Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of San Juan Diego, the first indigenous saint of the Americas, whose canonization I attended in Mexico City with Pope St. John Paul the Great on July 31, 2002. Juan Diego has since been joined by St. Kateri Tekakwitha, canonized at St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, and the boy martyrs of Tlaxcala, Mexico, whom Pope Francis canonized at St. Peter’s in 2017. Earlier this week, on December 6, the... Read more
I am delighted to announce the imminent publication of my new book! It is titled He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91. The publisher is Oxford University Press, who announce that it will ship on December 13. As it turned out, my own book developed a fair number of lives of its own. As it emerged, I found I was writing military history and medical history, studying pandemics and popular culture, music and... Read more
The discussion around Jay Green’s piece last week is beginning to die down and Beth Barr, Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby have responded in their characteristic ways. So now seems as good a time as any to add my considerations. We can consider a follow up to Joey’s recent post. My reflection, however, begins with my reaction to a book that may seem irrelevant but actually draws attention to a broader set of questions. In a nutshell, this debate... Read more
I only recently learned about Mike Winger. A friend alerted me that he had posted a not-so-flattering discussion of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. I wasn’t terribly surprised by this since Winger earned a ministry degree from Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, an extension campus of Calvary Chapel Bible College which states in its doctrinal statement that men and women were created to “complement and complete each other.” Indeed, the Bible college is part of the Calvary Global... Read more
As some of you may have heard, earlier this fall, the Rev. Charles Melvin Sherrod, a minister, civil rights leader, and life-long community organizer, died in Albany, Georgia at the age of 85. I wrote briefly about Sherrod and his impact on the freedom struggle for the Washington Post, but wanted to also take a moment here to expound, very informally and personally, on some themes from his remarkable life. Over the past several years, in working on a biography... Read more
This past Monday John Fea’s (21K f.; Messiah University Professor; author of Believe Me; past CFH President) Current, a digital journal, published an essay entitled “Forum: The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse” from historian, Jay Green, past CFH President, who currently teaches at Covenant College. Green’s essay proposes a grid for analyzing the landscape of Christian public discourse by plotting the goals of discourse on an x-axis and the means of discourse along a y-axis. Green plots the goal... Read more
Pope Francis has recently issued statements about the Ukraine war that are so mind-bogglingly at variance with reality as to raise alarming questions about him, and by extension, about anything in his record in that office. Why, in short, is he repeatedly recycling Kremlin talking points? I do have a couple of theories to explain his behavior, but none is too complimentary. Francis has in the past said some extremely silly things about the war currently raging in Ukraine. Last... Read more
Last month I asked whether pluralism can work in American higher education. What are the possibilities? What are the potential pitfalls? Today I want to ask what might be an even more intriguing question: Can pluralism work in Christian higher education? What would that even mean? To explore these questions, I’m thinking in conversation with George Marsden’s excellent Soul of the American University Revisited: From Protestant to Postsecular. As I explored last time, in his updated 2021 edition of his... Read more
I have becoming increasingly convinced that the preservation of a functioning democracy in which human rights are respected and civil discourse across the political spectrum is encouraged should be one of the most important priorities for American evangelical Christians. Yet too often, evangelical Christians are divided themselves about the value of civil discourse and democratic norms, with some openly rejecting these virtues. I’ve written elsewhere about why American evangelicals should care about the health of our democracy, but I was... Read more
Now that Thanksgiving is past and the holiday season has officially begun, I’m ready for my favorite Christmas tradition: watching holiday movies. I admit that I have something of a small addiction. I love the classics, of course—It’s a Wonderful Life, Love Actually, Die Hard. I enjoy the new shows, too, especially if they have diverse characters (Dash and Lily, Happiest Season) or involve royalty falling in love in generic European countries with lots of snow (the Christmas Prince... Read more
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