‘Tis the year’s midnight, which is an excellent time to discuss themes of decline, contraction, and even vanishing. Given that background, I have two closely related topics today. One is a review of the quite dramatic religious trends in the US over the past few years, with an explosive update. The other is a possible reimagining of what America’s future faith might look like. (I will resume my recent series on early concepts of savages and primitive worlds shortly). Over... Read more
I have been reading the sizable new book The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This wildly ambitious work basically tries to rewrite the whole history of humanity, and in the process, it inverts what “everybody knows” about the “rise of civilization.” What follows is not, repeat not, a review of the book, but rather an exploration of a few of its critical themes. To oversimplify a complex argument, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that early human societies... Read more
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade next June – which is a likely outcome, if the justices’ questions during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization earlier this month are any indication – it will signal the failure of a liberal Protestant decision in a religiously and politically fractured nation. Roe is not often thought of as a religiously influenced decision, but it was actually deeply rooted in the particular religious tradition of liberal Protestantism –... Read more
The third and final part of David's series on evangelicals, immigration, and the 2020 Census Read more
In a figurative sense, I stand by gravesides most of the time I teach, write, and otherwise interpret the past with and for other people. Not just for social and cultural historian Beth Barton Schweiger, but for me and most others in our guild, “To write history, is… to make a relationship with the dead” (Confessing History, p. 61). We stand, like the poet Thomas Gray in his country church yard, where “all the air a solemn stillness holds” and... Read more
The dazzling lights and the decadent feasts all delight me, but the Christmas tradition that cheers my heart the most is a simple one: singing Christmas carols. There’s so much that I love about Christmas carols: the triumphant melodies, the rich harmonies, and the fact that I know all the words to the songs, even if I don’t know what the words actually mean. (Confession: I only learned a couple years ago what wassail really is, and I enthusiastically recommend... Read more
“What are you laughing so much about?” asked my wife in puzzlement. “I’m reading Thomas Hobbes,” I replied. “Thomas Hobbes? The one who talked about life being nasty, brutish and short?” she continued. “Yes, him. Seventeenth century.” “Um, OK. And he’s funny?” “He’s making me think of Terry Pratchett.” I need to explain to her, and to you. Thomas Hobbes was one of England’s greatest political thinkers, and a founder of the idea of contract theory. He is best known... Read more
Chris pays tribute to his friend and mentor, Kevin Cragg (1945-2021), who taught ancient history at Christian colleges for nearly 40 years. Read more
I love Advent. It is the season in the church calendar that I have observed the longest, which is to say for many years before I joined a liturgical church. For the unfamiliar, the weeks starting four Sundays before Christmas have historically been set apart as a time to contemplate and prepare for not only the commemoration of Jesus’s first coming in Bethlehem, but also his future second coming at the end of this age—and the ways that Christ comes... Read more
Joel Lawrence, executive director of the Center for Pastor Theologians, talks to us about reconstructing evangelicalism, the topic of the CPT's 2022 conference. Read more
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