Gender, the Great Tradition, and Evangelical Memory

Last updated on: November 9, 2022 at 11:20 am By Guest Contributor

Today we welcome a guest contribution from Dr. Jacob Randolph. Jacob Randolph, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Religion at Baylor University. He is a cultural and religious historian whose research focuses on imagination, gender, and identity formation in medieval and early modern religious communities. His publications appear in Church History, Baptist History & Heritage, and Church History & Religious Culture. His recent article, “Tough and Tender: Theology and Masculinity in the 1991 Baptist Hymnal,” was... Read more

Complementarian Theology and Sexual Abuse: My Updated Reflections

Last updated on: November 8, 2022 at 12:04 pm By Beth Allison Barr

A shorter version of this was published last week with the Political Theology Network symposium on White Evangelicals and Right Wing Populism under the title “Where Does Evangelical Theology Lead?”. I am grateful that I was given permission to update and repost it here. I encourage you to read the other work in the symposium by Marcia Pally, Philip Gorski, Samuel Perry, David Gushee, and Khyati Joshi. Lastly, even if you read the original version of this essay last week, I... Read more

The Other Evangelicals: An Interview with Dr. Isaac Sharp

Last updated on: October 31, 2022 at 10:17 am By Ansley Quiros

Isaac, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. It’s so good to get to learn from you, especially at an exciting moment in your scholarly life. Your new book The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist and Gay Christians—and the Movement that Pushed them Out is coming out with Eerdman’s Press this Spring. Why did you decide to write this book? Thanks for interviewing me! After working on this project for many years... Read more

West Africa and the Future of Global Faith

Last updated on: November 11, 2022 at 12:18 pm By Philip Jenkins

The British Guardian just published a really excellent essay that should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of Global/World Christianity, and indeed for the world’s religious futures. It’s by Howard W. French, and it’s called “Megalopolis: How Coastal West Africa Will Shape The Coming Century”. I am guessing this is an extract from a future book. The article focuses on the stretch of coast between roughly Lagos and Abidjan, which incorporates portions of the five countries of... Read more

What Meghan Markle Taught Me About History

Last updated on: November 2, 2022 at 8:23 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of having a guest contribution from Allison M. Brown. Allison M. Brown is a PhD student in historical studies in Baylor University’s Department of Religion. She received her MA from Wheaton College (Illinois) in history of Christianity, with an emphasis on the Reformation. She has published on the Bible and nationalism in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter) and has forthcoming chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation and... Read more

Black Subtext in Mr. Bojangles

Last updated on: November 1, 2022 at 8:13 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of having a guest contribution from Dr. Alicia Jackson. Dr. Alicia Jackson is an Associate Professor of History at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. She currently leads a community-based project that focuses on recovering the lost history and stories of a vibrant Black communities located in southern Appalachia. Her public writing has been published in the Washington Post and History News Network. In 2016 she was awarded a Louisville Project Grant for Researchers for... Read more

Cherokee Removal and the Stories We Tell

Last updated on: October 31, 2022 at 10:10 am By Guest Contributor

Today we have the pleasure of featuring a guest post from Andrew Michael Jones. Andrew Michael Jones is the NEH Postdoctoral Teaching Historian at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and published his first book, The Revival of Evangelicalism: Mission and Piety in the Victorian Church of Scotland, with Edinburgh University Press in 2022. He lives in Marietta, Georgia—on the southernmost edge of the former Cherokee Nation. While I’ve spent most of... Read more

Conjuring Power and Liberation from Enslavement in the British Colonies

Last updated on: October 28, 2022 at 4:05 pm By Joey Cochran

In Hall’s Wilmington Gazette newspaper issue of October 1798, Jinkin Avirett posted an advertisement for his runaway slave, Sampson. Avirett described Sampson as disfigured with a scar and walking with a staff. What sets Sampson apart was that he practiced the magical art of conjure and told fortunes. Sampson’s inclination towards magic was more common among the enslaved than many assume. People who are oppressed look for ways to liberate themselves, even if liberation is not whole or complete. They... Read more

The Great Vampire War of the Enlightenment

Last updated on: October 26, 2022 at 5:27 pm By Philip Jenkins

If you must, you can read scary recent stories of ghosts and horrors for Halloween, but why not just go right back to the original sources from which all those tales are derived? When you do, you find that those original sources are at least as good as anything imagined by later generations. And as a bonus, you can discover a significant moment in Western religious history, and controversy. As a case in point, look at the vampires who will... Read more

Can Pluralism Work in American Higher Education?

Last updated on: October 26, 2022 at 1:12 am By Andrea L. Turpin

In 2005, I entered Notre Dame as a wide-eyed young PhD student to study the history of religion in American higher education. Notre Dame was at that time distinguished by having two scholars of such a specific topic: George Marsden had published The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief in 1994 and Jim Turner had published The Sacred and The Secular University (with Jon Roberts) in 2000. (Notre Dame also had an exceptional women’s and... Read more

I came to Jesus at night to ask about being born again. Who was this Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council?