I recently finished reading Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity,and the Unmaking of the American Dream. I have been a fan of Lehmann’s writing for some time now. A former graduate student in history at the University of Rochester where he...
The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only “bench” that is experiencing a change of personnel. As John Turner of George Mason University reports, Thomas Kidd, the prolific historian of American Christianity at Baylor University, will be...
Today’s post at the “The Anxious Bench” was my last as a regular contributor. I am stepping away from my weekly spot at the blog so I can devote more attention to other projects, including The Way of Improvement Leads...
Here it is, complete with the cover of L’Amour’s Bendigo Shafter....
Those who of you who thought I had gone off the deep end with last week’s critique of Dr. Ben Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast speech will probably be even more disturbed by the fact that today I will be speaking...
A couple of weeks ago I asked; “Where Are the Studies of Twentieth-Century Black Evangelicalism?” I was working on an article on evangelical political engagement and wanted to say something about the role of Black evangelicals, but I was unable...
The debate over David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies continues. The conservative Christian World Magazine has published a lengthy essay by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter drawn largely from their book, Getting Jefferson Right. The fitting title of their article is...
I am working on some revisions to an article on evangelicals and political engagement in the twentieth century. If all goes well, the essay will find its way into a collection of essays stemming from a series of Catholic-Evangelical dialogues...
Did you get a chance to watch The Abolitionists last night on PBS? If you missed it, you can watch the first episode here. The series focuses on five nineteenth-century abolitionists–Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown,...
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. If you do not read him regularly you should. Sometimes Wieseltier will make you angry, but he will always make you think. In the December 31 issue of the magazine...
In the wake of Thomas Kidd’s post on his five most compelling religious biographies, I thought I would offer an end-of-the year reading list of my own. Here are some of the best books (in no particular order) I read...
My friend John Turner, a historian at George Mason University, author of a biography of Brigham Young that has been receiving a lot of attention, and a fellow blogger, suggested that I post this piece over at the Anxious Bench. […]
“As an American historian, what do you think about the 2012 presidential election?” I am asked this question often and I am never sure how to answer it. Ask me in another ten or twenty years and maybe I might...
I recently read Ron Sider’s excellent The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World. If you have not read it yet, you should. If you have the time, I would strongly encourage...
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stood before the crowd at the United States capitol building to deliver his second inaugural address. Lincoln was addressing a nation nearing the conclusion of a long and bloody Civil War that took 600,000 […]
Two weeks ago I wrote in this space about the relationship between the historians work and the reality of human sin. This week, I want to focus on the historian’s work as it relates to the Judeo-Christian belief in Imago […]
This semester I am teaching a sophomore seminar entitled “Historical Methods.” Since I teach at a Christian college, we spend a lot of time in this course thinking about the relationship between Christianity and the practice of doing history. This...
According to Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance, “The Anxious Bench” is the 95th best “church blog” on the Internet. I am not sure what this all means, but the ranking has me thinking. Are we really a “church blog?” Read […]
My apologies to the readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home, but this week’s Anxious Post post is a repeat. The Founding Fathers would have been proud of Barack Obama’s speech Thursday night in Charlotte. Ever since the Chicago-based […]
I spent the last couple of days at Duke University where I gave a lecture at a really interesting conference on the Bible in the Public Square. The conference was sponsored by the Duke Department of Religion, the Duke Center...
