evangelical

In 1978, a who’s who of conservative evangelical leaders met in Chicago to draft a statement on biblical inerrancy. It would change the course of church and state.

Sandra Glahn shows how the Greek goddess’s prestige influenced the portrayal of women in Ephesians and 1 Timothy.

They’re selling marriage as a promise and a return on investment. It’s both misguided and genuinely appealing.

Is there a word for nostalgia tinged with trauma?

“These women are a puzzle hidden in plain sight.”

“I look on my faith as a liberation.”

Joshua Jipp's book does something few biblical scholars attempt: it offers explicit proposals for the church.

Fackre was influential in the formation of the United Church of Christ and wrote the five-volume work The Christian Story.

The Dones aren’t leaving church because they’re burned out. They’ve hit so much bureaucracy that they seek more efficient venues.

Katharine Bushnell was a reforming whirlwind who left the mission field to campaign for temperance and against the sex trade.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris in mid-November, Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz set off a flurry of controversy when he announced that he believed the federal government should bar Muslim refugees fleeing violence and civil war in Syria from resettling in the United States. He stated on Fox News, “on the other hand, Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them.”

After President Obama described these sentiments as “shameful” and “un-American,” Cruz doubled down.

Brian Steensland and Philip Goff's valuable anthology addresses a topic that usually flies under the media's radar: "new" evangelicals' progressive social engagement.

The reevaluation of liberal Protestantism and its real but perhaps overstated decline—a topic that the Century has covered with this review, and related commentary by Martin Marty and by John Buchanan—was picked up by the New York Times this week.

The Times story does a decent job summarizing the debate, in which the overarching question is posed by historian David Hollinger (interviewed by the Century last year): Did liberal Protestants of midcentury win the culture war but lose the church?

Barton Swaim, reviewing Elesha J. Coffman’s The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), wrote this:

Nor were the editors [of the Christian Century] above dirty tricks, at one point even hiring an investigative reporter to find some impropriety in [the Billy Graham] organization’s finances. None came to light, but in something of a scoop, Ms. Coffman has discovered documents linking the revered historian Martin Marty to the rough anti-Graham campaign.

As far as Coffman’s book goes, I have only the usual quibbles that a historian voices when reviewing the work of another historian. It is Swaim who is unfair to the magazine.

I keep seeing T. F. Charlton's Jason Collins post everywhere, and with good reason:

Tim Tebow is an example of how the public face of Christian athletes, like the public face of American Christianity in general, is overwhelmingly white—despite the fact that black Americans are the racial demographic most likely to identify as “very religious.” A recent Barna poll found that Tebow is by far the most well-known Christian professional athlete in the U.S. (with 83% awareness from the public), with retired white quarterback Kurt Warner a distant second at 59%. Robert Griffin III (RGIII), a black quarterback who’s had a far more successful season with the Redskins than Tebow’s had with the Jets, trailed at 34%.

It's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story.

Justin Lee's book is more than charitable to his Southern Baptist origins. But his heart-wrenching stories speak for themselves.

How did evangelicals develop their belief in an invisible God? T. M. Luhrmann argues that they created a space in their imagination.