“a fire burnt the whole parish of St. Alkmund’s starting at daybreak on the eve of Pentecost….anno. 1312.” I was in a meeting with my fellow graduate deans when I first saw the pictures. My colleague just handed me his phone. He said something, but I don’t remember his words as the image drowned out…
Cancer is terrible. It steals life. We have so many more treatment options available now and so much progress has been made (my father who has been a family physician since 1972 keeps reminding me that medicine miracles are just right around the corner), yet cancer treatments still wear down the body and exhaust the…
I usually never read comments on my blogs, much less respond to them. But one recently caught my eye. It was posted on a twitter thread following a tweet by Katelyn Beaty about my last AB article posted by Scot McKnight on Jesus Creed (sorry, the social media world can be a confusing place…). This…
In 1976, Elisabeth Elliot published her landmark book Let Me Be A Woman: Notes to My Daughter on the Meaning of Womanhood. If you remember, Elisabeth Elliot’s first husband Jim was one of five missionaries speared to death in Ecuador in 1956. Let Me Be A Woman was a gift to her daughter, Valerie–Elliot’s only…
I am so pleased to welcome guest blogger Leslie Hahner, PhD, to The Anxious Bench today. Leslie is a brilliant thinker, writer, and professor. I know this because we have been in an interdisciplinary writing group together since 2011. She has two recently published books, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the…
“White Jesus has blood on him.” Angela Tarango, Associate Professor of Religion at Trinity University, said this during the Conference on Faith and History’s 2019 panel for the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago last weekend. The panel (which I was so excited to have organized) featured Jennifer Graber’s excellent and provocative book The Gods…