The evangelist Luke tells us about a couple who were en route to Emmaus, when they met the Risen Jesus, who expounds the meaning of all those recent events. After he reveals himself to them, one says, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24.32, NIV, my emphasis), or alternatively, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way,... Read more
This week marks the one year anniversary of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Since the book was born in my blogging on The Anxious Bench, I thought it fitting that my postcript publish here as well. You can also find it on the Baker Book page for #MakingBiblicalWomanhood. It is a joy and privilege to continue to write in this space. Thank you for your faithful readership. A Postscript Mostly I remember the... Read more
Should a conservative Christian study history in a liberal secular academic institution? I was reminded of this question on the last day of the Conference on Faith and History, when I had a series of conversations that revolved around this theme. The first of these conversations was with a Ph.D. candidate who reminded me a little of myself in an earlier era of my life. He was finishing a Ph.D. in transatlantic history, with a dissertation on the Puritans near... Read more
Over the past week, we have heard a great deal about Jesus’s Resurrection, open tombs, and Jerusalem gardens, and the same topics will dominate the lectionary readings and sermons for next Sunday. Here is another view of the story. I want to suggest that we actually possess an alternative version of the very earliest story of a Resurrection appearance, and we don’t have to go some fringe source or “Gnostic Gospel” to find it. It’s hidden in plain sight. And... Read more
Two weeks after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, the Time Magazine’s March 14 issue boldly proclaimed “The Return of History” with an image of a tank on its cover. That statement could be read in a number of ways, given its context. A reference to Francis Fukuyama’s iconic book, The End of History and the Last Man, the title acknowledged something that Fukuyama himself stated soon after: that his theory of the triumph of democratic liberal capitalism, symbolized by... Read more
Chris considers another analogy between WWII and the war in Ukraine: how the arguments made by one leading opponent of war against Nazi Germany anticipated conservative sympathies for Vladimir Putin. Read more
I have recently had the pleasure of hosting a two-speaker conference on the theme of “Loneliness and Solitude” on the campus of Valparaiso University. We choose this topic because we thought it might connect well with students’ experience of Covid, while also shedding light on a difficult and perennial aspect of the human condition. Our two invited guests were Samantha Rose Hill (Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute... Read more
In several past blogs, I have commented on the extreme difficulty of reading the New Testament in English translation (or any translation), where you miss a lot of the connections, echoes, and resonances that would strike a Greek speaker. The same is true of Hebrew in the Old Testament, where reading in even the best translation means missing a great many puns and word-plays, but that’s a separate subject. Here I want to focus on one particular Greek word that... Read more
I’m currently on a research trip in England, so am posting from my Anxious Bench archives. Since I wrote this Easter post in 2017, probably a lot of folk missed it. I have updated the images from my very recent trip last Sunday to Norwich–ceiling bosses from the magnificant Norwich Cathedral and sites associated with Julian of Norwich. Speaking of Norwich, stay tuned for a postscript I have written for the one year anniversary of The Making of Biblical Womanhood... Read more
In recent days, Marc Chagall's WWII-era painting of a "Ukrainian Family" has been circulating on social media. Chris explains why it matters that it actually shows a Jewish family, and why Chagall often used Christian iconography to respond to the Shoah. Read more
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