That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

This week I wrote about Confederate statues at The Anxious Bench and… well, I wrote thousands of words about Charles Lindbergh. (Yep, manuscript deadline starting to loom.) Elsewhere…

• I used this week’s 5th anniversary of the shootings in Charleston, SC to frame my Confederate commemoration post. The historic AME church where those nine people were murdered has become a site of pilgrimage.

• What does it look like to practice “convicted civility” after the death of George Floyd? Amar Peterman had some suggestions for fellow evangelicals.

• If you haven’t yet seen Phil Vischer’s attempt to explain racialization in less than 20 minutes, check it out:

• I’m happy to see Juneteenth become a national phenomenon (perhaps a “truer Independence Day” than July 4th), but I also appreciate historian Annette Gordon-Reed reflecting on what that holiday meant for African American communities and families like hers when she was growing up.

• What effect did the initial protests in Minneapolis have on the spread of COVID-19? Less than I would have expected, according to early analysis of extensive testing data collected from protesters.

• Is our experience of the pandemic actually verifying the old saw that “absence makes the heart grow fonder“?

Read more from David in his new history of American evangelicals and world Christianity

• My Anxious Bench colleague David Swartz explained how missions caused a “supernatural turn” among American evangelicals.

• In the wake of this week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on workplace discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, Daniel Bennett warned against making premature assumptions of what it implies for religious organizations like Christian colleges.

• Meanwhile, The Gospel Coalition actually ran a piece recommending “a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy.”

• By the way, it seems like “the Venn diagram of reformed, complementarian, and misogynist has a pretty significant overlap….”

• “I can’t use any of this. It’s too much,” Jeff Sharlet tells himself at one point in reporting his article on the “cult of Trump” for Vanity Fair. But something can be unbelievable, outlandish, and yet still true.

• Then I don’t know how to fit this in… but if only because we’ve made so much of this meal while sheltering in place with two 10-year olds, I found fascinating the history of boxed mac ‘n’ cheese.