The season of Advent begins this year next Sunday, November 27. This is one of my favorite times in the church year, and for many reasons, I relish the “O Antiphons,” which belong precisely to this season. They are so rich in the lessons they teach, with implications for Christmas, of course, but also for the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and (surprisingly perhaps) for the apocalypse and the Last Judgment. You could actually present a fairly complete... Read more
My third--and final--post on the legacy of Ron Sider Read more
My past caught up with me last week. I stood on the West Campus of Duke University for the first time in more than nineteen years. A school group was visiting, their tour buses parked in the road circling past the gothic tower of the university chapel. I didn’t want to become part of the background for dozens of selfie pictures, so rather than join the crowd on the lawn, I sat on a bench–eating my breakfast bagel from the... Read more
“Don’t believe those indios, Vero,” the Mexican scholar told me in Spanish as we walked away from the Franciscan friary. “They don’t know their history; they’re inventing rituals. Talk to the scholars here instead.” I didn’t know how to respond and nearly tripped over the colonial cobblestones in surprise. I knew that prejudice against native people persisted in modern Mexico, but didn’t expect to hear a renowned Mexican historian who specializes in native peoples express the same sentiment. Perhaps I... Read more
I have been posting about the Bible’s genocidal texts. In my experience, many Christians who otherwise know the Bible well scarcely know about these texts, and if they do, they doubt their authenticity. There are reasons for that, and I would argue that we need to change matters. My Episcopal church uses its lectionary to decide what particular readings it will use throughout the year, but those texts often have what seem like strange omissions. In one cycle, we work... Read more
I am currently in the process of finalizing revisions of my book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church, under contract at Zondervan. The story that is the subject of this essay is a theory that ultimately got cut from the book, because there simply is not enough evidence to prove it with certainty. It is, nevertheless, a thought-provoking exercise. Put simply, I think that it is possible that Lydia, whom we meet in Acts 16, played a role in bringing... Read more
Last month, I enjoyed attending the Baylor Institute for the Study of Religion’s virtual conference, “Evangelicals on Their Past: Studies in the History of Evangelical Historiography,” organized by David Bebbington. The overarching research question Bebbington returned to regarded the legitimacy of confessional histories and their distinction from professional histories. As I mulled over the presentations, I, too, wondered about my perception of the making of the evangelical past. As the conference concluded, the ethical dimensions and implications of evangelical history occupied my mind.... Read more
A few weeks ago, I delivered the J.M. Dawson Fall Lecture at Baylor University titled “For Jesus, Country, and Robert E. Lee: Not Your Momma’s History of Baptist Missions.” The lecture built on my latest book, The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South, and showed examples of encounters between missionaries and locals in Brazil to demonstrate how missionary racial imagination impacted evangelical missions in Latin America. One of the examples of missionary behavior that I used in the lecture... Read more
Recently the Conference on Faith and History hosted a panel on witch hunts, both in history and in the contemporary world. We found ourselves asking the question—why is there a perennial interest in witchcraft history and the study of persecution of witches for both our students and the reading/watching public? Why is this so attractive to us? What seems clear is that we like stories with clear villains and victims and the inquisition and witch hunts seem like they... Read more
If you are a serious qualified scholar of the New Testament, you can ignore this post. If, though, you are a regular non-specialist citizen interested in such matters, this might be of use. I’ll be addressing one very specific topic, and then a much larger question about how anyone can find information about a vast range of topics. I’ll describe three or four invaluable resources. Jesus Was a Carpenter? When Jesus goes to Nazareth, the crowds are amazed by his... Read more
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