Every morning, grasping for dear life that first crucial cup of coffee of the day (possibly in the mug that truthfully admits that I am “Tired as a Mother”), I open my work email. Sometimes there is a sense of dread – chances are, my inbox is filled with requests, reminders, and questions from students and colleagues, near and far. Responding to all these emails can take hours. Some get “triaged” for another day, if they are less urgent. A... Read more
Today we welcome Dr. Thomas Carlson to the Anxious Bench. Dr. Carlson is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. His field of research interests include: Medieval Middle East; Muslim-Christian Relations; Byzantine, Islamic, and Syriac Studies. He is the author of Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq (Cambridge, 2018). You may follow Dr. Carlson at @MedievalMidEast. Christianity is a global religion. The canonical Acts of the Apostles narrates one trajectory from Jerusalem to the imperial capital at Rome, while hinting at other trajectories in... Read more
The Old Testament commands the Israelites not just to fight and defeat other peoples such as the Canaanites and Amalekites, but to exterminate them, to commit what any modern reader would define as genocide. Today, such commands are extremely troubling, and Jews and Christians alike have agonized over them through the centuries. But such concerns are anything but new. From the earliest Christian ages, we find readings and responses that sound very modern in tone, and in a few cases,... Read more
It keeps cropping up in my classes. Perhaps we’re studying about reported Aztec visions of the arrival of “white men” in the Western Hemisphere. “Do you think this really happened, Professor Diller?” someone is bound to ask. And then we stop to have the conversation about miracles—a conversation it seems I have almost every semester in all my courses. Just this week, in my class on the Mediterranean world 600-1600, a student wanted to know if I thought Muhammad was... Read more
There is an odd but very useful source on early Christianity that even now remains strangely unfamiliar to many writers on that topic. Even less known is the discussion by a totally unexpected nineteenth century source, which provides many insights that are still valuable. There is great material here for the sociology of religion, in any era. In the late second century, the pagan satirist Lucian wrote the story of one Peregrinus, who died in the 160s. (He ultimately burned... Read more
I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there. – Malcolm X, 1964 The absence of brutality... Read more
Did you know that the central aspect of patriarchy isn’t female subjugation? Some of you may be surprised to hear me say that, given my focus on how patriarchy (especially Christian patriarchy) subjugates women. Don’t get me wrong. Female oppression lays at the heart of patriarchy, but it is more a consequence of patriarchy rather than the focus of patriarchy. The central aspect of patriarchy is men. Or, as sociologist Allan Johnson explained in The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal... Read more
Hello all! It’s a great privilege to be in the lineup here at the Anxious Bench. As I said in my Introductory post, I’ve got many weaknesses as a scholar but am rich in brilliant friends. I got to talk with one of them here. Hope you enjoy listening in! AQ: Jemar, my friend, it is such an honor to get to converse with you. Thank you for taking the time. I know you have had a long history in... Read more
I have known about Ansley Quiros ever since I read her insightful Washington Post op-eds on Christians who support Trump and on the controversies surrounding kneeling during the national anthem), but it was my three-year-old daughter who officially met her first. As events were wrapping up on the first day of this spring’s Conference on Faith and History meeting at Baylor University, Mercy was running wild around the room, with all the energy of a preschooler who had spent the... Read more
We often hear the word “genocide” today, and it unquestionably describes a vital concept. The word is usually dated to 1944, when it was coined by the brilliant Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who had been studying related concepts for some decades. Surely, we think, Lemkin’s word was a new invention designed to describe a new phenomenon. But long before that, English-speakers had another word that meant much the same thing, and in many cases – not all – it grew... Read more
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