Christians often struggle with the cursing language of the imprecatory psalms. But Chris found that they were not exactly rare in American religious history, particularly in times of war. Read more
Christians often struggle with the cursing language of the imprecatory psalms. But Chris found that they were not exactly rare in American religious history, particularly in times of war. Read more
I have been posting about the linkage between empires and the shaping of world religions, particularly (by no means exclusively) Christianity. I have especially stressed the role of unintended consequences, of empires doing things that resulted in outcomes utterly different from what they wanted or expected. Man proposes, and God disposes. When we write Christian history, one empire in particular often escapes our attention, and it provides a vast hole in the story. Once upon a time, in the ancient... Read more
Very few non-specialist Americans or Europeans could tell you offhand why the name of Grozny is so potent in understanding the modern world, and specifically the Ukraine conflict. Here is a crude attempt to explain why that name matters so very much, why it is so often mentioned in Kyiv today, and why every Western policymaker needs to know it. The story begins with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, with the fragmentation of many territories in the... Read more
On Russian Orthodoxy as one of the underpinnings of Putin's regime. Read more
“We feel your prayerful support,” a Ukrainian Christian who is on the front lines fighting against the Russians told his American friend a few days ago, in a post that’s now going viral among American evangelicals. “Sometimes something really incomprehensible happens, as if someone’s invisible hand is actually making bullets fly past us. . . . We believe that the Jesus Christ Himself is for Ukraine.” (Ukrainian soldiers on parade – photo from Wikimedia Commons) When a fellow Christian from... Read more
How did gender shape how African American women experienced religion and enslavement? As we shift from Black History Month to Women’s History Month, I took the opportunity to consider the intersection of both fields and interview Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University and author of The Souls of Womenfolk, published by the University of North Carolina Press this past fall. Together we discussed her research on the distinctive religious cultures of... Read more
Throughout history, Empires have shaped religions worldwide, often in quite revolutionary ways. Commonly, they have their greatest impact through actions that are unconscious and unintentional. To take an example, empires fight wars, and through most of human history, that has involved various kinds of population transfer, from mass enslavement and deportation, to the forced relocation of individual captives and slaves. Those unwillingly moved people commonly take their religions along with them, and the consequences can be far reaching. The obvious... Read more
Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent that it ushers in, are appropriate for considering the desert as a place of spiritual growth. After all, it was Jesus’ forty days in the desert that began His earthly ministry. And yet, the stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, these strange people who quit Church and society to move into the desert in Late Antiquity, remind us, ironically, that the desert should never be our destination. Let us consider why not.... Read more
Chris shares a free daily devotional for Lent, a faculty-written booklet that made him think of George Brushaber, the long-time Christian college president and former editor of Christian Scholar's Review and Christianity Today who died last December. Read more
I have been describing the astonishing success of Buddhism across much of Southern and Eastern Asia in the first millennium AD, and how that movement suffered grave setbacks from the ninth century onward. Although Buddhism continued to be a vital cultural force, its loss of influence in India and, to a lesser extent, China, was a real setback. So why did this happen? I will argue that this resulted from the failure of the great empires that had hitherto either... Read more
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