Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Co-Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. He received his Ph.D. in history from University of Cambridge, and he has also been Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies and Professor of Criminal Justice and American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Professor Jenkins is the author of the books, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses; The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died; The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South; Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America; Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality; The New Anti-Catholicism The Last Acceptable Prejudice; Images of Terror: What We Can And Can't Know About Terrorism; The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity; Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way ; Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet; Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History; Synthetic Panics: The Politics of Designer Drugs; The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania 1945-1960; Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America; Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950; A History of the United States; Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis; Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide; Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain; A History of Modern Wales 1536-1990; Crime and Justice: Issues and Ideas; and The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790. His edited books include The Berlin Wall: Representations and Perspectives (with Ernst Schurer and Manfred Keune) and B. Traven: Life and Work (with Ernst Schurer).
His scholarly articles have appeared in numerous journals and his popular writings have been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Books and Culture, Boston Globe, Atlantic Monthly, Arizona Republic, Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Christian Century, First Things, Foreign Policy, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, and American Conservative.
