Making Meaning on a College Campus

Last updated on: May 15, 2021 at 11:53 am By Agnes Howard

My middle-school-aged son once described what I do teaching honors’ college classes as sitting around with students asking, “Does anything mean anything?” People in higher-ed humanities do talk quite a bit about meaning making. Indeed, our efforts in that direction are one means to name the value of what we do in contrast to, say, STEM disciplines, where parents may imagine they see tuition payoffs more immediately. The question also dips into territory usually understood as belonging to religion, or... Read more

A Letter about COVID to My Future Self

Last updated on: May 15, 2021 at 11:38 am By Chris Gehrz

At the end of a week that feels like a turning point, Chris leaves some reminders for his future self: what he's learned about church, education, community, family, and more from the COVID pandemic. Read more

Of Liturgy, Place, and Presence

Last updated on: May 9, 2021 at 6:58 am By Philip Jenkins

I recently posted about the character and drawback of virtual religion, and of what we lose when we are deprived of presence, physicality, and participation. That is a special problem for those of us who are liturgically oriented, and Eucharistic in mindset. How far can liturgical churches survive infinite periods in the Remote and Virtual Wilderness? Like many others, my own Episcopal parish has included in its Communion service the prayer of St. Alphonsus Liguori, which concerns Spiritual Communion. It reads... Read more

John C. Calhoun: American Heretic

Last updated on: May 13, 2021 at 12:07 am By johnturner

How would you like to have a President Trump and a President Biden at the same time? Or perhaps a President DeSantis and a President Newsom? You probably don’t like the idea, which stems from an end-of-life, cockamamie suggestion from South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, the vice president, longtime senator, cabinet secretary, and perpetual presidential wannabe. He is the subject of Robert Elder’s penetrating and captivating Calhoun: American Heretic. You might be asking: isn’t this a religious history blog? Other... Read more

The Scandal of Patriarchy in My Evangelical Mind

Last updated on: May 11, 2021 at 9:05 pm By Beth Allison Barr

Today we welcome Joey Cochran to the Anxious Bench. Joey recently earned his Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is an independent scholar and Social Media Coordinator for The Conference on Faith and History. He has publications with Jonathan Edwards Studies, Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology, and Fides et Historia. A Memoir Historians report the memory of past events and lives. However, it is common for historians to existentially mature by articulating the weight of current events as they historicize the... Read more

Not So Groovy, Baby: How Evangelical Sex Advice Got Stuck in the 1970s

Last updated on: May 10, 2021 at 11:12 pm By Chris Gehrz

"Rather than evolving its understanding of female sexuality," argues guest-blogger Sheila Wray Gregoire, "the evangelical church has stubbornly clung to [the] 1970s resurgence of Victorianism, as if frozen in place." Read more

Religion’s Sudden Decline

Last updated on: May 10, 2021 at 7:19 am By Philip Jenkins

Since 2007, the United States has “showed the largest shift of any country away from religion and now ranks among the world’s least religious publics. … The United States, which for many years stood as a highly religious outlier among the world’s high-income countries, now ranks as the 12th least religious country for which data are available.” That’s least, L-E-A-S-T. Those striking statements summarize the findings of a recent book that I have been devouring, namely Ronald L. Inglehart, Religion’s... Read more

Real Presence and Virtual Religion

Last updated on: May 9, 2021 at 7:06 am By Philip Jenkins

I don’t know where I am. That might sound like a desperate confession by an ancient and doddering person, but it actually gets to a vital issue in contemporary religion, and in just how we reimagine religious practice after the pandemic. I will return to a sequence about which I have posted before, namely those critical five Ps: physicality, place, presence, participation, and proximity, and how they shape what we do in church, or indeed any religious institution. Here is... Read more

Race and Liberalism in Dr. Seuss

Last updated on: May 5, 2021 at 10:25 pm By Daniel K. Williams

When Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that six books written by the late bestselling children’s author would be taken off the market because of their allegedly racist illustrations, the reactions predictably split along partisan lines. Some conservatives rushed to buy the books, pushing previously obscure titles like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street or If I Ran the Zoo into Amazon’s top 20 list. On the other hand, some progressives questioned whether this move had really gone... Read more

René Padilla: Enfant Terrible

Last updated on: May 5, 2021 at 8:54 am By David Swartz

Padilla earned his reputation as an enfant terrible who showed no fear in challenging white evangelical kingmakers at Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, and the Evangelical Theological Society. Read more