Here… • Study Day during Finals Week isn’t really a typical day in my life as a Christian college professor… but this year it reminded me of all the reasons why I enjoy my job. • John Fea’s observations about the loneliness of people in our line of work got me thinking about history as being … More That Was The Week That Was
While I didn’t do a lot of blogging during my travel course in Europe, I did try to keep up on my newsfeed. So as we near the end of January, I’ll share a couple of links wraps covering the whole month. I’ll come back to history and education tomorrow, but let’s start with the first overarching topic … More That Was The Month That Was: Christianity
One way or another, it’s clear that white evangelical support for Donald Trump is the biggest religion-and-politics story to come out of the election. But as a former student pointed out to me yesterday, that’s not the only Christian group that might have some soul-searching to do. Now, this is preliminary analysis of exit polls, and such … More It’s Not Just Evangelicals…
Because it was written by a Jesuit in a Jesuit magazine, I suspect that most evangelicals haven’t read James Martin’s “A Two-Way Bridge,” a lecture given to a Catholic LGBT group that was published over the weekend at the website for America. That’s a shame, since his first paragraph could be addressed to evangelicals with some simple … More A Two-Way Bridge: Sexuality, Evangelicals, and Christian Higher Ed
One of the highlights of the 2016 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History was Jay Green’s presidential address, “Evangelical Historiography, Evangelical Identity, and the Spiritual Vision of History.” Like many of his predecessors, Jay offered an erudite, thought-provoking reflection on the past, present, and future of a professional society whose “primary goal is … More Should Evangelical Historians Contend for Evangelical Identity?
Here… • I surveyed the religious history of the modern Olympic Games for my weekly Anxious Bench post… also reflecting briefly on the Olympics as religion (a theme I developed a bit more when invited to rewrite that post for The Gospel Coalition). • After a year of enormous division, could the games help bring Americans together? • And for no … More That Was The Week That Was
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
Here… • My wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is tin or aluminum, but I went with public praise and ecclesiological rumination instead. • We’ll be spending my sabbatical as a family in Virginia, where I can’t wait to attend the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. • Some reflections on the Stanford … More That Was The Week That Was
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
In the wake of the recent Southern Baptist debate about religious freedom for Muslims — and given the larger conversation about the meaning of religious freedom in an increasingly post-Christian society — I thought I’d use this week’s Anxious Bench post to revisit something I wrote about last year: how Baptists responded to the 1960s Supreme Court rulings against … More Religious Freedom: The Contested Core of Baptist Identity
The Pietist Schoolman 