Deathbed image taken from “Catholic Last Rites” entry on Scripture Catholic Friends, I lost my dad last week; we will bury him on Monday. This post is my attempt to understand the experience through a sixteenth-century Catholic lens. ********* On the day my sister gave birth to my parents’ first grandchild thirteen years ago, my father had a stroke. My mother was driving us home from the hospital when dad began speaking gibberish; a minor incident, the hospital released him... Read more
Just this week, archaeologists in Wales announced a spectacular find, namely a very large Roman villa that lay under a well-known country park in Margam, in the town of Port Talbot. Jokingly, people are already talking about “Port Talbot’s Pompeii”. For reasons I will make clear, that find speaks very much to me and my interests, and more generally, to how we understand early Christianity in the larger Roman world. And next time, I will explain why I am the... Read more
I am still a little shocked about the Philip Yancey news. I made it a point to listen to him when he popped up on a podcast, especially since he was a literary master when it came to faith integration of classic texts and historical figures. In fact, his book Soul Survivor was paramount to my introduction to faith integration in the works of the Russian literary masters, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. My undergraduate years peaked with reading their... Read more
At eighty-nine, the Dalai Lama fairly recently made global headlines again—this time with a striking declaration in his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, denouncing the Chinese government’s ongoing attempts to dictate the terms of his next reincarnation. The irony ofan officially atheist regime meddling in matters of deep spiritual significance is glaring enough. But even more troubling is the broader context: over seven decades of systematic repression of Tibetan Buddhism under Communist rule. Yet this repression is only one... Read more
I am delighted to hand over today’s blog to my good friend Mark Morrisson, who has just published an excellent book entitled Light on the Path: Advancing Occultism Through Esoteric Fiction, 1880–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2025). He and I share a long-standing interest in these occult topics, and the book is just fascinating, with so many surprising insights. All images in this post are in the public domain Light on the Path Mark S. Morrisson During the later nineteenth century,... Read more
My family and I celebrated Christmas in Norway this year, which brought a number of new experiences, including far more communal singing at work parties than I’d anticipated! It was in one of these early Christmas festivities that I first heard the song I’ll now always associate with Advent and Christmastide in Norway: the Nordnorsk julesalme (North Norway Christmas Hymn). Among the many new traditions and customs of a holiday in a new place, this one was my favorite. Praise... Read more
We are still in the season of Christmas—my friends around the world who celebrate Three Kings’ Day will remind us that the Twelve Days of Christmas are actually all after December 25. And in this season many of us are spending time with families that are formed in a variety of ways, not always by biology. The holidays are a really good time to think about adoption, step-parenting and blended families. John 1: 10-13 gives a different version of the... Read more
One of the American historians I hold in high regard is Richard White, author of an excellent book on The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. Naturally then I enjoyed a recent column he wrote for the Economist titled “The Gilded Age holds lessons for today.” His argument is that we today are living in a second Gilded Age recalling the first such example, and that fact has some predictive value... Read more
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1878 novel Poganuc People depicts a young Connecticut girl’s discovery of Christmas in a small Episcopal church, and I have argued that the account is autobiographical. Today, I’ll show how that novel fits into the whole American idea of Christmas as it was emerging in these very years. And yes, there will be reindeer. As I have suggested, the novel’s Christmas scene is set in 1820 or 1821, and that date is significant. Much of our modern... Read more
After five and a half years on the Anxious Bench, the time has come to say goodbye. Given my other writing commitments during the coming year (including regularly posting on my Substack and writing more frequently for Christianity Today and other venues), I decided that it was time to step away from the Anxious Bench, so this will be my last regular Anxious Bench post. I’m leaving with a lot of gratitude for the Anxious Bench and its administrators over... Read more
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