Today I am so pleased to welcome Amy Achenbach to the Anxious Bench. Amy is a second year PhD student in the History department at Baylor University. I have the privilege of teaching her for the second time in one of my graduate seminars–Women and Religion in Fall 2020 and currently in my Women’s History and Theory Fall 2021 seminar. Just last week we read Judith Bennett’s History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism in my current seminar, but Amy... Read more
Recent events at Bethlehem Baptist Church — where John Piper's successor resigned this summer — and its college and seminary reminded guest blogger Greg Rosauer of an earlier controversy in a Minneapolis church and school whose founder, W.B. Riley, gave way to a successor who ran afoul of fundamentalists. Read more
In 2005, George Clooney starred in Good Night, and Good Luck, a decent film about broadcaster Ed Murrow’s struggle against Senator Joe McCarthy, set in 1953. A careful viewer would note a scene in an office where you see a water bottle sitting on a desk, in a way that water bottles did not in 1953, any more than did Macbooks or Starbucks cups. The interesting thing is not that somebody left the bottle there, but that nobody else noticed... Read more
On Thursday, Pres. Joe Biden invoked Isaiah 6:8 in eulogizing American service members killed in Kabul, Afghanistan. That got Chris wondering just how long "Here I am, Lord. Send me" has been used in the context of America's wars... Read more
I have been posting about my forthcoming book on The Global History of the Cold War, which is (not exclusively) intended as a main textbook for courses on that topic. I have an ongoing interest in materials for that course, or for a related one on Cold War Cinema. Now, if I was actually teaching such a course focused on movies, I would cleave pretty closely to the predictable choices. Dr Strangelove would be high on the list, along with... Read more
White evangelical politics in the United States has for many years been characterized primarily by the assumptions of political conservatism, including support for free markets, the American military, and, above all, moral regulation of the individual vices that evangelicals oppose. Now, though, evangelical critiques of political conservatism have been gaining ground in many formerly conservative evangelical venues – as evidenced, for example, by a new interest in examining structural racism or challenging the Republican Party’s support for immigration restrictions. But... Read more
Until the 1980s, evangelicals didn’t distinguish between legal immigrants and refugees and “illegal” undocumented immigrants. They welcomed all newcomers. Read more
Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and defended slavery. Why does John Piper think it's alright to engage in "wishful thinking" about that topic? Read more
Chaotic scenes of people surrounding military aircraft and hoping desperately to be evacuated: this is what we saw on our television screens last week. It is also what Kathleen, a woman in Saint Paul, Minnesota, witnessed 46 years ago. It was the spring of 1975, and she was recovering from surgery in the hospital when the news broke: Saigon had been captured. She recalled, I’m watching the TV in my room, and here [are] these people, you know, scrambling... Read more
Recently, I was one of several historians of the 1970s-1980s era interviewed by New York Times journalist Clay Risen. The article’s subtitle reads “The fall of Kabul is not the fall of Saigon. But historians still point to some useful parallels and lessons.” So how did Vietnam affect US politics and culture over the following decade or two, and are there analogies for Afghanistan? Here are some additional thoughts on that currently pressing, and tragic, topic. When we think of... Read more
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