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.

Most of the world happens when I’m not in the room.  That’s been a guiding principle for me as I’ve read and heard about all kinds of things I’ve never seen.  I know some folks prefer David Hume’s assumption that anything that doesn’t resemble closely enough what one has witnessed directly is more likely delusion or deception than real testimony, and I know others would just as soon dismiss the experiences of folks not from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as primitive or worse, but I’ll take Hamlet over Hume on these kinds of matters: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And although our approaches to these matters differ somewhat, I think I found an ally in Joy Vaughan’s book Phenomenal Phenomena: Biblical and Multicultural Accounts of Spirits and Exorcism.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Vaughan to the show to talk about her research.

 When Amaziah, Priest of the Shrine of Bethel, confronts the prophet Amos for conspiring against King Amaziah, Amos replies with a very specific denial: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.”  And it’s hard to run for president of the United States without insisting early and often that “I’m not a politician.”  What about philosophers?  What happens when you ask a philosopher whether or not she’s a philosopher?  We might find that out today as we talk with Rebekah Spera and David M. Peña-Guzman about their recent book Professional Philosophy and Its Myths from Lexington Books.  And even if we don’t, I imagine we’ll find ourselves posing questions about the field that we call academic philosophy that are worth posing.

In the middle of the twentieth century a process of collection started, one that would profoundly shape of Biblical studies for decades to come, all the way to our own moment.  To say more than that would run afoul of any number of chapters of Andrew Perrin’s book Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds: Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls from Lexham Press, so I’ll try not to overstep.  Instead I’ll say that his book stands both as an introduction to this fascinating collection and its place in our knowledge of Biblical cultures and that for someone like me who studied Qumran back when Bill Clinton was president, the book provides some interesting new questions to pose.

Every story of thought and thinking runs into its own kinds of problems.  Progressive accounts do well showing how predecessors were not quite as sharp or as moral as we are, but they have a hard time saying what might come to pass in years or generations to come.  Conservative narratives have to distinguish between things worthy to conserve and things best left to antiquarians.  Revolutionary accounts anticipate radical ruptures but tend to neglect good things that revolutions tend to leave behind.  And Christian stories of the history of thought face the struggle of deciding when to say, with Jesus in Matthew, that whoever is not with us is against us; and when to say, with Jesus in Mark, that whoever is not against us is with us.  Gerald Bray’s book Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Theology, and the Mind of Christ takes up that work of distinguishing influences of Christian theology from resistance to the same, and Dr. Bray is here to talk to us about that project.

If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again.  With that image, from Job 17, the book’s title character indicts the violence of the LORD and the finality of that violence.  But many centuries later, in a very different book, Philip S. Thomas enlists that image to do very different rhetorical work, and that’s what we’re here to investigate.  Dr. Thomas’s new book Hope for a Tree: Artistic Afterlives of Job examines films and poetry and literary nonfiction and other artifacts that take up Job’s lines and do other things with them.  The investigation leads to persistently interesting questions that arise from traditions whose books are holy, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Thomas to Christian Humanist Profiles.