I always think I know what Romans is about, and then I reread Romans.  I don’t fault the Reformed for fixating on the formulas that confirm Calvin, and I don’t blame Lutherans for taking “law” as consistently a term of abuse when it seems more fluid to my eyes, but I do wonder at the confidence with which so many read this confounding epistle–how are people so convinced that they know what Romans teaches?  Today Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Beverly Gaventa to talk about her book Readings in Romans: Interpreting Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel from Baylor University Press, and perhaps she can tell me either to read more confidently or perhaps to continue in my caution, but either way, we welcome Dr. Gaventa to the show.

In the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus revolutionized homiletics by bringing the insights of Ciceronian and later humanist rhetoric to bear on preaching, and historians of Protestant and Catholic traditions in the following centuries agree that worship gatherings transformed radically with that crossover.  Not long after, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and others brought the humanist love for human individuality into the theater and replaced allegorical representations of spiritual forces with individual human characters, changing drama in Europe.  And more recently, Dr. James Cone brought Black Church traditions of worship and activism into academic theology, shaping the discipline irreversibly.  And now, the Reverend Dr. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough invites us to think about American oratory, specifically public speech by Black women, in the light of academic homiletics and as preaching in its own right.  Her recent book Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women, from Baylor University Press, is our text today.  Does it preach?

Talk to an American Protestant about her spiritual life, and you’re as likely as not to hear about reading a printed Bible, usually in solitude, for the sake of resisting the distractions that an image- and video-saturated world.  There’s nothing inherently bad about any part of that picture–certainly I’ve meditated on the Psalms in a quiet place for similar reasons.  But spirituality does not always take that form.  Whatever one posits about human nature–whether it’s a historically-developing reality or trans-historical, the documented, concrete practices of Christian spirituality have changed substantially over the course of the centuries and have taken different forms in different places.  The study of such things is daunting, and Volker Leppin’s new book Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction aims at a moment–some time between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries–and a place–largely in the German-speaking regions called the Holy Roman Empire–that show us modern Americans just how interesting and just how various Christian spirituality has been.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Leppin to the show.

For Americans, in the twenty-first century, the first association between Shakespeare and schools is obvious: we read Shakespeare in school.  Whether we’re thinking of the ubiquitous Romeo and Juliet unit in ninth grade, later high-school tragedies, or perhaps even a play or two in college, in our moment the Bard shows up in school, and then some might go and see a play in a theater.  In Shakespeare’s own time, plays were entertainment, the things that law students went to hear when they weren’t reading for the bar.  And in both moments, along with many moments in between, Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies themselves feature characters who are former students, would-be teachers, and other educational figures.  Sean Keilen’s book Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts journeys from stage to school and back a few different ways, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

I first learned about Pierre Hadot in a John Milbank book, and ever since I’ve read everything of his that I could get my hands on.  Hadot’s revolutionary power resides not in a particular claim or argument but in a method: he investigates Plato and the Stoics and eventually even Wittgenstein as shapers of lives, teachers who lead disciples into new ways of life through philosophical disciplines.  Although Hadot is not one of the heroes of The Kantian Religion–and we might get back to Hadot at some point–Dr. Ian Hunter’s recent book, Hunter brings Kant into that same revolutionary matrix, investigating the ways that Kant, for many the picture of a detached modern philosopher, was making disciples with his philosophy.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Hunter to the show to talk about this fascinating book. 

I’ve spent a fair bit of my professional life among devils.  Dante’s gigantic Satan never was much of a talker, but Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and Goethe’s diminished version of Mephisto never shut up.  Milton’s Satan lies so much he convinces himself, and the strange devil who visits Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov remains a logic-chopping favorite.  But as much time as I spend with literary devils, and as much time as I spend talking to theologians, I don’t spend a lot of time talking with theologians about devils.  Today we’re going to try to correct that as Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Philip Ziegler to talk about his recent book God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil.

The New Testament book of Revelation is light on scenes of battle but never hesitates to announce that God has won a battle.  Whether the text implies that a battle never actually happened or just moves the battles so far out of the narrative’s zone of attention that they’re rendered unimportant, Revelation as a narrative never says that the disciples of Jesus don’t need to be killers because God has already won the battles but seems to imply something like that.  David Zahl’s book The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World brings a version of that good news to 21st-century folk, to scenes of exhaustion more than persecution, exploring some of the fake news that tries to do the work of grace and showing why only grace really saves.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome David to the show to talk about fake grace and real.

Stories of spiritual origins often begin as the new way emerges against the dominant traditions of the region.  Thus Siddhartha grows up among the Brahmins and Moses among the Egyptians.  Joseph Smith and Elijah Muhammad, each in his own way, emerges among American Protestants.  But what about the much older, Arabian Muhammad?  Many stories of Islam’s rise situate Muhammad among polytheists, proclaiming one God to folks with plentiful spirits.  But Gabriel Said Reynods invites us, in his recent book Christianity and the Qur’an, from Yale University Press, to consider another possibility: what if Arabian Christianity stands as the Qur’an’s earliest conversation counterpart?  Christian Humanist Profiles stands glad to welcome Dr. Reynolds on the show to talk about his research on these questions. 

 When teachers complain about the ways that schools evaluate our teaching–and we do so with frequency and enthusiasm–one of the common refrains has to do with the measuring instruments and their inability to account for randomness and adjustment to randomness.  Many a hallway story involves a moment when a teacher’s plans became irrelevant and the teacher responded.  Sometimes in these stories we adapt.  Sometimes we invent.  But as often as anything else, we improvise, a word that we share with the worlds of jazz music and stage comedy.  Nick Sorensen has taken that moment and proposed ways to evaluate the work of teachers in more complex and ultimately more adequate ways, and his recent book The Improvising Teacher: Reconceptualising Pedagogy, Expertise, and Professionalism presents his research and some proposals for moving forward more intelligently.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Sorensen to the show.

Ask six Americans what the adjective or the noun “evangelical” means, and you’ll get as many answers.  Ask six historians, and you might get twelve.  But what if you ask a rhetorician?  We’re going to find out today as Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Bethany Ober Mannon to the show to talk about her book I Grew Up in the Church: How American Women Tell Their Stories.  Along the way we’ll visit and revisit some figures and some phrases that our long-time listeners will remember from episodes of The Christian Feminist Podcast, and perhaps we can add to the conversations that we inherit from them.