How Will the Pro-Life Movement Address Women’s Rights after Roe v. Wade Is Reversed?

Last updated on: May 17, 2022 at 10:17 pm By Daniel K. Williams

One of the reasons that the conversation about abortion is so polarizing in the United States is because it pits two competing rights claims against each other – women’s rights versus fetal rights. And in that battle between fetal rights and women’s rights, pro-life advocates appear to have nothing to offer the women’s rights cause. They may claim to be “pro-woman, pro-child” and to “love them both,” but the reproductive rights movement is highly skeptical. This skepticism is likely to... Read more

An Oral History of The Anxious Bench: Change over Time

Last updated on: May 16, 2022 at 5:44 pm By Chris Gehrz

Part two in Chris' "oral" history of this blog covers the period from 2015 to the present, when the list of contributors — and the topics they covered — grew considerably more diverse. Read more

Reconsider the Stepmother

Last updated on: May 14, 2022 at 8:42 am By Agnes Howard

Among his many other exceptional qualities, Abraham Lincoln had high regard for his stepmother. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln married the sixteenth president’s widowed father in 1819, and by Abe’s own honest report, “she proved to be a good and kind mother.” This reputation makes Sarah pretty unusual, and not just in American history. If motherhood has seen some highs and lows in the country’s life—moms valorized and vilified according to shifts in culture, economy, and politics—stepmotherhood is trickier still. Stepmothers... Read more

Peopling the Biblical World

Last updated on: May 9, 2022 at 5:37 pm By Philip Jenkins

The Biblical world at various eras is probably the most intensely studied society in human history. Just how many books, for instance, have been written about Palestine in the time of Jesus? Despite all that work, though, we still have major areas of ignorance about such a basic issue as population. If we look at a country today, that is such a critical theme. How many people are there to pay taxes, to serve in armies, to populate cities, and... Read more

How Did the Reformation Matter for Women?

Last updated on: May 12, 2022 at 7:53 pm By Beth Allison Barr

“Have you been to St. Thomas yet?” The question buzzed my phone. It was from one of my former students who knew I was in Salisbury. What she didn’t know was that, when I read her text, the Salisbury Cathedral spire soared above me as I sat below the glass ceiling of the refectory cafe drinking tea. In two hours I would meet the archivist to view the only copy of a Middle English sermon collection housed in the cathedral... Read more

An Oral History of The Anxious Bench: Origins

Last updated on: May 9, 2022 at 11:59 am By Chris Gehrz

This month The Anxious Bench celebrates its 10th anniversary by telling its own story... starting with its origins in 2012. Read more

Making Ukraine, and How Empires Invent Geography

Last updated on: May 8, 2022 at 6:00 pm By Philip Jenkins

More than usually, I am currently living in two different worlds, and traveling between them, sometimes uncomfortably. At present, like many people, I am living day by day following the news from Ukraine, the greatest moral and political conflict of our time. At the same time, I am writing my present book project, which concerns the Iconoclast controversy in the Roman/Byzantine empire in the seventh and eighth centuries. The two worlds, medieval and modern, keep bumping up against each other... Read more

The Lost Letters of Saint Paul, and How They Were Lost

Last updated on: May 5, 2022 at 11:09 am By Philip Jenkins

Much of Christian theology and doctrine grows out of St. Paul’s letters to various congregations identified by their location, including those in Rome, Corinth, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and other places. We do not have his letters to the people of Damascus, or Caesarea, or Tyre, or Ptolemais, or plenty of other places with which he certainly had associations. Why is that? And why on earth are there no letters to the Jerusalemites? That did not mean that he was a wildly... Read more

Rome to Rotterdam: The Weaver-Swartzes Go on Pilgrimage

Last updated on: May 4, 2022 at 9:00 am By David Swartz

A trip in which we interrogate our familial and religious heritage Read more

What the End of Roe v. Wade Will Mean for Abortion Rates (part 1)

Last updated on: May 2, 2022 at 10:14 pm By Daniel K. Williams

What will the end of Roe v. Wade really mean for abortion in America? If the Supreme Court, as now expected, declares next month that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, it will be one of the most momentous events in the recent history of the court. This will be the moment for which the pro-life movement has been eagerly awaiting for decades and about which the reproductive rights movement has issued the most dire apocalyptic warnings. Yet... Read more

What city did Paul and Silas sing hymns in while imprisoned, leading to a miraculous jailbreak?