Heathens and and the History of Race-Making in the United States: A Conversation with Kathryn Gin Lum

Last updated on: May 2, 2022 at 7:18 pm By Melissa Borja

Scholars have long described the global ambitions of White Protestant American as rooted in a sense of exceptionalism animated by notions of racial and religious ascendancy. But as Stanford historian Kathryn Gin Lum argues, we cannot limit our attention to understanding how “a White American Christian superiority complex” has driven Americans to see themselves as set apart and called to be saviors of the world. We also need to understand how they viewed the people whom they endeavored to... Read more

The Curse of Capitals and the Theology of Punctuation

Last updated on: April 25, 2022 at 2:22 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have invented a new discipline, the Theology of Punctuation. Some years ago, I published a book called Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World, about the couple of centuries preceding Jesus’s time. One of the persistent problems I have relates to capitals and upper case letters. That may sound trivial, but it actually gets to some quite critical issues of translation and interpretation. Let me take one famous quotation from the Gospels, concerning the... Read more

What is a Conservative Christian College? On the Grove City CRT Report

Last updated on: April 27, 2022 at 10:48 am By Andrea L. Turpin

Grove City College, a small liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, has been in the news. Its Board of Trustees recently released a report investigating allegations of “mission drift.” Because Grove City identifies as a Christian college and I am a Christian historian of religion in American higher education, I read this report with interest. But the mission drift in question turned out to be much more about the school’s political identity than its religious one. Let me explain. Grove City... Read more

“Just the Same as Never Before”: A Christian College at 150

Last updated on: April 28, 2022 at 4:58 pm By Chris Gehrz

As his university concludes its 150th anniversary, Chris considers how it remains — in the words of a former president — "just the same as never before." Read more

Counting the Ways

Last updated on: April 25, 2022 at 2:19 pm By Philip Jenkins

The evangelist Luke tells us about a couple who were en route to Emmaus, when they met the Risen Jesus, who expounds the meaning of all those recent events. After he reveals himself to them, one says, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24.32, NIV, my emphasis), or alternatively, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way,... Read more

The Quiet Reformation: How The Making of Biblical Womanhood is Setting Women Free

Last updated on: April 22, 2022 at 10:47 am By Beth Allison Barr

This week marks the one year anniversary of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Since the book was born in my blogging on The Anxious Bench, I thought it fitting that my postcript publish here as well. You can also find it on the Baker Book page for #MakingBiblicalWomanhood. It is a joy and privilege to continue to write in this space. Thank you for your faithful readership. A Postscript Mostly I remember the... Read more

What Secular Liberal Historians Can Teach Conservative Christians about the Gospel

Last updated on: April 21, 2022 at 10:15 pm By Daniel K. Williams

Should a conservative Christian study history in a liberal secular academic institution? I was reminded of this question on the last day of the Conference on Faith and History, when I had a series of conversations that revolved around this theme. The first of these conversations was with a Ph.D. candidate who reminded me a little of myself in an earlier era of my life. He was finishing a Ph.D. in transatlantic history, with a dissertation on the Puritans near... Read more

Walking on the Water

Last updated on: April 20, 2022 at 5:43 am By Philip Jenkins

Over the past week, we have heard a great deal about Jesus’s Resurrection, open tombs, and Jerusalem gardens, and the same topics will dominate the lectionary readings and sermons for next Sunday. Here is another view of the story. I want to suggest that we actually possess an alternative version of the very earliest story of a Resurrection appearance, and we don’t have to go some fringe source or “Gnostic Gospel” to find it. It’s hidden in plain sight. And... Read more

Evangelicals Need More Military History (But of a Theologically Orthodox Kind)

Last updated on: April 18, 2022 at 7:29 pm By Nadya Williams

Two weeks after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, the Time Magazine’s March 14 issue boldly proclaimed “The Return of History” with an image of a tank on its cover. That statement could be read in a number of ways, given its context. A reference to Francis Fukuyama’s iconic book, The End of History and the Last Man, the title acknowledged something that Fukuyama himself stated soon after: that his theory of the triumph of democratic liberal capitalism, symbolized by... Read more

What Has 2022 To Do with 1939?

Last updated on: April 18, 2022 at 10:12 pm By Chris Gehrz

Chris considers another analogy between WWII and the war in Ukraine: how the arguments made by one leading opponent of war against Nazi Germany anticipated conservative sympathies for Vladimir Putin. Read more

Who defeated the Midianites with just 300 men?