Was Carter a Progressive Evangelical or Centrist Politician?

Last updated on: January 25, 2025 at 1:53 am By Guest Contributor

When President Jimmy Carter died on December 29th, 2024, almost every obituary on the 39th president made some mention of his deep Christian faith. A New York Times article featuring seventeen objects that exemplify Carter’s extraordinary life included a wooden cross hanging in Maranatha Baptist Church, which Carter made himself. Carter’s identity as a born-again Christian was certainly no secret, either during his presidency or after, and it helped to shape his politics in a way that was distinctly different... Read more

Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Reformation Roleplay, Pt 1

Last updated on: January 24, 2025 at 12:11 pm By Jacob Randolph

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Evangelicalism and ecstatic Spirit-filled movements have long had an uneasy relationship. The inclusion of Pentecostal denominations into the newly-formed National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 meant that, on paper, Pentecostals were card-carrying members of conservative orthodoxy. Yet, the relationship between Pentecostals and midcentury evangelical power-brokers was often chilly. Pentecostals represented a threat to Neo-evangelicals’ self-perception as rationalistic, objective, and socially respectable. For their part, some Pentecostals saw the move into evangelical spaces as weighing into a cultural fight that wasn’t... Read more

Rebel on Main

Last updated on: January 22, 2025 at 11:15 pm By David Swartz

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Are memorials actual reflections of the past? What do we do with static memorials when interpretations of the past change? Read more

Oedipus and the Tragic Flaw of Self-Deception

Last updated on: January 21, 2025 at 10:19 am By Adam Renberg

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I am pleased to welcome Dr. Aaron Johnson to the Anxious Bench today! Dr. Johnson is Professor of Classics and Humanities at Lee University (Cleveland, TN), specializing in Greek literature of the later Roman Empire, particularly in the areas of ethnic and religious identities and of Hellenism. He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies (Harvard University), the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago and the University of Tuebingen. His publications include a book entitled... Read more

What Evangelical Influencers Love About this Inauguration

Last updated on: January 20, 2025 at 10:03 pm By Erica Ramirez

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It’s the 20th of January and there is a lot going on today in Washington, DC. No doubt readers of The Anxious Bench are already receiving notifications about Trump’s inaugural executive actions, like instituting a federal two-gender policy and ending birth right citizenship. As with his first-term efforts to overturn Roe, these new policy-level initiatives will do something to address evangelicals’ anxiety about the place of the American family (and conservative gender politics) in public life and policy. We can... Read more

Windstorms and Wildfires: Finding Christ Among Devastation

Last updated on: January 17, 2025 at 3:53 am By Verónica A. Gutiérrez

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As I sit down in the local library to write this post, I can see the ocean extending beyond the tree tops and red tiled roofs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Following the curve of the coast, I can see beach towns, most notably a collection of tall white buildings that must be Santa Monica, where I lived when I moved to SoCal in 2004. But then the buildings stop. Sweeping my eyes to the left there is an eerie... Read more

The Prophet Micaiah and Divine Deception

Last updated on: January 12, 2025 at 7:40 pm By Philip Jenkins

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I offer a column on themes of deception, false identity, and the utter unreliability of all forms of external authority, including (apparently) the divine. I have been working on a truly odd text called the Gospel of Barnabas, which purports to be a secret gospel revealed to the early Christian figure of that name. The more I get into it, the more intriguing ideas and insights I find. Growing directly from that, I will explore one truly weird story from... Read more

Rest by the Koi Pond: Journey with Japanese Literature

Last updated on: January 15, 2025 at 1:08 am By Michael Jimenez

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“Nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes before death.” Kawabata Yasunari Recently David Vernon, who has a new book on Japanese writer Yukio Mishima coming out soon, posted a comment on X (formerly known as Twitter) that I couldn’t agree with more: “Whatever we lose in translation, we lose far more by not reading at all.” It reminded me of an earlier article I wrote about my own literary journey years ago reading Latin American literature, and another... Read more

History and Ourselves: Story, The Past, and Responsibility

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 2:15 am By Wyatt Reynolds

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David Blight, the eminent Civil War historian, begins every class he teaches in the same way: by quoting from Herodotus’s histories. “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other… I am bound to... Read more