Frederica Mathewes-Green is a wide-ranging author who has published 11 books and 800 essays, in such diverse publications as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Smithsonian, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), a columnist for the Religion News Service, Beliefnet.com, and Christianity Today, and a podcaster for Ancient Faith Radio. (She was also a consultant for Veggie Tales.) She has published 10 books, and has appeared as a speaker over 600 times, at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Calvin, Baylor, and Westmont, and received a Doctor of Letters (honorary) from King University. She has been interviewed over 700 times, on venues like PrimeTime Live, the 700 Club, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Gregory Mathewes-Green, in Johnson City, TN. Their three children are grown and married, and they have fifteen grandchildren.
[Beliefnet, September 16, 2001]
When it hits home, we reel back. Thoughts explode in confusion: I trusted God, where is he? If he’s all-powerful, why didn’t he stop it? Maybe he doesn’t love us. Maybe he is punishing us. Maybe he is weak. Are we really so alone and endangered? Can we not trust him? Are we so terrifyingly alone?
Suffering on this scale is new to us. But it is not new to the weary human race, and countless men and women before us have tried to understand God’s presence in times of horror.
[Woman Alive, August 2001]
It is strange that I would be here. I look up toward the vaulted ceiling of our little stone church and see the drifting smoke of incense. Its fragrance mingles with the drowsy honey-scent of beeswax candles. Those tips of flame illuminate ancient faces on painted icons, faces that convey a serious and heroic faith. As my husband passes in the offertory procession, chanting intercessions,
Few book titles have had the sticking power of Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences.” Even people who’ve never read it find the blunt title instantly compelling. Weaver’s thesis was that the ideas that we absorb about the world, about the way things are or should be, inevitably direct our actions. Though the book was published in 1948, before many current bizarre ideas had fully emerged, the thesis is an eternal one. It sets people to wondering which ideas were the seeds that sprouted our present mess, and which new ideas might be helping us out of it — or further in.
[Beliefnet, July 11, 2001]
The discussion in the wake of my Fourth of July column has been invigorating, and it is moving to see the high pitch of idealism on every side. There are things I wish I'd said more clearly, and side-topics I wish I'd had room to address, but limited space demands selectivity.
[Beliefnet, July 4, 2001]
Give me liberty or give me death. Or give me something else. Staying alive, but under the rule of another nation? Yeah, that sounds all right, too.
Scandalous thoughts, especially this time of year. I’m a conservative Christian, born an American, born into the idea of faith intertwined with freedom. But I’ve been thinking over something I read recently. During the Jewish rebellion against Rome in the first century, religious leaders were the last to join the cause. They worked for peace and opposed revolution because, as one historian put it, “Roman rule presented no serious threat to Jewish religion.” In other words, overthrowing an oppressive government wasn’t a requisite of the faith.
[Beliefnet, June 20, 2001]
Just hours after the New York Times hit doorsteps on the first Sunday of this month, my e‑mailbox began to fill with distraught messages. “Sit down before you read this, in case you start crying,” wrote one friend, and another muttered “Poor Lewis must be turning over in his grave.”
[Beliefnet, June 20, 2001]
King Henry VIII was desperate. He was swept with lust for Anne Boleyn, but she was holding out for a wedding ring. The problem, of course, was Queen Katherine, who had been his loyal, forgiving wife for twenty years.
Henry needed an annulment, but the pope kept stalling. So Henry moved Katharine from one damp, drafty lodging to another, reducing her provisions, in hopes that illness would carry her off. To break her spirit, he replaced her staff with hostile spies, and refused to let her see their daughter.
[Beliefnet, May 29, 2001]
It's got the head of a monkey and the body of a monkey. But not the same monkey.
You probably don't want to hear any more details of this Mondo Bizarro medical news item. According to pioneering scientist Robert White, the mix-and-match creature he fabricated in a 1970's experiment survived for “many days.” This experiment raised hopes, he told the BBC in an interview last month, because “People are dying today who, if they had body transplants, ...would remain alive.”
[Beliefnet, April 14, 2001]
It’s that time of year again, when school children are coloring pictures of Jesus hanging from a cross, and shop-owners fill their windows with gaily colored cutouts of the Flogging at the Pillar. In the malls everyone’s humming along with seasonal hits on the sound system, like “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded” (did you hear the Chipmunks’ version?). Car dealers are promoting Great Big Empty-Tomb Size discounts on Toyotas.
Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Easter. Who hasn’t been invited to an “In His Steps” party, where players move plastic pieces around a board emblazoned with a map of Jesus’ last suffering day in Jerusalem?
[Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2001]
Imagine a convocation of New Testament scholars, circa 2100 AD, poring over a recently discovered cache of ancient scrolls. What a delightful, mystical figure Jesus cuts here! He’s hardly like the fire-and-brimstone version promoted in the establishment Gospels. Surely this is the *real* Jesus, the one suppressed for so long by a rigid hierarchy.
Sad, isn’t it, that all previous generations of scholars were too hidebound and fundamentalist to perceive the truth. Like those folks in the Jesus Seminar, a hundred years ago.
