iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I'm thrilled to be returning to Wheaton College this week to share from my current research. If any friends in the area are interested, come out on Wednesday night! 🗃️

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

On the fiction that we're in total control of our health. Building on Nancy Tomes's history of patients becoming savvy consumers. #histmed 🗃️ hedgehogreview.com/issues/after...

"So once you’re equipped with information, your next stop is the app store on your phone. There’s an app for every landmark on your journey. Just accept the terms, download, and follow the prompts. And stay alert to the health news filling your inbox. It is on you to journey safely, and older advice can lead you straight off a cliff."

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Even better, it's part of a cluster hire.

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Can anyone make out the missing word? 🗃️ Doctor reflecting on seeing poor dispensary patients during the day and then going to fancy parties with the wealthy at night. "surroundings of wealth and the luxury have made me [something] for a time and moralize upon the different phases of human life."

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Can any Skystorians help me decipher a word? "the condition of med[icine] in this country and the means of advancing it [???]." What's the missing word? From a letter written by a physician in Philadelphia in 1824. 🗃️

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

I'm excited to share my JHMAS review of *Critical Approaches to Science and Religion,* edited by Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ahmed Ragab, Terence Keel. 🗃️ track.smtpsendmail.com/9032119/c?p=...

Screenshot of the first paragraph of the review, reading as follows: "The editors of this collection begin with a historiographical problem. Historians of science have long reckoned with the complicity of Western scientists in colonialism, slavery, and sexism. Likewise, historians of religion have explored how Christians abetted white supremacy and its attendant evils. Yet scholars studying the intersection of these two fields have not, by and large, taken up the same concerns. Instead, they have focused on their own cluster of issues: the alleged conflict between science and religion, attempts to historicize or problematize that conflict, and debates about definitions and borders marking off the two domains. Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel determine to remedy this problem by rallying scholars who deploy “critical approaches” to science and religion, meaning those who incorporate “critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial and Indigenous analysis” (p. 5). But the editors aspire to more than historiographical intervention. By bringing to the study of science and religion the political consciousness of its adjacent fields, they hope to encourage scholars to marshal knowledge of the past in the fight for justice in the present."

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

How a nineteenth-century doctor burns you for delivering boring lectures. 🗃️

Screenshot of text reading, "Is it the fault or the misfortune of the successor of James and Dewees, that the soporific influence which he might desire to exert over his patients with ether and chloroform overspreads his class when listening to his sedative discourses?"

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

The time Sylvester Graham got into an argument with a doctor during one of his lectures, calling the doctor "a stupid blockhead" for opposing vegetarianism. 🗃️

Image of a nineteenth-century newspaper article reading, "The person who will tell me that man is a meat-eating animal is not fit to teach. [Looking at Dr. Wieting.] He is a stupid blockhead, and as blind as Samson was after the Philistines had to put out his eyes."

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Nineteenth-century physician Rene La Roche says he saw "one of the brightest luminaries of American medicine" get into a street fight with another doctor. I want to know who he's talking about!

Screenshot of a passage of text describing nineteenth-century Philadelphia physicians as querulous and combative.

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

A new "multifaith" church opens in San Francisco, with mushrooms as its primary sacrament. www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/2747361...

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I’ve been working on this for several years, so I’m thrilled to announce that Pepperdine University will offer a minor in health humanities beginning in fall 2025! 🗃️

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

A newspaper editor considering the day-age theory and a Baptist missionary wondering how fishes got into lakes: science and religion in the antebellum era. 🗃️ From the Hampshire Gazette, February 4, 1824.

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

I can't wait for this book from one of our best thinkers and one of my best -- most patient, most helpful -- mentors. It will be appointment reading! 🗃️

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Re-upping for the Bluesky crowd: I got the chance to think about COVID-19 in historical context with @profwehrman.bsky.social, Aishah Scott, and Nancy Tomes last year. 🗃️ You can read the full forum here: faithandhistory.org/wp-content/u...

Table of contents for the forum, "COVID-19 in Context"

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 13/12/2023

The tech titans trying to build a better world are also preparing to save themselves when it all comes crashing down. Here's a short history of the individualism of libertarian survivalism. hedgehogreview.com/issues/marke...

According to their credo of freedom über alles, to be a “man without a country” is not a punishment but a privileged exemption from the manacles of communal obligation. Rather than a role defined by duties as well as rights, citizenship for them is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

I study the history of medicine and religion, but I very much did not see the Religious Right-Hippocrates connection coming. 🗃️ www.businessinsider.com/mike-johnson....

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people's temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a "mask" while temperaments are "inborn" and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates' view that there were four temperaments.

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 12/10/2023

A new story from NPR's Throughline about how North Carolina activists, including a church formed immediately after emancipation, kickstarted the fight for environmental justice. 🗃️ www.npr.org/transcripts/...

Rev. Ben Chavis, right, raises his fist as fellow protesters are taken to jail at the Warren County PCB landfill near Afton, N.C., on Sept. 16, 1982.
Greg Gibson/AP

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 07/10/2023

Really exciting to see these two examples of technology pushing our knowledge of pre-Columbian America further and further. 🗃️ First, using LIDAR to detect earthworks in Amazonia: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Geographical distribution of known and newly discovered pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in Amazonia

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Jonathan D. Riddle @jonathandriddle.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

When I studied church responses to COVID-19 in 2020, the most optimistic pastors hoped for revival. Now, it appears churches have been losing members since the pandemic -- whether they embraced public health measures or not. Reporting via Daniel Silliman www.christianitytoday.com/news/2023/se...

"Churches that responded to COVID-19 by shutting their doors for long periods, limiting attendance, and requiring masks for extended intervals sometimes lost members who wanted to return to “normal” more quickly. And churches that responded with less stringent restrictions sometimes lost members who were more cautious or had health concerns."

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