From Truth to Trust: Reimagining the Future of Christian Apologetics

Last updated on: August 29, 2022 at 7:55 pm By Guest Contributor

Today we welcome Daniel Montañez to the Anxious Bench. Montañez is an adjunct instructor of Christian ethics at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He is a doctoral student at the Boston University School of Theology, researching the intersection of theology, ethics, and migration. He is a co-editor of the newly released book, The Church and Migration: A Theological Vision for the People of God. Since the rise of the Enlightenment, modern apologetics has concerned itself with giving an... Read more

The Call to Comprehensive Justice

Last updated on: August 30, 2022 at 9:57 am By Guest Contributor

Today we welcome Allie Roberts as a guest contributor to the Anxious Bench. Roberts is a PhD student in the History department at Baylor University. Her research focuses on Black women’s leadership and grassroots activism during the twentieth century, particularly during the US civil rights movement. In the United States, some Christians profess a faith undergirded by white supremacy, patriarchy, and power. Recently, stories about those who abuse their power and suppress others while claiming Christ capture our attention, and... Read more

The Growing Crisis of Anomie in the United States: Learning from Hungary’s Cold War Past

Last updated on: August 29, 2022 at 9:01 am By Guest Contributor

Today we welcome a guest contribution from Patrick Leech to the Anxious Bench. Patrick Leech (@PatrickCLeech) is a historian of the global Cold War, with an emphasis on Hungary and Eastern Europe. He is a doctoral student at Baylor University, researching global resettlement of Hungarians from 1956–1957. The collection of podcasts I subscribe to has repeatedly featured the same guest, Eboo Patel, discussing his new book and interfaith work. In each interview, Patel has proposed a provocative thought experiment: What would be the consequence... Read more

Texts of Terror, and Damned Races

Last updated on: August 28, 2022 at 7:22 am By Philip Jenkins

Jews and Christians have long wrestled with the Bible passages that command the annihilation of rival races, notably the Canaanites and Amalekites. As I have noted, those passages proved very useful for the new and aggressive kinds of Euro-American colonialism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Even more pernicious was the merger of those Biblical ideas with emerging eugenic theories, which postulated the existence of degenerate “damned races.” Well into the twentieth century, Christian apologists defended the Biblical texts, and... Read more

The Annales Movement (Part One): Working Across Social Science Disciplines

Last updated on: August 26, 2022 at 10:27 am By Joey Cochran

“Tell me, daddy. What is the use of history?” (Bloch, 3). This is the opening line of Marc Bloch’s methodological work on historiography, The Historian’s Craft. This piercing question asked by a young boy to his historian father is innocent yet profound. Bloch traced the implications of this question to two parallel spheres: an epistemic sphere, where history serves the function of intellectual inquiry that builds a base of knowledge on the past, and a pragmatic sphere, where history serves... Read more

Professor Albright, Biblical Archaeology, and the Virtues of Genocide

Last updated on: August 24, 2022 at 1:25 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting about the Bible’s genocidal texts, which have most recently been discussed in Charlie Trimm’s book The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation (Eerdman’s 2022). So obvious were the flaws and dangers of these texts as to make them a gift for critics of religion in general and the Bible in particular, and fundamentalists struggled to defend them. I particularly note one individual who undertook such a defense, as this was such a prestigious... Read more

Dated and Overrated: A Review of Jonathan Pokluda’s Outdated

Last updated on: August 24, 2022 at 1:25 am By Andrea L. Turpin

Today’s guest post is by Cara Hoekstra. Cara is a recent graduate of Baylor University, where she studied Sociology, History, and Political Science in the University Scholars program. Since graduating with her BA in 2021, she has participated in the Brazos Fellows program, a part-time residential fellowship studying theology and church history in community through Christ Church Waco. She has also continued working on various projects related to the intersection of marriage and the family and religion. A new Christian... Read more

It Wasn’t the Religious Right That Made White Evangelicals Vote Republican

Last updated on: August 22, 2022 at 6:42 pm By Daniel K. Williams

The Gospel Coalition’s article earlier this month critiquing Randall Balmer’s claim to have discovered the “real origins of the Religious Right” has brought to the forefront once again the question of what prompted the Religious Right to emerge in the 1970s. But while this can be an interesting question, it doesn’t really provide much of an answer to the separate question that too many people conflate with it – the question, that is, of why the overwhelming majority of white... Read more

Religion, Race, and “Never Have I Ever”: A Roundtable Discussion on Season Three

Last updated on: August 22, 2022 at 6:41 pm By Melissa Borja

Mindy Kaling’s comedy Never Have I Ever returned to Netflix for a third season earlier this month, and as with the first two seasons, there’s much to discuss about how the show portrays Asian Americans, religion, and race. In a follow-up to the roundtables organized for Season One and Season Two, I brought together five scholars to reflect on different aspects of the newest season of NHIE: Dr. Shalini Shankar considered themes of class and caste, Dr. Swapnil... Read more

I Am A Historian: On Presentism

Last updated on: August 26, 2022 at 12:05 pm By Malcolm Foley

This probably should have been my introductory piece, but now it has been precipitated by a recent piece by the president of the AHA, Dr. James Sweet. In this piece, Dr. Sweet lamented, alongside Lynn Hunt from twenty years ago, that the entire academic discipline of history seems to be pressing toward presentism, perhaps best understood as viewing the past through the lens of the present, especially, as Sweet names, through the categories of “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and capitalism.”... Read more

Which mountain did Jesus ascend from at His ascension?