Impious and amoral, petty and vindictive, Richard Nixon is not the typical protagonist of a religious biography. But spiritual drama is at the heart of this former president’s tragic story. The night before his resignation, Richard Nixon wept—and prayed. Though his demanding parents had raised him Quaker, he wasn’t a regular churchgoer, nor was he quick to express vulnerability. As Henry Kissinger witnessed Nixon’s loneliness and humiliation that night, he remarked, “Can you ima...
American history has profoundly shaped, and been shaped by, Christianity. Turning Points in American Church History provides a brisk and lively yet deeply researched survey of these intertwined forces from the colonial period to the present. Elesha Coffman tells the story of Christianity in the United States by focusing on 13 key events over four centuries of history. The turning points are as varied as the movements they track, including a naval battle, a revival, a schism, a court case, an ...
Today’s political and cultural polarization has led to suspicion and animosity in our churches, our workplaces, and even our families. It has also led to a false sense that our options are limited to choosing a side. But there is a better way. Shirley Mullen invites readers to claim the powerful, redemptive potential of the courageous middle. Far from being a place of bland averaging, moral cowardice, wobbling indecisiveness, or lazy indifference, the courageous middle is a place where though...
The beloved Little Housebooks by Laura Ingalls Wilder have sold over 60 million copies since their publication in the first half of the twentieth century. Even her unpolished memoir, Pioneer Girl, which tells the true story behind the children’s books, was widely embraced upon its release in 2014. Despite Wilder’s enduring popularity, few fans know much about her Christian beliefs and practice. John J. Fry shines a light on Wilder’s quiet faith in this unique biography. Fry surveys the Littl...
The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology. In this unique exploration of evangelical subcultu...
In God Gave Rock and Roll to You (OUP, 2024), Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped–and continue to shape–conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and ...
Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and ...
Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire. These believers blurred and pushed the boundaries of what it meant to ...
In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. “Socialism,” he wrote, “has become a distinct substitute” for the church. He was not wrong. In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. The...
In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them,...
What has been the history of the Conference on Faith and History? What have been the high points, the difficult points, and what have we learned as an organization that seeks to explore the relationship between the Christian faith and history? And what would one generation of historians wish to pass on to the next generation of historians? Listen in as the Western Regional President of CFH, David McFarland, moderates a panel of longtime members of CFH, which include: Shirley Mullin, Barry Han...
South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli show...
Christians need to pause once in a while to get their bearings. For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light (IVP Academic, 2023), the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards. Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets fort...
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) is one of the most widely known Christians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. After the death of her husband, Jim, and four other missionaries at the hands of Waorani tribesmen in Ecuador, Elliot famously returned to live among the same people who had killed her husband. Her legacy, however, extends far beyond these events. In the years that followed, Elliot became a prolific writer and speaker, touching the lives of countless people around the world. In...
Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His “Today and Tomorrow” columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth...
Since the shootings in Buffalo, Laguna Woods, and Uvalde, the AACC (Asian American Christian Collaborative) has been a crucial Christian organization that is actively pursuing advocacy and policy efforts to address gun violence in the United States. During April of 2023, the Anxious Bench proudly partnered with the AACC to raise awareness about the long and terrible history of gun violence in the United States. You may find the series of Anxious Bench articles below, if you wish to read thema...
Though born into slavery, Sojourner Truth would defy the limits placed upon her as a Black woman to become one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned female preachers and civil rights advocates. In We Will Be Free, Nancy Koester chronicles her spiritual journey as an enslaved woman, a working mother, and an itinerant preacher and activist. On Pentecost in 1827, the course of Sojourner Truth’s life was changed forever when she had a vision of Jesus calling her to preach. Though...
Drawing on the evidence from medieval and early modern sermons, and in particular the narratives of the cursed carolers and the dance of Salome, this book explores these changing understandings of dance as they relate to religion, gender, sin, and community within the English parish. In parishes both before and during the English Reformations, dance played an integral role in creating, maintaining, uniting, or fracturing community. But as theological understandings of sacrilege, sin, and prop...
Dr. Jonathan Tran hosts a conversation with author, Dr. Melissa Borja, about her book, Follow the New Way. Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel app...
Enjoy this conversation between Dr. Joey Cochran and Dr. Paul Gutacker on Gutacker's book, The Old Faith in a New Nation. BOOK SUMMARY Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and f...