Still unfamiliar with Juneteenth? Get up to speed here. The Atlantic offers some reading suggestions, including this take on Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth: Back in 2021, about a month before Juneteenth became a federal holiday, The Atlantic published an excerpt from Annette Gordon-Reed’s […]
Archives for June 2024
Cornerstone University responds to our story on faculty cuts and the termination of humanities and arts programs
Earlier this week, we called your attention to Cornerstone University’s decision to fire tenured professors and terminate all humanities and arts programs. Get up to speed here. Yesterday, WOOD TV-8 the Grand Rapids NBC affiliate, did a story on our […]
Vin Scully meets Willie Mays
On the day of Scully’s final Dodgers broadcast: RIP Say Hey Kid! And as long as we are talking about Scully, I still love his rendition of the Lord’s Prayer:
The Author’s Corner with Gaines M. Foster
Gaines M. Foster is Murphy J. Foster Professor of History Emeritus at Louisiana State University. This interview is based on his new book, The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory (LSU Press, 2024). JF: What led […]
Who’s at fault? They-a culpa, mea culpa
Underestimating Trump has gotten us here.
LONG FORM: It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Springsteen’s Catholic localism permeates his music in winsome ways
Willie Mays, RIP
Here is #647: Here is the start of the New York Times obit: Willie Mays, the spirited center fielder whose brilliance at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths for the Giants led many to call him the […]
The National Association of Evangelicals praises Biden’s executive action on undocumented immigrant’s spouses and children
Get up to speed here. Here is the National Association of Evangelicals release: The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) welcomes the announcement today that the United States will no longer deport the undocumented spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens […]
CURRENT keeps rolling along. We’d love your support!
As I’ve said multiple times at this blog, I hate asking for money. They didn’t teach me how to do this graduate school, but after three years of serving as the Executive Editor of Current I am realizing that these […]
The Summer-Fall speaking schedule is filling-up
I’m starting to get back on the road. Here are some of the places I am heading: Next week I’ll be in Boston studying the city’s colonial and revolutionary history with a great group of teachers from the Roanoke, Virginia […]
Is the Biden administration “demonic”?
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council thinks so: Sadly, this is the dominant form of evangelical political engagement these days. Politics as spiritual warfare. Historians like to talk about “contingency”–the choices people make that shape the future. There were […]
When evangelical leaders fail: Some thoughts from Augustine
Christianity Today news editor Daniel Silliman is trying to make sense of the recent spate of moral failures in evangelical leadership. Some good words here from Dan and Augustine: Today is not a day when I feel particularly optimistic about […]
“The divide within the Republican Party…is between people who know how to work within the existing system, and outsiders who want to overturn it.”
Alternative title: What is going on in Indiana gubernatorial politics? Here is Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: The Indiana governor’s race should not, under normal circumstances, be remotely competitive. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state by 16 […]
The Author’s Corner with Richard E. Ocejo
Richard E. Ocejo is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. This interview is based on his new book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton […]
PREVIEW: Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery
If George Whitefield was ‘America’s Spiritual Founding Father,’ the road ahead was bound to be rough
The life you save may be your own
Our first duty isn’t the great affairs of nations, but to attend to our own soul and the good of our neighbors.
The art of living: Angela Lansbury
Some celebrities are exemplars in many ways, but the public is less aware.
Juneteenth before Juneteenth
Historians Susannah J. Ural and Ann Marsh Daly tell the stories of Black men and women celebrating emancipation well before Juneteenth became a holiday. Here is a taste of their piece at The Atlantic: In a quiet corner of a library at […]
What happens when the “greatest” moment in your denomination’s history was orchestrated by a sexual abuser of boys?
This weekend we learned that Paul Pressler, the lawyer who co-led the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention and a sexual abuser of boys, passed away at the age of 94. He died on June 7. Baptist News Global […]
A Milwaukee brewery rolls out a new IPA after Trump’s comments about the city
Last week Donald Trump had some things to say about Milwaukee, the host of the GOP national convention where he will receive the Republican Party’s nomination for president in July. “Milwaukee, where we are having our convention,” Trump said, “is […]