the Second Punic War. Sources tell us between 50,000 and 70,000 Roman soldiers died that day. That is seven times as many soldiers killed at Gettysburg. As the first century Roman historian Livy cried, “Certainly there is no other nation that would not have succumbed beneath… Read more
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