With the 2016 Summer Olympics just days away, let’s test your knowledge of the religious history of the games: Who banned the ancient Olympics in AD 393, and for what religious reason? What 1935 initiative had the joint support of Reinhold Niebuhr, the first Catholic to be a major party nominee for president, and the … More Religion in The Olympics… And The Olympics as Religion
Last week my Anxious Bench colleague John Turner drew our attention to America’s Public Bible, a new project by Lincoln Mullen. A leading digital historian who works (like John) at George Mason University, Lincoln describes APB in this way: America’s Public Bible uncovers the presence of biblical quotations in the nearly 11 million newspaper pages in the Library of Congress’s … More Following Up: Micah 6:8 in American Rhetoric
I’ve occasionally used this blog to write about my mom and her family, my dad and his family, and my children. But today I’m going to break with longstanding tradition and devote an entire post to my wife Katie. (But knowing how much this will embarrass her, I’ll try to keep it short. Just over a … More For My Wife, on Our Tenth Wedding Anniversary
I was honored this past spring to be elected to the executive board of the Conference on Faith and History, the leading professional society for Christian historians. As luck would have it, my first meeting with that group will take place at the CFH biennial meeting this October 20-22 in Virginia Beach, Virginia — on the other … More What’s Coming Up This Fall at the Conference on Faith and History
Not long before Britons voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, I wrote an Anxious Bench post surveying some Christian statements about “Brexit.” Now that it’s been a week since that vote, I thought I’d share a few responses and postmortems from and about British Christians: • Earlier surveys had predicted that practicing Christians would be the religious group most likely to … More British Christian Responses to Brexit
Some levity for your evening: from many of the same summer-breaking scholars of religion who brought you #IfTrumpwereEvangelical, it’s #MethodistHillary! In the spirit of #iftrumpwereevangelical comes super #MethodistHillary. She wants your vote but also that casserole recipe. — Kate Bowler (@KatecBowler) June 28, 2016 N/sure #MethodistHillary can be as yuge as #iftrumpwereevangelical… or wants to be … More #MethodistHillary
Before I write too many posts for The Anxious Bench, I thought I ought to explain “what I mean by ‘Pietist’ — and why I associate myself with a term that tends to inspire blank looks or antipathy.” A lot of what I have to say in that post should be familiar to readers of this blog, and to … More What It Means to Say “I’m a Pietist” in 2016
Quick math: (presidential campaign season + sudden conversion story + observers of evangelicalism on summer break) x (social media) = ? That’s right: #iftrumpwereevangelical! If you’re on Twitter, agree that the best response to fear is laughter, and enjoy inside references to evangelical subculture, then you should click on the day’s fastest-trending hashtag. (Well, the most hilarious.) Among my favorites … More #iftrumpwereevangelical
As I begin work on a book with one of its pastors about its theological heritage, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Evangelical Covenant Church. So with delegates from its congregations gathering in Phoenix, Arizona for our denomination’s annual meeting, I thought I’d share a few quotations from a few of my favorite Covenanters, clustered around our denomination’s … More Glad Hearts: Some of My Favorite Voices from the Covenant Church
Republicans have garnered 77-78% of the evangelical vote in the last three major elections (2014, 2012, 2010). And it seems unlikely that Hillary Clinton will even reach the near-quarter of the evangelical vote that Barack Obama won in 2008. In April, Barna found that 81% of evangelicals had an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton — over … More Could Hillary Clinton Win a Significant Share of Evangelical Voters?
The Pietist Schoolman 