We are so pleased to welcome back John Wigger to the Anxious Bench. John Wigger is Professor of History at the University of Missouri and author of PTL: The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Empire of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. #MeToo #ChurchToo In 1980 Jessica Hahn was sexually assaulted by one of the […]
Jessica Hahn and Evangelical Silence on Sexual Abuse Read More »
“Water You turned into wine; Opened the eyes of the blind; There’s no one like you; None like you; Into the darkness You shine; Out of the ashes we rise; There’s No one like you; None like you” In 2010 Chris Tomlin recorded these opening lyrics to “Our God” at a Passion Conference. He couldn’t
Romans 8:31, Chris Tomlin, And The Faith Of A Medieval Woman Read More »
Last Friday, 29 September 2017, we lost another World War II veteran.Out of the more than 16 million men and women who served in the American armed forces during World War II, less than 600,000 survive in 2017. More than 300 die every day. As the Veterans Statistics page from The National WWII Museum in
The Death and Historical Afterlife of a World War II Soldier Read More »
In a 2006 interview, Wayne Grudem argued that female leaders in the church (especially pastors) are disobeying God’s word and thus open to “the withdrawal of God’s hand of protection and blessing.” As Grudem explained: “A woman who serves as a pastor, preaching to both men and women, is disobeying the word of God. There
An Ordinary Preaching Woman in a Texas Baptist Church, c. 1930 Read More »
The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood exploded my twitter feed last week. As a Texan with both friends and family in Houston, I really just wanted to see the update on Hurricane Harvey. But the Nashville Statement dominated my news feed. I confess after scrolling through headline after headline I mostly just felt tired.
Riding the London Eye is deceptively peaceful. The city that slowly unfolds below seems a different place from the noise and heat of the crowded South Bank. I always look first for Cleopatra’s Needle, the 3500 year-old Egyptian obelisk shipped to England in the nineteenth-century and hoisted along the Victorian Embankment Gardens. The startling incongruity
Should Women Rule? Netflix’s The Crown and Complementarian Theology Read More »
It probably doesn’t surprise you that I have always loved Wonder Woman. My mother will testify that it is one show my little sister and I refused to miss. It is also my first clear memory of watching TV. The story of Wonder Woman, however, didn’t begin in 1975 with Lynda Carter as Diana Prince.
On September 19, 2016, I received news so shocking that the world stopped. I was walking across campus when the text came through. For a few seconds I am not sure what happened. I remember the sky flashing blue above me; I remember the sound of falling water from the nearby fountain. I had been
Several months ago I heard a catchy phrase preached in a sermon. But it wasn’t until recently, when I began to compare popular medieval Bible verses with popular modern bible verses (thanks Bible Gateway!), that I began to think about the phrase more critically. So what is the phrase? “Information does not equal transformation.” Not
Lysa TerKeurst, Bible Gateway, and Fides ex Auditu: the Biblical Heart of Medieval Faith Read More »
Recently, Karen Swallow Prior spoke out against the “Billy Graham rule”–married men distancing themselves from women to avoid temptation and the appearance of evil. For those of you who missed Prior’s article, she eloquently argued that good moral character is better than rigid behavioral rules. As she writes, “Virtue ethics relies on moral character that