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
Last time I wrote about the amazing ecstatic behavior of followers of a radical Catholic sect in France in the 1730s, who became known as the Convulsionnaires, focused on what became a popular shrine at St. Médard. I was struck by the similarities of that upsurge to the fringes of revivals and awakenings in the Anglo-American world, for instance in 1740 and 1798, and asked why the French movement should not have evolved in the same way, into a mass... Read more
This blog concerns a complaint I often have when I read Christian history, which in an English-language context is all too often written as if Christian is synonymous with Protestant, and that alone. As I will suggest, not only is far more happening in the Catholic context than is known to most non-specialists, but that Catholic story has uncanny parallels to the familiar Protestant tale. Comparing the two stories offers powerful lessons for understanding landmark events in Christian history, including... Read more
Guest blogger Angela Tarango shares some of her research on the material culture of Tejano Methodists, including their response to the COVID pandemic. Read more
In 164 BCE, the Maccabees, the Jewish priestly family that would go on to found the Hasmonaean dynasty, managed a miracle. They successfully wrestled control over Jerusalem from the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, and rededicated the Temple. From the perspective of military history, this was astonishing, as it is difficult to overemphasize the magnitude of the resources and military capabilities of the Seleucid Empire compared to the relatively small and ragged crew that the Maccabees led in their revolt. But it... Read more
This blog serves a number of purposes. It helps Christians think more deeply about the history of their faith, and to understand its relevance for the church today. It creates space for some Christian historians to think out loud about their research and get feedback from prospective readers. But on this last day of November, The Anxious Bench has another, equally serious mission to fulfill: To help you buy Christmas gifts for the history buff in your life. I know the urgency... Read more
While religious Americans might have exaggerated the “godlessness” of communism during the Cold War, they were spot-on with respect to one state: Albania. The communist regime that swept to power there after World War II dealt with clerical opposition by killing or imprisoning vocal clerics, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim—although the more educated Catholic clergy had it particularly bad with the entire hierarchy (save one bishop) being wiped out by the 1950s. I have recently returned from the small country... Read more
In the opening years of the eighteenth century, England experienced an outbreak of spiritual excitement, and indeed excess, of a kind that many societies have noted before and since. People claimed amazing spiritual and mystical episodes, accompanied by stories of prophecies, healings, and even resurrections. Sometimes, such phenomena betoken a religious revival, or might at the disreputable fringes of such a revival. On this occasion, though, the extreme manifestations – what people at the time called “enthusiasm” or fanaticism –... Read more
Today we’re happy to welcome back to the Bench Janine Giordano Drake. A faculty member in History at Indiana University, where she specializes in US labor and working class history, US religious history, and the US Survey, Janine’s book, War for the Soul of the Christian Nation, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. We’ve all heard the story: Abe Lincoln created the national holiday we call “Thanksgiving” in 1863. In the midst of incredible carnage due to war and disease, the... Read more
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