I am leaving Academia for homeschooling. There. I said it. In three days, I am leaving a fulfilling career as a Latin American historian – while my application for full professor is under review and promises to be favorable – for classical education. To assume the role of Director of the Great Books Program en español for the Angelicum Academy, a fully online Catholic homeschooling program, I find that I must pause my scholarship. Or must I? Like most academics,... Read more
I have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Veronica Gutierrez as a new regular contributor to The Anxious Bench! I have known Veronica for many years as a fellow Christian historian and member of the Conference on Faith and History. She is both an incisive scholar and a kind and generous colleague. Dr. Gutierrez’s research focuses on colonial Mexican history, specifically indigenous expressions of Christianity. She also researches and teaches in Latin American history more broadly. As such, she brings a... Read more
I have been writing about the alarming Bible passages in which God commands the destruction of the older peoples of the land of Canaan, ordering what by any common sense understanding we would call genocide. Early Christians were not too troubled by such texts, because they mainly saw them as allegorical, and they saw no need to confront the moral dilemmas in their own writings, particularly the New Testament. But here is one exception, and a significant one. It appears... Read more
The story sounds familiar in some respects. A member of the royal family, enthralled with the beauty of a married woman in his city, secretly raped her while her husband was away from the city on military campaign. In this case, however, events turned out differently than what we may remember from the Bible. Instead of keeping the secret, the way Bathsheba did, this woman immediately summoned her father and husband, asking them also to bring witnesses. When they arrived,... Read more
George Whitefield canceled John Tillotson. Tillotson was one of the most influential ecclesial figures during the seventeenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic basin and continental Europe. He garnered the regard and friendship of philosophes like Voltaire and Locke. Increase Mather esteemed him. Jonathan Edwards referred to him as “one of the greatest divines on the other side of the question in hand”—the “other side” being Arminianism. Many considered this former Lord Archbishop of Canterbury to be the hallmark... Read more
If the invasion of Ukraine at the instigation of a former KGB agent were not enough to focus the mind on the legacy of the Soviet Union, 2022 also marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s infamous secret memo to the Politburo, expanding the Revolution to include butchering Orthodox priests. Thus began an age of brutal religious persecution wrought by secularist states. By the estimation of leading religious demographers, over thirty million Christians perished under atheist regimes in the twentieth century.... Read more
“My people are an apocalyptic people. We have resources to help you prepare for the end of times.” This was a sort of tongue-in-cheek greeting I developed for my academic friends, of the liberal or non-religious bent, after the election in 2016. While that year felt traumatic to those who felt sideswiped by the Trump election, the sentiment has only been magnified by the economic, health, environmental, political, and military crises since. And yet, only recently have I felt comfortable... Read more
I have the pleasure to welcome another new regular contributor to the Anxious Bench, Lisa Clark Diller. Professor Diller teaches at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her specialty is in early modern British studies, and her current research agenda examines religious minority communities and the development of modern liberal democracy. She is currently investigating the strategies of Catholic parents as they passed along their faith to their children in the face of persecution. Her writing has appeared in Church... Read more
And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee. Deut.7.16 I recently read Charlie Trimm’s book The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation (Eerdman’s 2022). Let me say right away that this particular post does not in any sense constitute a specific response to that book, and is not... Read more
If there is one thing that has been drilled into my mind as a historian, it is this: social location matters. A lot. Before I focused my research on lynching, I was deeply committed to doing work on Calvin and the Greek early church. When I found myself discouraged by the glut of Calvin scholarship, I turned to the next best thing: the Puritans! Along this journey, I became enamored with Protestant confessions, particularly the process that Christians went through... Read more
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