West Africa and the Future of Global Faith

Last updated on: November 11, 2022 at 12:18 pm By Philip Jenkins

The British Guardian just published a really excellent essay that should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of Global/World Christianity, and indeed for the world’s religious futures. It’s by Howard W. French, and it’s called “Megalopolis: How Coastal West Africa Will Shape The Coming Century”. I am guessing this is an extract from a future book. The article focuses on the stretch of coast between roughly Lagos and Abidjan, which incorporates portions of the five countries of... Read more

What Meghan Markle Taught Me About History

Last updated on: November 2, 2022 at 8:23 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of having a guest contribution from Allison M. Brown. Allison M. Brown is a PhD student in historical studies in Baylor University’s Department of Religion. She received her MA from Wheaton College (Illinois) in history of Christianity, with an emphasis on the Reformation. She has published on the Bible and nationalism in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter) and has forthcoming chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation and... Read more

Black Subtext in Mr. Bojangles

Last updated on: November 1, 2022 at 8:13 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of having a guest contribution from Dr. Alicia Jackson. Dr. Alicia Jackson is an Associate Professor of History at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. She currently leads a community-based project that focuses on recovering the lost history and stories of a vibrant Black communities located in southern Appalachia. Her public writing has been published in the Washington Post and History News Network. In 2016 she was awarded a Louisville Project Grant for Researchers for... Read more

Cherokee Removal and the Stories We Tell

Last updated on: October 31, 2022 at 10:10 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of featuring a guest post from Andrew Michael Jones. Andrew Michael Jones is the NEH Postdoctoral Teaching Historian at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and published his first book, The Revival of Evangelicalism: Mission and Piety in the Victorian Church of Scotland, with Edinburgh University Press in 2022. He lives in Marietta, Georgia—on the southernmost edge of the former Cherokee Nation. While I’ve spent most of... Read more

Conjuring Power and Liberation from Enslavement in the British Colonies

Last updated on: October 28, 2022 at 4:05 pm By Joey Cochran

In Hall’s Wilmington Gazette newspaper issue of October 1798, Jinkin Avirett posted an advertisement for his runaway slave, Sampson. Avirett described Sampson as disfigured with a scar and walking with a staff. What sets Sampson apart was that he practiced the magical art of conjure and told fortunes. Sampson’s inclination towards magic was more common among the enslaved than many assume. People who are oppressed look for ways to liberate themselves, even if liberation is not whole or complete. They... Read more

The Great Vampire War of the Enlightenment

Last updated on: October 26, 2022 at 5:27 pm By Philip Jenkins

If you must, you can read scary recent stories of ghosts and horrors for Halloween, but why not just go right back to the original sources from which all those tales are derived? When you do, you find that those original sources are at least as good as anything imagined by later generations. And as a bonus, you can discover a significant moment in Western religious history, and controversy. As a case in point, look at the vampires who will... Read more

Can Pluralism Work in American Higher Education?

Last updated on: October 26, 2022 at 1:12 am By Andrea L. Turpin

In 2005, I entered Notre Dame as a wide-eyed young PhD student to study the history of religion in American higher education. Notre Dame was at that time distinguished by having two scholars of such a specific topic: George Marsden had published The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief in 1994 and Jim Turner had published The Sacred and The Secular University (with Jon Roberts) in 2000. (Notre Dame also had an exceptional women’s and... Read more

In Search of an Evangelical Political Theology

Last updated on: October 24, 2022 at 10:21 pm By Daniel K. Williams

Is there such a thing as an American evangelical political theology? Some pundits are convinced that evangelicals (or, at least, the majority of evangelicals who are white) don’t care about theological principles at all, but merely vote for their self-interest. In yesterday’s Washington Post, columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote, “White evangelicals have never had a robust political ethic based on rigorously developed principles but rather an ends-justify-the-means approach to politics that starts with support for outcomes that are perceived to serve... Read more

Faith, Family, and Filipino American Life: A Roundtable Discussion About the Film Easter Sunday

Last updated on: October 24, 2022 at 12:54 pm By Melissa Borja

Happy Filipino American History Month, everybody! In honor of this occasion, I’m doing the one thing I love more than snacking on a freshly pressed polvoron: thinking and writing about religion, popular culture, and Asian American life. The theme of religion and Filipino American life received a good deal of attention this year in the film Easter Sunday, which was released in theaters in August and is now available to stream. Starring the Filipino American comedian Jo Koy,... Read more

A Primer on Racial Violence

Last updated on: October 21, 2022 at 10:10 am By Malcolm Foley

Disclaimer: I want to offer a short warning which could hypothetically go alongside most of my pieces. The following has rather graphic descriptions of lynchings in American history and the accusations that accompanied them, which included brutal murders and sexual assaults. There are a few things that every United Statesian should know about racial violence in the United States. The shame is that this is a history that has been actively suppressed for a while, though I have been encouraged... Read more