The Heretics on the Borderlands, And Their Strange Books

Last updated on: March 27, 2022 at 6:16 am By Philip Jenkins

Empires move or deport populations, often against the will of those subject peoples. Such movements can have the quite unintentional result of fostering and spreading new religious developments, often of a kind that imperial authorities strongly disfavored. The consequences can last for centuries. The Heretics on the Borderlands … Empires are deeply concerned abut maintaining public order and stability, and such concerns are all the greater in border regions, where a revolt might open the door to foreign invasion. When... Read more

The Ukraine War: Three Thoughts

Last updated on: March 24, 2022 at 4:46 pm By Philip Jenkins

Another comment about the ongoing horrors in Ukraine. Or rather, three thoughts in particular, respectively: 1.Why Putin’s Campaign Really Was, and Is, As Dumb As It Looks When the Ukraine invasion started, I felt rather humbled by my obvious ignorance. By common report, Putin had planned his assault for around February 10, but Xi Jinping ordered him not to begin until after the Winter Olympics ended on the 20th, as that would distract from Chinese glories. Putin obeyed, and saved... Read more

The Redemption of Redeeming Love: A Movie Review and Marketplace History

Last updated on: March 24, 2022 at 1:19 am By Andrea L. Turpin

Today’s guest post is by Emma Fenske. Emma is a current MA student and incoming PhD student in the history department at Baylor University. She studies conservative evangelical women and their thoughts and theology through Christian historical fiction romance novels during the rise of Billy Graham and the Christian Right. By analyzing this genre of evangelical print media consumer culture, she hope to bring to light the ideas and theologies that answer the question “Who is an Evangelical?” from the... Read more

Islam and the Borderland of Empires

Last updated on: March 23, 2022 at 5:50 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting about the borderlands of empire, territories beyond the tight control of rival realms. Some of those buffer states, those often-neglected liminal kingdoms, have a special significance in the history of religion. Arguably, early Islamic history makes little sense except in the context of two remarkably influential tribal powers, which together represent a lost Christian realm. The new religion of Islam emerged from these embattled borderlands. A familiar myth suggests that it was mainly the force of... Read more

The Religious History of Daylight Saving

Last updated on: March 22, 2022 at 10:12 am By Chris Gehrz

I don’t often dip into my archives and reprise a post. But since the U.S. Congress may (underline may) be on the verge of making Daylight Saving Time a permanent fixture, I thought the post I originally wrote for “falling back” might be actually be more helpful now that we may have “sprung forward” for good. It’s been lightly edited. Daylight Saving Time (DST) is not the farmers’ fault, explained the New York Times last November. On the contrary, DST is “a... Read more

The Scandal of the Evangelical Professor Mommy

Last updated on: March 22, 2022 at 6:32 pm By Agnes Howard

When I was pregnant and finishing my dissertation, a beloved dean told me about one night when she was writing hers. Her husband decided to take the kids out for ice cream, but she couldn’t go because she had to finish a chapter, so after he piled them in the car, she put her head down on the table and cried. She told me this as an encouragement–one day you too will be cleared to go out for ice cream!–but... Read more

Between Two Empires

Last updated on: March 21, 2022 at 5:58 pm By Philip Jenkins

Empires commonly have religions that enjoy an established or favored status, and in many cases, those empires suppress rival forms of faith. When we write the history of empires and religion, we often have to look beyond the heartlands of a given regime, and turn to the borderlands, and to the smaller states or statelets on the periphery. Those border states can serve as refuges for groups fleeing official persecution, and they become hothouses and laboratories, from which new movements... Read more

Ideas about Women Matter: A Resource List for Women in Church History

Last updated on: March 16, 2022 at 11:35 am By Beth Allison Barr

I planned this post several weeks ago. Ever since publishing The Making of Biblical Womanhood, folk ask me for resources that show the reality of women’s leadership and active role throughout church history rather than what they have been taught in evangelical spaces: a narrative that mostly ignores women and/or interprets women’s historical participation through the lens of complementarianism. So I planned a series of posts listing historical sources (primary, secondary, and tertiary) that can help reframe our understanding of... Read more

The Book I’ve Been Waiting For: A Review of Aimee Byrd’s The Sexual Reformation

Last updated on: March 15, 2022 at 4:06 am By Andrea L. Turpin

In the final chapter of her bestseller The Making of Biblical Womanhood, my friend, colleague, and fellow Anxious Bench blogger Beth Allison Barr writes, “One of my friends, shortly after seeing a draft of my table of contents of this book, asked if the final chapter would contain a new vision for a theological approach to women in the church. Her words panicked me. I am a historian; not a theologian—and a very practical historian at that.” Beth went on... Read more

The Last Emperor, and His Faithful Bishop

Last updated on: March 14, 2022 at 6:08 am By Philip Jenkins

I recently wrote about how the mighty Persian Empire became a powerful vehicle for the spread of Christianity through much of Asia. That role was unintentional, in the sense that the empire itself followed a very different creed, that of Zoroastrianism, and at various points, the Persian state had brutally persecuted Christians. But in the last days of that empire in the seventh century AD, before its conquest by Islam, the Christian presence became very strong indeed. Unknown to non-specialists,... Read more