Jason A. Kerr recently completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston College. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Twitter: @jakerr35
Cross-posted from Historicisms. One of the more uncomfortable aspects of the “Mormon Moment” for me was seeing LDS scripture deployed against the candidate on whose behalf I chose to exerc...Read More
Note: this essay draws on material originally published in two posts on my personal blog, Historicisms. Having just read Mark McCormack’s post, “Dialogue in the Age of Unfriending,” ...Read More
On 7 October, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, was speaking to reporters outside the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC, where he had just introduced Republican presidenti...Read More
For me, 9/11 began with religion: after my clock radio alarm gave me the first hint that something had gone terribly wrong, I knelt by my bed to pray that God would watch over the affected people. The...Read More
For Part I of this series, click here; for Part II, click here; for Part III, click here; for Part IV, click here. If Stephen Marshall’s literalism makes his reading of Psalm 137 easy to interpret a...Read More
As the cases of Digby and Smectymnuus illustrate, the Israel/Edom metaphor does not readily admit of middle ground. Indeed, in a famous sermon given on the occasion of a Parliamentary fast day on 23 F...Read More
The invocations of Psalm 137 got uglier when Hall addressed a new tract to Parliament in the wake of the Root and Branch Petition. This tract drew responses from adversaries in his first category, the...Read More
Like Jacob and Esau after the episode of the pottage, the family relationship of the English Church had gone quite sour by 1640, and this bitterness gave Psalm 137 its potency in the church-government...Read More
7 Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of Jerusalem: how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground. 8 O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery: yea, happy shall he be tha...Read More
The recent events in Egypt produced many stirring images, among them those of Muslims joining hands so that Coptic Christians could hold Christmas mass unmolested in the wake of a suicide bombing outs...Read More