religious history

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• SOURCE: Vox
  7/12/2020
  

  Is Evangelical Support for Trump a Contradiction?

  Religious historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez explains why Trump wasn’t a trade-off for American evangelicals.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/29/2020
  

  In Search of King David’s Lost Empire

  The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Biblical archaeologist Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin sheikh?

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• SOURCE: Catholic Sun
  5/22/2020
  

  Polish Historian Questions German Researcher’s Claims About Wartime Pope

  "I’ve never personally encountered a situation in which 11 volumes of material, published over two decades, are suddenly countermanded by a single document, found after a few days’ research," says Jan Zaryn.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  2/25/20
  

  Why Religion Is the Best Hope Against Trump

  by Jon Meacham

  Evangelicals may support an amoral president. But faith can still offer hope for liberation and progress.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/10/10
  

  Lynching preachers: How black pastors resisted Jim Crow and white pastors incited racial violence

  by Malcolm Brian Foley

  Religion was no barrier for these white murderers, as I’ve discovered in my research on Christianity and lynch mobs in the Reconstruction-era South. White preachers incited racial violence, joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched black people.

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• 2/9/20
  

  How Religious History Helps Us Understand Russia's War Against Ukrainian Independence

  by Khrystyna Karelska and Andreas Umland

  In recent months, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian multidimensional military, political, economic and cultural conflict has made international news. What is less well known beyond Eastern Europe is the important religious aspect of Moscow’s “hybrid war” against Ukrainian national independence.

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• SOURCE: The Dialog
  2/2/20
  

  Black History Month has a little known Catholic history as well

  by Shannen Dee Williams

  In 1949, famed Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes celebrated Negro History Week (the precursor to Black History Month) with members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence and their students at the all black and Catholic St. Alphonsus School.

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• 2/2/20
  

  Why Thomas Jefferson Was Really No Friend of Religious Freedom

  by M. Andrew Holowchak

  Thomas Jefferson, because of the passage of his Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom, is customarily viewed by scholars as a paladin of religious freedom. Yet there is reason to question that view.

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• 2/2/20
  

  Kindergarten Goes to the University Classroom: The Educational Value of Show and Tell

  by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

  During the Fall 2019 semester, I experimented with having students do 10-minute Show and Tell presentations in my Secularisms/Atheisms religious studies and U.S. history seminar. The results couldn’t have been better.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  1/8/20
  

  Evangelicals using religion for political gain is nothing new. It is a US tradition

  by Reverend William Barber

  No one who has read US history can be surprised by the hypocrisy of Evangelicals for Trump but it also tells us how their undoing will inevitably come.

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• SOURCE: The Hollywood Progressive
  12/28/19
  

  Why Netflix’s The Two Popes Is Important

  by Walter G. Moss

  At the core of the film are the differences between Benedict and Francis, especially before Benedict retired and Francis took his place.

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• 12/22/19
  

  An Abolitionist and the Christmas Tree

  by John Buehrens

  Christmas, in 1835 Boston, was not yet widely celebrated. New England’s Puritan heritage considered it “popish.”

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• 12/8/19
  

  Jack Miles' God in the Qur’an brings the three Abrahamic traditions to the table

  by Zaman Stanizai

  We cannot force someone to hear a message they are not ready to receive, but we must never underestimate the power of planting a seed.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/4/19
  

  Calling Trump ‘the chosen one’ is a political act — not a theological statement

  by Wallace Best

  Claims about God’s plans for the United States often morph into justifications for wrongdoing.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  12/3/2019
  

  Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves

  by Robert Gudmestad

  Harriet Tubman worked as a slave, spy and eventually as an abolitionist. What I find most fascinating, as a historian of American slavery, is how belief in God helped Tubman remain fearless, even when she came face to face with many challenges.

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• 12/1/2019
  

  How did November become the Mizrahi Heritage Month? And what’s Mizrahi anyhow?

  by Lior Sternfeld and Arie M. Dubnov

  The Mizrahi heritage month is not a local, grassroots initiative that emerged in response to experiences of discrimination or marginalization. Instead, it is a transatlantic importation of recent attempts by the Israeli government to commemorate the forced expulsion of Jews from the Arab and Muslim world in the wake of the establishment of Israel.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/26/19
  

  The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump

  by Thomas Lecaque

  Implicit is a vision of the president as a triumphantly apocalyptic figure, one who evokes the medieval legend of the Last World Emperor.

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• 11/26/19
  

  Bodhisattvas and Saints

  by Ed Simon

  St. Josaphat is a particularly remarkable Roman Catholic saint, for he’s normally known by a rather different title – the Buddha. 

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• 11/21/19
  

  Coexistence and Sectarianism in the Modern Arab World

  by Ussama Makdisi

  In the case of the Middle East, the need to demythologize communities and their ideological underpinnings needs to go hand in hand with evoking a dynamic history of coexistence that transcends communalism. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  11/14/19
  

  Thomas Kidd Featured on NPR's All Things Considered:

  'Who Is An Evangelical?' Looks At History Of Evangelical Christians And The GOP