The late months of the year bring many changes–the days become short, the weather cold, the landscape bare, the ground hard. During this season, the country has paused to remember–the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the 93rd anniversary of the Armistice. Amidst these sobering times of reflection, the Church prepares to celebrate the seasons of Advent and Christmastide–times of joy and peace. Yet the question arises in these times of remembrance, “Where has the Church been during the times when war, not peace, has covered the earth?” All too often it seems that the Church has made itself an accessory to war instead of calling all warring parties to account.
A Season of Remembrance
In Essays on 11 December 2011 at 3:06 pmCornbread and Caviar / Bob Jones Jr.
In Books on 23 June 2011 at 7:52 pm
I first read Cornbread and Caviar when I was in high school. Bob Jones Jr.’s love for fighting fire with fire and his willingness to say embarassing things about the yet living made it entertaining fare. Stories about Ma Sunday filching fried chicken? Check. Broadsides against Billy Graham? Check. As a teenager, a line like this was just fun: “What a tragedy to see him [Billy Graham] building the church of Antichrist, masking the wickedness of popery, and providing a sheep’s cloak of Christian recognition for the wolves of apostasy.” After receiving a new copy of the book from my uncle last week, I decided to reread it and see what caught my attention now that I’m a graduate student with an interest in twentieth century fundamentalism.
The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South.
The Rapture Index: How the Hermeneutics of Rapture Predictions Are Modern
In Essays on 15 June 2011 at 10:34 pm
There are a whole host of adjectives used to describe fundamentalist religion: backwards, anti-modern, reactionary, unscientific, ante-Diluvian.* The idea behind all of those descriptions is that fundamentalist religions have fallen off the train of progress. It’s a whiggish notion that religion, like society and politics, is advancing to greater freedom, rationality, and liberality thanks to science; consequently, fundamentalist religions that don’t share those goals are backwards, and will fade away in time.
It’s also a notion that is wrong.
