Late last month, Liberty University and its former president, Jerry Falwell Jr., settled for an undisclosed amount to end a multi-year, sprawling set of multi-million dollar lawsuits brought by Falwell against the Lynchburg, Va.-based school. For the world’s “largest evangelical university,” the…
Congressman John Lewis is my choice in this election
John Lewis has been called the moral conscience of the United States Congress. His death in July 2020 was a great loss to all of us. I mourn his death, but I call on his dream, his spirit, for our…
Rome for Christmas
One of the factoids for which 2023 will be remembered is the TikTok hashtag #romanempire. This was the year a generation of women (much to their surprise and bemusement) learned the men in their lives think about ancient Rome regularly…
Prior explores the origin of evangelicalism’s ‘empire mentality’
The allure of empire is so deeply baked into evangelical culture that it is expressed in compulsive and sometimes unconscious ways, author and scholar Karen Swallow Prior said. “We have this empire mentality,” Prior said during a Sept. 18 webinar…
The state murder of Tyre Nichols
Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison. — Mark 6:27 On the day we write this post, during the week Tyre Nichols was buried…
What Kenobi has taught me about God
Spoiler alert: This article includes important plot information about the new series Kenobi. I’ve always considered myself a pop culture theologian. Since my earliest writings for my hometown newspaper, I would take the recent blockbuster film and compare it to…
What do ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ have to do with American Christianity today?
Remember the opening of the first Hunger Games movie? At the annual reaping ceremony in District 12, Capitol representative Effie Trinket plays a short film for her captive audience. The montage, narrated by President Snow, depicts scenes from Panem’s history…
‘The Lapsed’: An ancient church controversy with 2020 implications
We’ve all lapsed from something, haven’t we? If we live long enough, we lapse from all sorts of promises, convictions and ideals we thought we’d never relinquish. COVID-19 has enforced collective lapses from restaurants, concerts, movies and sporting events, not…
The vital work ahead: evangelizing the evangelicals and demythologizing the empire
We are being called to die for an economy that only works for a handful of people. The racial caste system brutalizes black and other communities of color, while dangling just enough opportunity to white people to keep the system intact and to prevent most of us from revolting.