Pride isn’t arrogance; it’s love

Shae Washington, a Black queer Christian woman, struggled to reconcile her sexuality and her spirituality. Her church had always taught that you cannot be both Christian and queer. After years of praying about her struggle, one day she heard God say, “I have already set you free on the cross. Why are you still in the closet? Come out, be who I created you to be.” That day, when Shae chose to trust God’s authority over her own certainty, she said she felt a tremendous peace from God. That peace kept her grounded as former friends now demanded she show them where in the Bible it said this was okay and as church members charged her with arrogance for elevating her own experience over years of tradition.

Shae was among those living on the frontlines of the so-called culture wars—conservative Christians who are also LGBTQ+. Some of the things that make a lot of their lives hell make a lot of other people’s lives hell, too, in less direct ways. We all gain by understanding their situations. As we think about pride this month, the lives of LGBTQ+ conservative Christians can help us to see the link between pride and humility, and how both are necessary for love and justice. Knowing that you are a human being, worthy of love, is the kind of pride that a lot of straight, cisgender people take for granted. It is often denied to LGBTQ+ people. That is the pride we celebrate during Pride Month. As Shae’s story illustrates, many LGBTQ+ Christians find it is their humility that helps them recover or develop a healthy sense of pride: the belief in their fundamental worthiness of love and belonging.

Many LGBTQ+ conservative Christians have had loved ones cut them off from all connection out of fear that they are not just sinful, but dangerous to those they love. They are accused of “turning their backs on God,” even though many have begged and pleaded with God to take away the feelings that they thought made them unworthy of love. Still, many LGBTQ+ Christians stay connected to their faith communities, and more and more are being honest about who they are and engaging with their churches. LGBTQ+ Christians who are also people of color may need church as the one place where they find the support they need to survive living in a racist world from week to week. But unlike straight, cisgender people who may have church support groups to help with their marriages or families, LGBTQ+ people may not feel welcome to talk about their intimate relationships or find support for how to navigate them. And in predominantly white LGBTQ+ spaces, they may be free to express their sexual and gender identities, but might endure racism. Their stories make clear that it’s hard to flourish when you have to hide parts of yourself, and that we thrive when we are unconditionally loved and accepted as whole people. But getting there can be a tough road.

Looking at life from LGBTQ+ conservative Christians’ perspective, we see how actions that look like love might not actually be loving. In our research, we heard about a dynamic we call sacramental shame, where churches required LGBTQ+ members continually to feel and display shame—an emotion that signals they know they are unworthy of love—as a sign that they have not rejected God. This requirement was often shrouded in the language of love, “we love you, but we hate your sin,” and in expressions of affection and care. Being gay, bi, or trans was compared to being a murderer, or cheating on a spouse, or embezzling funds—all things that violate other people’s trust and break relationships. Yet the same people who taught that God could forgive people for these things also taught that being LGBTQ+—which is generally involuntary and doesn’t actually hurt anyone—makes a person uniquely unworthy of God’s love. When you treat being LGBTQ+ itself as a sin—the worst sin—you treat your own understanding of gender and sexuality as greater than God’s love, as a commandment more important than the Ten Commandments (which, Jesus said, all boil down to loving God and neighbor).

There is a particular harm that is caused by treating someone like their capacity to love is dangerous. It can make people feel like monsters. We heard from people for whom life had become completely unlivable because they felt unworthy of human connection and God’s love. They kept friends at arm’s length out of fear that getting too close would condemn them both to hell.

When someone has been treated this way, and comes out of it recognizing that they are not monsters but human beings, they feel alive again. That is pride: knowing that they are worthy of love and belonging, with their gifts and flaws, simply because they are human. In contrast to arrogance or hubris, we call this “relational pride.” Relational pride is taken for granted by many cisgender and heterosexual Christians, because no one ever questions that they deserve love. Knowing they are worthy of love only seems like arrogance to those who think LGBTQ+ people are uniquely unworthy. And yet they accuse LGBTQ+ people of being the arrogant ones.

Relational pride is not the opposite of humility, but its counterpart. Humility is a realistic knowledge of your gifts as well as your limitations. Humility enables us to admit that we might be wrong even when we feel pretty certain; it keeps us honest about our humanity, that none of us is all-knowing and that we need to learn from each other. Shae’s humility allowed her to be open to the possibility that she might be wrong about what she had always thought about gender and sexuality. It allowed her to trust God’s message that she is worthy of love, just as she is. What looked like arrogance to fellow church members was an act of submission to God, taking the harder path of being who God was telling her she was made to be. Shea’s humility led her to a healthy sense of pride—the joy of knowing she is worthy to give and receive love.

Humility also helps those who have devalued LGBTQ+ Christians to reconsider. Conservative Christian parents, pastors, and friends tell stories of the moment they realized that maybe they didn’t know everything about human sexuality and gender. That maybe they didn’t fully understand what the Bible was really saying. They showed humility, which led them to prioritize love over certainty.

Conservative Christians often say their job is to love others, not try to bring about social justice. But there is no love without justice. When we love other people, we are humbly open to learning from them and growing through our connection. We listen to them when they tell us we’ve been hurting them, and because we love them, we work to stop hurting them. Love also means listening when people tell you that your organization’s—or country’s—policies are hurting them, because of their sexual orientation, or gender, or race, ability, or because the policies themselves deprive them of things they need to live. Helping them to thrive might mean working to change those policies—out of love.

We on the left can also be arrogant, dismissing those we disagree with as backwards or even evil. To be sure, there are some pretty evil things happening in the world right now. It can be harmful to try to empathize with someone who treats you as if you shouldn’t exist. But trying to understand the fears behind their actions—when we can do so without personal harm—can help us all to find a way forward, to a society in which people are all treated as worthy of love and care not just from their friends and family, but by institutions and policies. Humility and pride foster solidarity—a relationship of love that works for justice.

^{Featured image by Jason Leung via Unsplash.}

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Ten transformative Andraé Crouch tracks that shaped gospel music [playlist]

At his passing in 2015, President Barack Obama celebrated Andraé Crouch as the “leading pioneer of contemporary gospel music.” The Guardian UK newspaper’s obituary called him the “foremost gospel singer of his generation.” Ten years after his death, Andraé Crouch’s songs are still found in more hymnals—Black and white—than any African American composer, save Thomas Dorsey (and Dorsey had a 30-year head start!).

While Crouch’s live performances galvanized audiences in venues ranging from Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall to Explo ’72, it is his compositions that are best remembered today. As Obama suggested, Crouch all but created contemporary gospel music. He’s also credited as the founder of the Praise & Worship music phenomenon. He was an innovative evangelist, a restless composer, musical experimenter, and a perfectionist whose gospel songs are still sung today around the world.

Choosing among Crouch’s many recordings from a 50-year career in music is an exercise in frustration but we have identified 10 songs that we believe can truthfully be said to be “transformative”:

1. “The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power)” 

While watching the Rev. James Cleveland pour barbecue sauce on a brisket at a cookout, Crouch, still just in his teens, was inspired to write his first gospel song, “The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power).” Frustrated, Crouch initially tossed the hastily scribbled lyrics, but twin sister Sandra Crouch fished the sheet from the trash and Billy Preston quickly fleshed-out Andréa’s melody. Crouch recorded two versions of “The Blood,” this one sung by Billy Thedford (later Bili Redd) from the album Take the Message Everywhere (1969).

2. “I’ve Got Confidence”

The most pop-oriented of all of Crouch’s hits, this happy, upbeat number caught the ear of Elvis Presley, who recorded it in 1972 on his final and best-reviewed religious album, He Touched Me. The song was quickly recorded by dozens of other artists. “I’ve Got Confidence” appears on Andraé and the Disciples’ Keep on Singin’ (1970).

3. “My Tribute (to God be the Glory)”

One of Crouch’s most symphonic—and beloved—compositions, “My Tribute” owes a spiritual debt to the beloved hymn writer Fanny Crosby’s “To God be the Glory.” The song’s soaring chorus comes to a dramatic crescendo and has become a part of the evangelical church’s core repertoire since its first appearance on Keep on Singin’ but it is Alfie Silas Durio’s heart-stoppingly stratospheric recording on the Finally album (1982) that remains the definitive version.

4. “Through It All”

In his short biography by the same name from 1974, Crouch tells the heartbreaking story of his first and greatest love, Tramaine Davis, who left the Disciples and married famed gospel singer Walter Hawkins. The loss threw Andraé into a deep depression that only lifted when the words and music to this triumphant ballad came to him, though he couldn’t bring himself to record it until the release of the Soulfully album in early 1972.

5. “Satisfied”

One of the defining moments of the Jesus Music movement and the beginnings of contemporary Christian music is Andraé Crouch and the Disciples’ electrifying performance of “Satisfied” before 80,000 screaming fans at Explo ’72 in Dallas—still one of the largest religious music festivals ever. The Disciples turned what was a pop song on Soulfully into a Holiness piano-driven gospel vamp/stomp. The Explo ’72 version is available on YouTube via a professionally-produced video that includes footage of the massive festival.

6. “Bless His Holy Name”

Perhaps the first recording of a song in the style of what would come to be called Praise & Worship music, “Bless His Holy Name” is the highlight of Crouch’s first “solo” album, Just Andrae (late 1972). Andraé would return to his format throughout his career, with gentle, reverent hymns like “Hallelujah,” “It Won’t Be Long,” and “Praises.”

7. “Jesus is the Answer”

Though recorded before Just Andrae, “Live” in Carnegie Hall was not released until a year later, in 1973. The album, which served as his breakthrough in both the Black and white Christian markets, showcases Andrae’s reliance on the Holy Spirit to “lead” the services. “Jesus is the Answer” was still only partially completed when he introduced it on the Carnegie Hall stage. Paul Simon found the happy, bouncy tune so appealing that he recorded it on Live Rhymin’ later that year.

8. “Take Me Back”

By the release of the Take Me Back album in 1975, “A-list” studio musicians were clamoring to record Crouch’s innovative, instantly memorable songs. The song showcases Billy Preston’s inspired work on the Hammond B3 organ and the brilliant vocals of Danniebelle Hall. Whatever musical adventures Crouch might explore elsewhere, he always included at least one triumphant, memorable gospel song like “Take Me Back.”

9. “Soon and Very Soon”

Though released on the It’s Another Day album (late 1976), “Soon and Very Soon” is based on a timeless Church of God in Christ chant—or perhaps an even older spiritual. It is compelling, haunting and irresistible, especially when the senior members of his father’s Christ Memorial Radio Choir, led by 80-something Mother Dora Brackins, join the chorus on the close.

 10. “Just Like He Said He Would”

Live in London (1978), with its iconic cover of a spaceship piano hovering over the United Kingdom, was Andrae’s last great release. Over the course of the two LPs, Crouch preaches, testifies, re-visits, and re-imagines beloved favorites, unpredictably introduces old hymns, and improvises several new songs on the spot. “Just Like He Said He Would,” originally released on Take Me Back, brilliantly synthesizes jazz, funk, R&B, rock, and gospel into a seamless whole—and thrills the stunned English audience.

_{Featured image by Matt Botsford via Unsplash.}

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Fact and fiction behind <em>American Primeval</em>

A popular new Netflix series, American Primeval, is stirring up national interest in a long-forgotten but explosive episode in America’s past. Though the series is highly fictionalized, it is loosely based on events covered in my recent, nonfiction publication, Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, co-written with Richard E. Turley Jr.

From 1857–58, Mormon settlers of Utah Territory waged a war of resistance against the federal government after the newly elected US president sent troops to occupy the Salt Lake Valley. Concerned about the Mormons’ expanding theocracy in the West—Brigham Young was not only the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also Utah’s governor—President James Buchanan’s advisors urged him to replace Young with a new governor, accompanied by an army contingent. The occupation of Utah by federal troops, the advisors insisted, was necessary to ensure that Mormons accepted their federally appointed leader.

Though tensions ran extremely hot, remarkably, no pitched battles broke out between the two sides in what became known as the Utah War. But the conflict was anything but bloodless. In the heat of the hysteria, Mormon militiamen in southwest Utah committed a war atrocity, slaughtering a California-bound wagon train of more than a hundred men, women, and children.

Viewers have been asking what is fact and what is fiction in American Primeval’s depiction of the Utah War. Vengeance Is Mine answers those questions. Below are just a few of the answers:

Did the Mormons actually purchase and burn down Fort Bridger?

Yes, though their motivations for doing both were different than those portrayed in the series. They purchased Fort Bridger in 1855—two years before any of the events depicted in the series took place. They bought it to be a trailside way station to supply thousands of immigrant converts making their way to Utah. Mormon militiamen burned down the fort in October 1857, along with the army’s supply wagons and grasses their draft animals needed to survive, all to thwart the advance of the approaching US troops and stall them on the plains of what is now Wyoming.

Did Mormon militiamen really wipe out a contingent of the US Army and a band of Shoshone people?

No. The militiamen’s scorched-earth tactics successfully slowed the troops’ approach until winter snows set in, making trails into the Salt Lake Valley impassable and forcing the troops to spend a miserable winter in a tent city they created outside the burned-out remains of Fort Bridger. When Congress met in early 1858, it rejected President Buchanan’s proposal to raise additional troops to send to Utah and forced Buchanan to broker a peace settlement with Mormon leaders instead. A few years later, in 1863, a different US Army contingent stationed in Utah slaughtered a band of more than four hundred Shoshone people in the Bear River Massacre, in what is southern Idaho today.

Did the Mountain Meadows Massacre take place just outside of Fort Bridger, and did the Shoshone and Southern Paiute live nearby?

No. The Mountain Meadows is in the desert climate of southwestern Utah, several hundred miles south of Fort Bridger. In the series, a band of Shoshone murder a group of Paiute men who had supposedly participated in the massacre in order to kidnap and rape white women. None of this was true. The traditional homelands of the Northwestern Shoshone are in what is today northern Utah and southern Idaho, and the Southern Paiute live in today’s southwestern Utah and Nevada, hundreds of miles apart. The Shoshone and Paiute weren’t at war and rarely, if ever, came in contact with each other. The Southern Paiute did not kidnap and rape women. The massacre was orchestrated by a group of 50-60 Mormon militiamen to cover up their involvement in a cattle raid of the wagon company that went awry. In the war hysteria of 1857, they thought that violence—murdering all the witnesses besides 17 young children—was the answer to protect themselves and their community.

Tragically, the political wrangling and tensions over federal and local rule, separation of church and state, and religious zeal and bigotry, led to a deadly climax on 11 September 1857. Modern readers may recognize similar tensions today, not only in the West but throughout the United States.

_{Featured image by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.}

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The massacre at Fort Mystic and the Puritan “Wars of the Lord”

The first light of dawn flickered through the trees as soldiers rushed to take position around the fort. Twenty soldiers from Massachusetts commanded by Captain John Underhill prepared to storm the south gate. Another sixty from Connecticut under Captain John Mason would move against the northeast gate. Behind them, some three hundred Natives—Mohegans, Eastern Niantics, and Narragansetts—formed a perimeter surrounding the fort to prevent anyone from escaping.

It was Friday, 26 May 1637. Inside the fort, known as Mystic, in modern day eastern Connecticut, between four hundred and seven hundred Pequots lay sleeping. As the soldiers crept forward, a dog started barking. The soldiers opened fire. Although the Pequots had been taken by surprise, they offered bitter resistance. Soldiers cut their way into the fort, which they found crammed full of wigwams. Soon as many as twenty soldiers were killed or wounded.

Captain Mason made a snap decision: “We must burn them.” The wigwams were covered with mats made from “rushes and hempen threads” that lit easily. The soldiers withdrew, and the densely packed wigwams quickly became an inferno. Mason ordered his soldiers and their Indian allies to prevent anyone from escaping. While some Pequots fought on, others, including groups of women and children, tried to flee the fort. Soldiers cut them down with swords. “Down fell men, women, and children,” Captain Underhill recalled. “Not above five of them escaped out of our hands.” Only seven were taken prisoner. The rest were killed.

A relieved Mason later proclaimed that the victory belonged to God. “God was above them, who laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn, making them as a fiery oven,” he crowed. Thus did the LORD judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” Like his soldiers, Mason viewed the massacre as vengeance on the Pequots for their brutal raid on the Connecticut town of Wethersfield, back in April, in which nine unsuspecting settlers had been killed. Puritan pastors had assured the soldiers that their cause was just and that God was with them: the heathen were servants of Satan who threatened not only their families and communities, but Christ’s nascent kingdom in the American wilderness.

This was not why the Puritans had come to America. When their leaders recruited potential colonists in England and lobbied the crown for permission to migrate, they had emphasized that their efforts would result in the salvation of the Natives. Indeed, the Massachusetts Bay colony charter, issued in 1629, declared that the “principal” purpose of the colony was to “win and incite the natives of [the] country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith.” The colony seal depicted a humble Indian petitioning the English to “come over and help us,” which was exactly what most Puritans thought they were doing. They viewed their efforts as a sort of spiritual warfare in which they were saving Native souls from Satan’s tyranny.

Their efforts had begun peacefully enough. Alliances and trade relations had been established with many Native communities. But many Puritans had imagined that the Natives would embrace Christianity with open arms, and this did not happen. When Indians aligned with the Pequots killed an English trader, the English felt they had to retaliate with a raid against the Pequots. When the Pequots retaliated in kind, the English decided to destroy them. A spiritual war for Native souls devolved into a military campaign to obliterate a Native nation.

The massacre at Mystic was a low point in English-Native relations, and the Pequot War was relatively brief. The support of the Mohegans, Eastern Niantics, and Narragansetts for colonial forces is a reminder that more Indians supported the English during the Pequot War than opposed them. If anything, English military dominance enhanced the credibility of Christianity among Indians. A renegade Pequot named Wequash, who had guided colonial forces to Fort Mystic, was so stunned by English power that he became convinced their God was real, converted to Christianity, and began to evangelize other Natives. During the 1640s, numerous Native communities began to submit to the English and accept Christianity. Thanks to the efforts of missionaries like John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, over the next three largely peaceful decades, thousands of Natives would accept Christianity. Some twenty “praying towns” were organized where Indians were guaranteed their land in exchange for submitting to Christian teaching and administering their own Christian governments.

Nevertheless, the massacre at Mystic was a constant reminder of what the English could do if America’s First People resisted them. The Puritans wanted to conquer the Indians for Christianity through love and justice, but they were willing to conquer them by force if provoked, and they were fully convinced that this too was in accord with God’s will. Conscientious Christians would protest cases of injustice, but there was never a doubt whose side they would take if war broke out.

It all came to a head in King Philip’s War, perhaps the bloodiest war per capita in American history, fought in 1675-1676. Once again, the English and their Indian allies–some Christian, others not–squared off with their Indian enemies. This time the conflict would rage across New England and beyond. Puritan ministers reminded their people that they deserved God’s wrath, but they also insisted that God would not abandon them if they repented and faithfully defended Christ’s kingdom. Their Christian Indian allies did not disagree. Some Indians believed their own welfare required supporting the English. Others were convinced that the English had to be defeated. Religion, culture, trade, government, even simple survival–everything was at stake. All came down to the catastrophe of a war that would decide the fate of New England.

_{Featured image Engraver unknown. Author of folio was John Underhill (1597-1672). Photo-Facsimile by Edward Bierstadt (1824–1906), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

Oxford editors from across our press submit books for catalog consideration; our sales team evaluates forecasts and sales patterns to determine the market for each title; and the trade marketing and publicity teams coordinate, plan, and pitch to get these titles in front of readers. Each year, when December rolls around, we excitedly wait to see which titles will be featured in the year end “Best Books” lists put out by the major media outlets including The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New Yorker, TLS, and more. Inclusion on these lists serves as yet another seal of approval, highlighting the quality of the content, wide appeal, accessibility, and novelty of the books we publish. Being featured in such reputable lists and selected by the top critics and thinkers reinforces the press’s reputation for publishing high-quality, impactful work.

This year’s list includes the first ever history of the transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts by a Professor at the University of Oxford; the final book by the prolific writer John L. Heilbron—the definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate; a collection of nine tales of romance and wonder from early Irish literature; and a deep dive into the mysterious origins of words by arguably the greatest living English word-hunter.

As the world’s oldest and largest university press, OUP holds an important place in the publishing landscape. The press’s mission is an extension of the university’s—we strive for excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our global publishing program. A crucial aspect of the trade team’s role is making sure that the work of Oxford’s academics and scholars isn’t kept solely within the confines of academia, but instead is shared with the wider population. Through the use of accessible and engaging writing, OUP’s trade books share the expertise of highly qualified researchers with the general public, allowing new ideas to spread and reshape our knowledge of the world.

The ‘Best Books’ lists which numerous major media outlets share annually represent the capstone of yearly book coverage. All year, publicists submit books to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and other outlets for review, excerpt, author interviews and news coverage. In the last 12 months, the New York Times (with its 153 million reported unique visitors per month) covered 18 of OUP’s titles—including a review of Making the Presidency which drew comparisons between John Adams and Kamala Harris’s legacy, and an Op-Ed by the authors of Wreckonomicswhich asked when liberals became so comfortable with war.

Beyond the Times, in the last year 11 books were featured or reviewed on the BBC, 19 in the Wall Street Journal, 15 in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 in the Financial Times, 8 in the London Review of Books, another 11 in Time Magazine, and to the delight of the author, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was recommended on Oprah Daily. These reviews are truly just the tip of the iceberg in publicity campaigns that also include hundreds of podcasts, local media coverage, and events that bring authors directly into communities. The additional visibility a book receives when it is reviewed in major outlets often translates to significant boosts in sales and allows authors to extend the size of their audience and the reach of their message. This visibility is also many authors’ first exposure to OUP’s range of publishing and can be instrumental in attracting future authors that help the program grow and diversify.

Each year’s list of best book serves as a distillation of our collective questions and priorities as a society. Trade publishing must be more agile than traditional academic publishing because every title has to tap in to at least a certain portion of the zeitgeist. As a reflection of preoccupying questions, last year’s list was topped by Kirkus’s selection of Trans Children in Today’s Schools, as well as both Defectors and The Ruble from our Russian and Soviet history lists. This year, different trends have clearly risen to the top of readers’ consciousness. The New Statesman (in their seasonal lists released throughout the year) have selected not one but two Oxford books on AI. The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor—a former AI ethicist at Google—offers advice on reclaiming our humanity in the approaching age of machine thinking. AI Morality edited by David Edmonds is a collection of essays from leading philosophers exploring some of the nearly endless questions about our changing relationship with AI.

Similarly, this year’s list includes two titles about China. The former prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd’s book On Xi Jinping and Oriana Sklyar Mastro’s Upstart both provide informed perspectives on China’s role in the global world. When asked why she chose to write her second book for a general audience, Dr. Mastro points out that China’s power has impact far outside of academia and she wanted to make sure her work could reach readers in all walks of life.

The support that the trade marketing and publicity teams provides authors is crucial to strengthening their careers. Debut authors utilize our platform to both benefit their scholarly careers through the academic prestige the Oxford brand provides while simultaneously developing their presence as a noted subject matter expert in the media. This recognition grows in tandem with the author’s career, allowing the Oxford trade program to retain successful authors as well as attract well-established authors who haven’t previously published with us.

This year, COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black was selected as one of The New Yorker’s recommended titles and among The Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. Dr. Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves after the Battle of Port Royal and joined the 2^nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman. Only her second book, and her first written for a wide audience, it was essential to Dr. Fields-Black that she had an opportunity to share both her research and also her family’s story.

On the other end of the spectrum, the trade team works with many authors and scholars who are well-established in their careers and come to OUP with ample experience and high expectations of the publishing process. Our team was honored to have the opportunity to work with Noel Malcolm on his 12^th book Forbidden Desire which was named by both The Times Literary Supplement and History Today as one of the best books of 2024. Malcolm has published across academic and trade publishing houses during his long career, and it was important that we be able to provide him with the highest level of marketing and publicity possible.

All of the books published by Oxford are the culmination of years of work on the part of the authors, research assistants, editors, designers, marketers, and publicists. Each one is an accomplishment that has the potential to move knowledge forward. The books in our trade program—with their potential to speak to all readers—represent a unique opportunity to inform, illuminate, and entertain. Join us in celebrating the best books of 2024.

_{Featured image by clu, Getty Images via Canva. Image modified in Canva.}

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Prophetic libraries and books in ancient Israel

For most readers of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the question of the ancient material forms of the biblical books rarely comes up. When it does, readers tend to imagine the large scrolls made famous by the discoveries around the Dead Sea. Even the Dead Sea scrolls, however, are centuries newer than most of the Hebrew Bible, which may well have been written on different materials and in different formats.

At least some of the biblical prophetic literature started out as collections or libraries of scrolls rather than as what we call books. Considering these material forms of biblical literature is important because the materials and formats of texts play a crucial role in how both authors and readers encounter and think about them. Consider the difference, for example, between reading a hardbound book by a famous author and a small mass market paperback. Even before you crack the cover, the material form and format of each book contribute to your expectations as a reader. Thinking about the material and format of texts, therefore, is always important and is especially so when considering media cultures whose forms would have differed so markedly from our own. Rethinking the materiality of the biblical books before they were books opens up intriguing new possibilities for understanding the ancient texts.

One interesting possibility concerns the prophetic books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. The book of Isaiah was written over a long period of time and involved multiple authors. Isaiah 1–39 is more or less attributed to the titular prophet of the 8th century BCE. Due to a discernible difference in context, scholars generally understand Isaiah 40–55 and 56–66 to belong to two different anonymous prophets nearly two centuries later. Around the same time, scribes were also recording and collecting traditions that would eventually become the book of Jeremiah.

I argue that at this early stage, the literary traditions that would eventually become the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah were libraries of short scrolls rather than complete books. We can imagine in the 6th-5th centuries BCE something like an Isaiah-library and a Jeremiah-library, both of which would have included multiple scrolls and other short media. These libraries were the locus of growing prophetic tradition, elaborated on and expanded by the scribes responsible for them. By their nature, these libraries were fluid and open to texts being added, rearranged, removed, and revised.

One intriguing hint about the fluidity of these prophetic libraries appears in a reference to a supposed prophecy of Jeremiah that concludes the book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36:20–23) and is partially repeated at the beginning of the book of Ezra (Ezra 1:1–2). The passage in 2 Chronicles describes two prophecies that were fulfilled with the restoration from exile. The first identifies the end of the exile as the completion of Jeremiah’s promise of restoration after seventy years of exile (2 Chronicles 36:20–21, which is clearly referring to Jeremiah 25:11–12; 29:10). This reference to an oracle of Jeremiah is straightforward, but the author continues with the fulfillment of a second prophecy of Jeremiah:

But in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to complete the word of YHWH through the mouth of Jeremiah, YHWH roused the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, and he sent a message through his entire domain … saying, “Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, YHWH God of Heaven has given to me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has appointed me to build on his behalf the temple in Jerusalem.” (2 Chron 36:20–23)

What is so intriguing about this prophecy is that nothing in the book of Jeremiah corresponds to it. Jeremiah never speaks of rousing a foreign king or of the rebuilding the temple. By contrast, not only does Isaiah 40–55 mention both of these elements, it provides the name of the foreign king: “He says concerning Cyrus: ‘My shepherd. He will accomplish all I desire.’ And he says concerning Jerusalem: ‘it will be rebuilt, and the temple will be reestablished’” (Isaiah 44:28). Furthermore, the language used in 2 Chronicles of “rousing Cyrus” appears to be a direct reference to a repeated motif that appears in Isaiah (Isaiah 41:2, 25; 45:13).

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the author of Chronicles and Ezra attributed Isaiah 40–55 to the prophet Jeremiah. How could this happen? It is hard to explain if we assume the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah were already books. But if they were prophetic libraries, it is not difficult to imagine an anonymous prophetic text like Isaiah 40–55 finding its way into two libraries, one associated with Isaiah and one with Jeremiah. The author of Chronicles knew it as part of the Jeremiah library and attributed it to him. Through an accident of history, it ultimately found its way into the book of Isaiah.

Before they were books, these compositions were very different than the unified texts that we can find today in printed editions of the Bible. In some cases, the texts that would later be curated into single books were likely part of larger libraries with fluid boundaries. The transformation of these libraries into books profoundly transformed the texts—and altered the experience of later readers.

_{Featured image from Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0.}

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The great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe

In 1899 a young Jewish woman published a harrowing account of her journey through Germany in 1894, based on Yiddish letters she had written during the journey. Maryashe (Mary) Antin’s travelogue From Plotzk to Boston stands out as one of the few detailed contemporary descriptions of a migrant journey from the Russian Empire to America.

In the spring of 1894, when she was thirteen years old, Maryashe, together with her mother and sisters, left her hometown of Polotzk in northern Russia to join her father, who had moved to Boston in 1891. The family’s journey resembled that of thousands of other Jews. Usually, a young father would follow an acquaintance or relative, find employment, save sufficient funds, secure housing, and send prepaid tickets to his family. After the tickets arrived in early 1894, Maryashe, her sisters, and her mother embarked on the journey.

At the German border they were denied passage because they did not carry enough cash. But a member of a Jewish aid association managed to get them across the border. They boarded an overcrowded train specifically designed for transmigrants. The train was sealed and did not stop at regular stations. After passing through Berlin the train came to a halt in a deserted area a few miles west of the city. The conductors rushed the tired and confused passengers off the train. A group of Germans in white overalls, screaming orders, separated men from women and children, throwing the luggage on a big pile. Antin describes a scene of utter chaos as the terrified travelers were driven into a small building.

“Here we had been taken to a lonely place. . . . Our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room.”

The migrants had to strip naked, were washed with soap, and showered with warm water. The German officials urged the migrants to hurry.

“They persist, ‘Quick! Quick!—or you’ll miss the train!’—Oh, so we really won’t be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous germs. Thank God!”

Antin’s harrowing account appears to eerily foreshadow the experiences of Jews who were deported by the Nazi regime to concentration and extermination camps between 1941 and 1945. But can we draw a line from the disinfection of Jewish (and other) migrants from the Russian Empire traversing Germany in the 1890s to the Holocaust?

The procedures for Russian transmigrants in Germany were implemented in part because the United States demanded it. Disinfections of migrants and travelers became common towards the end of the 19^th century in different parts of the world, for pilgrims heading to Mecca, Russian settlers moving to Siberia, and during the First World War on the U.S. Mexico border. The growing importance of public health regulations was one facet of unprecedented mass mobility and migration around the globe during the second half of the 19^th century. A cholera epidemic in Hamburg, a major port for Jewish and other migrants from the Russian Empire traveling to the United States, claimed thousands of victims in the summer and fall months of 1892. In 1893 the United States imposed a quarantine requirement for all Russian migrants. And in 1893/94 disinfection procedures were implemented by the German authorities and the steamship lines along the main transit routes and at major transit points along the Russian border.

_{Featured image: Immigrants at Ellis Island undergoing a medical inspection by The New York Public Library via Unsplash.}

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Religious faith in contemporary society

The idea that religious beliefs claim truth is an unpopular position in Western societies. Any religion can sometimes be out of step with whatever the current secular consensus about moral priorities is. The claims of any faith can seem threatening when many wish to be autonomous and not be told what to think. They want to decide on their own identity.

Religious faith, on the other hand, often appears to make dogmatic assumptions about truth that apply to all people whether they believe it or not. It allegedly takes us towards an authoritarianism that challenges individual liberty. It is tempting instead to see faith as part of the identity of a person instead of a stance taken about the nature of the world—perhaps then faith is just a characteristic of some people and not of others. However, that does not do justice to the fact that any use of the word, whether in a religious context or not, must always specify who or what we have faith in. This then involves reason because we have to know what we believe and be able to specify it. Faith without content is not faith at all if it lacks all focus.

Once we talk of what we have faith in, the question must always arise whether we are justified and whether our views might be true. Religion needs reason if it is to appeal to an objective truth, and the two are not intrinsically opposed to each other. The issue should always be what any faith is directed at. Reason may be powerless without faith to guide it, but faith is arbitrary without the support of reason, and unable to appeal to others who do not at present share it. That is the case in secular cases of faith and is all the more so with the central issues of religious faith. Reason without faith lacks motivation. Faith without reason is blind.

Faith may seem an individual matter, but there is also a corporate side to it, such as when we refer to ‘the Christian faith’, the ‘faith’ of another religion, or even ‘faith leaders’. The word can be about a transmitted body of belief as well as an individual’s stance to the world. A casual reference to ‘communities of faith’ can produce a view of different bodies of faith, each with their own standards of belief and practice, which cannot then be criticised from an external standpoint. This may seem very tolerant, but it is an approach that involves a departure from the idea of a rationality which we all share. It can encourage the establishment of self-contained sectors within modern society, resentful of outside interference or scrutiny, let alone the application of a general, non-sectarian, set of laws. It encourages the breakdown of a cohesive society, with a shared concern for what may be the common good.

Why though does any form of religious faith matter? The temptation is to leave people alone with their personal beliefs and practices, or to respect the views of communities to which we do not belong on the grounds that they are of no concern to the rest of us. Religious faith, though, is never just a matter of private belief and practice but is manifested in actions that resonate in wider society. Our life at every level is always influenced by our understanding of the world and the place of humans in it. That applies to all of us whether we accept or reject a religion. Attitudes to the world and understandings of its nature and the place of humans in it, produce the morality that guides different people to see what is important. Any religion typically makes claims about how we should behave, and religions such as Christianity and Islam preach forms of morality that they claim have universal applicability. Such claims to truth by different forms of religious faith are too significant to be cast out of the public square. If true, they deserve acceptance by everyone, and if false, their influence must at least be controlled. If we do not know which, they deserve serious debate and examination.

Faith can never be just a personal property or the mere badge of a particular community because of the nature of its claims about who we humans are and why we should matter to each other. It can appear a disruptive component in society because, when it talks of God, it refers to an authority beyond this world and superior to those who have political power. That is a threat to those who hunger for power in any society, and it is not surprising that religious faith is typically outlawed by totalitarian regimes. Even so, just because it deals with what people think is most important for them in their lives, any religious faith can be a powerful motivation, harnessed for good as well as evil. This then brings us back to the issue of the place of rationality in the guidance of faith. Religious faith will typically demand its place in the public square and its voice in deliberations about the common good. It should not be swept aside and ‘privatized’ but should be able to contribute to democratic debate. Faith must never be afraid of the full searchlight of reason if it believes it is proclaiming a truth that is applicable to everyone whether they recognise it or not.

_{Featured Image by Jack Sharp via Unsplash [public domain]}

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How race shapes American Christian solidarities in Palestine [long read]

Since the October 7 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, race and religion have loomed large in debates over appropriate solidarities linking the United States with Israel and Palestine, with the breakdown and reorientation of durable Black-Jewish U.S. civil rights alliances, mounting pressure coming from African American Christian clergy for a ceasefire in Gaza, and even organized Black clergy denunciations of U.S. military aid for the State of Israel as enabling “mass genocide.”

These trends illustrate a shift in U.S. Black religious politics in global terms and in its potential to disrupt long-standing coalitions in American electoral politics, as Black churchgoers—a historically reliable demographic for the Democratic Party—were increasingly less enthusiastic about President Biden’s prior candidacy in 2024 in key electoral states like Michigan. And this was in line with Biden’s plummeting approval ratings among African Americans in general, with a poll showing a drop from 81% approval among all African American adults in 2021 to 50% in December 2023.

In this context, we ask how race matters when progressive U.S. Christians travel abroad to forge solidarities with Palestinians in overlapping religious, racial, and political terms. Between 2015 and 2018, we traveled separately with different American Protestant Christian solidarity tours of Palestine and Israel—some primarily white (Sara Williams) and some primarily Black (Roger Baumann). We conceptualize these kinds of tours as either “journeys to the margins” or “journeys among the margins.” Journeys to the margins are solidarity tours grounded in liberation theologies that take the form of packed experiences and promise ethical and spiritual transformation through encounters with marginalized people and groups. Journeys among the margins are tours aimed at linking the struggles of marginalized groups across national borders.

So, how does race matter in each?

In comparing majority-white and white-led American Christian Palestinian solidarity tours with majority-Black and Black-led tours, we point out that race and racial identity are important to both kinds of trips, but manifest in different ways that matter for understanding transnational religious and racial solidarities. For white participants on white-led journeys to the margins, appeals to race and racial identity offer opportunities to reckon with inequitable power arrangements in conversation with progressive Christian values like social justice and inclusivity. For Black participants on Black-led journeys among the margins, overlapping experiences of racial marginalization and discrimination afford the cultivation of empathy, offer new transnational perspectives on racial identity, and forge new bonds of solidarity with Palestinians.

These outcomes, however, are far from determined. Journeys to and among the margins not only have the capacity to conscientize, but also to reinforce the paternalistic and asymmetrical “humanitarian reason” that animates white engagement with Black and Brown communities in the United States and abroad. And bonds of solidarity can come into tension with participants’ religious schemas that place values such as reconciliation and dialogue over justice and accountability, particularly among evangelicals.

Journey among the margins

Consider the following experiences of African American participants on evangelical solidarity tours of Palestine that involved a guided tour and discussion with an organization called Roots. Roots is a dialogue group founded by an Israeli-American Orthodox Rabbi and a Palestinian activist. It affirms both Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land as well as civil, political, and national rights for each group. Baumann visited Roots in 2015 with an all-Black group of pastors and lay leaders from The Perfecting Church (TPC), a large independent majority-Black evangelical congregation in the South New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia that travels to Palestine regularly with an evangelical theological mandate of peacebuilding and reconciliation. The TPC group began its ten-day trip to the Holy Land with a walking tour in the Judean hills (the Palestinian West Bank) guided by Shimon, a Jewish settler and spokesperson for Roots. TPC’s founding pastor, Kevin Brown, shared his hope that Roots would help TPC members understand a Jewish settler perspective on the land so they might relate to “both sides” in Palestine and Israel.

The TPC Roots tour began with a drive from Bethlehem to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc about five miles southwest, where the Palestinian van driver dropped the group off for a walking tour of a Jewish settlement area. Following that tour, the group visited a plot of land the organization maintains, gathering on a concrete platform under a tent in a semi-circle of plastic chairs. Shimon introduced the group to Bassem, a Palestinian Christian who also works with Roots. They took turns telling personal stories of how the organization’s work had become important to them, followed by a shared lunch of lentils, salad, and roasted chicken. Over lunch, Baumann talked with Don, a return visitor from TPC and a pastor in training who was preparing to plant a satellite branch of the church in his hometown of Camden, New Jersey. Don candidly shared that his younger brother had been murdered as a teenager. He also described how common police harassment of Black men is in Camden.

“I’m mindful when I’m in a neighborhood where there aren’t a lot of people who look like me,” he said. “And I’m praying that I won’t appear as a threat.”

When asked if he saw that kind of situation in the Holy Land, Don responded, “I saw it with our bus driver when Shimon got on the bus.”

Recognizing racialized experiences and power imbalances linking African Americans and Palestinians was a common theme of the trip. Participants shared frequently that their experiences of being Black in a white-dominated society conditioned how they interpreted the lives and experiences of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Journey to the margins

A year later in 2016, Williams visited Roots with a tour organized by progressive evangelical peacemaking organization, The Global Immersion Project (TGIP). Twenty of the participants were white; the remaining two were young Black evangelical leaders. The visit was led by Noam, a Jewish man originally from Minneapolis who had made Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) almost half a century earlier.

The group made its way to Beit Zakariyyah, a Palestinian village made up of makeshift tin-roofed cement structures lacking electricity and running water. Noam was quick to point out the disparities between Beit Zakariyyah and the neighboring Jewish settlement of Alon Svut, with its gleaming stone buildings and lush farmland. To underscore his point, Noam called over Munir, a Palestinian man from a nearby village accompanying us. Noam asked him,

“When you go from your village into [the settlement] … and you see the way they live [and] the way you live, does it feel like there’s something wrong?”

“It’s very different,” Munir responded. “There’s a big difference between the Arab life and the Jewish life. We don’t have 10 percent [of] what they have.”

A few minutes later, Williams noticed Munir whispering in hushed tones with Derek, one of the two Black participants in the group. After a while, one of the TGIP group leaders asked Derek whether he wanted to share their discussion with the group. He politely declined.

The next morning, in a small group debriefing, Derek shared about this encounter:

“I had a really hard moment when [Munir]… came and sought me out in the midst of everybody talking. [Munir asked me], ‘Why are you here? You came all the way here to learn about this tension between the two groups?’ He was just taken aback by that. [And] I was like, ‘Tell me a little bit about what it’s like to be you here in terms of the military occupation and stuff… Are the officers violent?’ And [Munir] said, ‘Yeah, all the time…I just worry about getting shot for no reason.’ And I was like, ‘You should tell the group that.’ And [Munir] said, ‘My Israeli friend [Noam] doesn’t like when I talk like that.’”

Reflecting on this conversation, Derek said,

“I don’t even know if [Noam] knew that the power dynamic of their relationship [was] inhibiting [Munir] from being fully honest with him. I can’t fault people, but I think when you’re in a position of privilege, oftentimes you’re blinded to how those relational dynamics function.”

After Derek spoke, a white member of the group, Sue, asked him whether he thought Munir had approached him because he is Black. When Derek responded with an unequivocal “yes,” she replied in a didactic tone,

“There’s another area people don’t understand. Probably from the outside he views you as the stereotypical — may I say? — and to be honest, you’re not. You’re highly educated, you have huge visions and plans. But he automatically stereotyped you, that’s what I find interesting.”

Derek gently redirected Sue’s interpretation of the encounter.

“I figure either he stereotyped me or he said, ‘He will get what I’m going through.’ It was one of the two.”

What can we learn from these journeys?

These two encounters between American evangelicals and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories share several common features. First, the evangelical theological imperative for reconciliation and peacemaking dominate the framework for participant meaning making. Second, Black evangelicals experience particular points of connection with Palestinians based on what the religious historian Judith Weisenfeld calls “religio-racial identity,” where some marginalized group identities function at the conjunction of religion and race, which takes on additional significance as Black religious politics shift from the national level to the transnational level. Third, the religio-racial frameworks Black evangelicals brought to their meaning-making processes functioned for them as ethical affordances, anthropologist Webb Keane’s term for aspects and perceptions of an experience that people may draw on in making ethical evaluations.

But we also see important differences that lead us to think of the majority white TGIP trip as a journey to the margins and the majority Black TPC trip as a journey among the margins.

Derek’s conversation with Munir suggests the limits of a “both sides” reconciliation paradigm. Yet the racial experiences of white participants like Sue did not afford them the same attunement to this dynamic. For Sue, Munir’s overture was the result of racial stereotyping; ironically this exposed her own racism in posturing Derek as a “model minority” Black man. Derek, by contrast, adeptly read this encounter as a kind of clandestine solidarity. It was the admission of what the reconciliation paradigm renders unspeakable: when structural power imbalances persist, reconciliation can actually become a tool for reproduction of those imbalances.

On journeys to the margins, like the TGIP trip, Black religio-racial experiences exist as whispers on the peripheries of the overall meaning making framework of the trip, where it is difficult for them to interrupt or destabilize white progressive Christian racial frameworks. Even with an attempt to contextualize his connection with Munir, Derek’s explanation didn’t register with Sue. This suggests limits to the reach of racialized perspectives into theologies and rhetorics of “both sides” engagement so central to American evangelicalism. For Black evangelicals on journeys among the margins, there are more opportunities for the limits of symmetrical “both sides” theological and ethical imperatives to become disrupted and reworked in a context where Black religio-racial experiences are more centered, more openly discussed, and more available to participants.

_{Featured image by Ian Scott via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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How the body reshapes our understanding of biblical prophecy

In common parlance, a “prophecy” is a special kind of utterance. Perhaps an oracle about the future, words of approval or condemnation, critique or consolation. Scholars often define prophecy as a kind of message, issued from a deity to their people and mediated through an individual called a prophet. The books of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament preserve numerous writings considered “prophetic”. Some of these writings record words attributed to prophets. Some tell stories about prophets. When we attend closely to those stories, we begin to notice that prophecy is more than words. It always also involves the body.

Scholars have long studied the words of the prophets. Expanding our focus to include the body reshapes our very understanding of prophecy. But it is not either/or. To say that prophecy involves the body is not to deny the importance of words, both spoken and written. Instead, prophetic word and body act in synergy. The call of Moses—a narrative that was paradigmatic for other prophetic call stories—emphasizes this synergy by focusing attention on two parts of his body, his mouth and hand. This programmatic pairing places the prophet’s words and actions on equal footing.

Indeed, if “prophecy” is the mode of mediation performed by prophets, it quickly becomes evident that prophecy takes many forms. It is often a form of speech. But sometimes it is not an utterance at all. Sometimes a prophecy is an act of healing. Sometimes a meal. The prophet may be a mime or a dancer. The diverse forms of prophecy correspond to a diversity of functions. Like other forms of divination, prophecy—and the prophetic body—mediates knowledge. But they also mediate divine power, presence, provision, and relationship.

The body of the prophet is not incidental to this work, but necessary. That is because the prophet does not mediate between two disembodied parties. The prophetic body mediates between an embodied God and embodied people. Detailed written descriptions of the prophet’s bodily encounter with divine realities help to facilitate the audience’s own religious experience. Although biblical writers understood divine bodies to be different from human (or other animal) bodies, they conceived of a deity that could see and hear, speak and touch. The body of the prophet does not simply stand between God and people but makes possible their encounter and ongoing relationship.

This mediating work does not leave the prophet’s body unchanged. The mediating prophetic body undergoes transformations that mark it as other and help it to bridge divine and human realms and modes of being. Sometimes these transformations are visible. After his encounter with the deity, Moses’ face shines so brightly he must wear a veil; in some traditions, he becomes more monstrous, horns now protruding from his face. In punishment for her challenge to Moses’ prophetic authority, Miriam’s body is afflicted with a visible skin disease that requires her exclusion from the camp. Prophets also transformed their bodies through askesis, practices such as fasting, abstention from water, and isolation, that could prepare them to receive revelation or contribute to their mediatory power. In a more temporary transformation, music and other triggers could elicit altered states of consciousness. Such religious ecstasy was a further pathway for the prophet’s body to bridge divine and human realms.

The mediating body of the prophet was rarely static. It was, instead, a body in motion. If the deity often instructed the prophet to speak, the deity also often instructed the prophet to “go.” To places, yes, but more importantly, to people. The prophetic body in motion catalyzes movements of people and links deity and people across boundaries of space and time. The movements of the prophet’s body mirror the movements of the deity; they also help set the people in motion toward the future God has planned for them. The converse was also true. The immobilized prophetic body could be a portent of siege, captivity, or exile. In this way, too, the body prophesied.

Related to motion are emotion and affect. These embodied phenomena are not the property of one body alone. Affect and emotion are social phenomena that circulate. And they are vital components in decision-making, action-readiness, and relationship. Study of prophetic literature quickly reveals the centrality of affect and emotion to biblical prophecy. Ezekiel ingests words of woe and embodies the people’s devastation. Jeremiah instructs the people to lament and cry out. He also paints future consolation and joy. The book of Daniel aims to replace fear with wonder, exhaustion with hope. Affect emerges as both a means of mediation (how the prophet mediates) and its object (what the prophet mediates); it is vital to prophetic persuasion and to the transformation of the prophet’s audience.

Asking new questions about the body’s role in biblical prophecy helps to expand and reshape our understanding of prophecy itself. There is yet more work to do, sounding the body’s role in prophecy’s reception, charting the role of an embodied creation, or mapping the materiality of prophetic power through the agency of “things”. The prophetic body is a great place to start.

_{Featured image by Carolingian book illuminator circa 840 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Love your friend as yourself

Perhaps the most popular command in the Bible is to “love your friend”—or “neighbor,” as it’s commonly translated— “as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Less popular today are the preceding verses, which command friends to rebuke each other if one has sinned. In ancient Judaism, a good rebuke was a mark of friendship, although it had to be done the right way.

In the book of Leviticus, the commands to love and rebuke your friend are given in the context of the justice system. A loving friend will rebuke the sinning party in a lawsuit. In the biblical legal system, cases were sometimes judged by friends, village elders, and witnesses who saw neighbors in need of resolution (Gen 31:36–37; Job 29:7–16). The crucial responsibility of such a judge, according to Leviticus, is to remain impartial, a stipulation emphasized by repetition and Hebrew wordplay. Showing favoritism toward the powerful, or even the weak, is not an act of love.

Over time, the imperative to rebuke a friend became associated with wisdom, and it is frequently found in texts like Proverbs (Prov 9:7–8; 10:17; 19:25; 25:9–12; 27:5; 28:23). According to these texts, a loving friend tells someone when they’ve erred, so they can get their life back on track.

While the biblical book of Job is often considered wisdom literature, it frequently subverts genre expectations. Job is righteous, and yet his sacrifices fail to protect his children. In other books, if someone makes a sacrifice that is rejected, or if their children suddenly die, it is usually because of sin (1 Sam 13:8–14; Prov 11:21).

Three “friends” visit to comfort Job after the death of his children, and they try to be the best friends they can be by rebuking him for whatever sin he committed. He’ll be restored once he repents—or so they think. In this case, however, the expectations are flipped. Job’s suffering is not punishment for sin. Instead of a mark of friendship, the friends’ rebuke comes across like self-righteous presumption toward a friend in need.

Job recognizes that his friends are following wisdom protocols, but he raises the stakes and holds them to legal protocols. Job talks about his situation as one who is embroiled in legal troubles. His accuser, as he sees it, is God, who applied punishment too swiftly and with a heavy hand. He says the friends neglect the legal definition of a proper rebuke according to Leviticus 19:

Job accuses his friends of showing favoritism toward the most powerful disputant—God! If they are truly friends, they will remain impartial when they judge his case. Job wants to prove his innocence in court—but he wants an unbiased judge who is willing to say, “God, you are wrong! Job, you are right!” Job imagines a true friend who would rise up and bring justice to his trial (9:32–33; 16:19–21; 19:25; 31:35).

An imaginary friend is a way of loving yourself as a friend, especially when your friends don’t love you as themselves. Job is not the only character who relies on imaginary friends.

Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), shares affinities with the book of Job. Like Job, Alice’s story is told within a frame tale that opens on an ordinary day when suddenly nothing works the way it should. Like Job’s friends, the citizens of Wonderland become increasingly antagonistic, engaging Alice in a series of debates about logic, meaning, existence, and morality. Children’s literature of the time preached heavy-handed morals, but Wonderland subverts genre expectations and makes the self-righteous characters look silly.

The Cheshire Cat is an ephemeral character who appears and disappears suddenly between Alice’s arguments. The Cat is technically an imaginary character—in fact, everyone in Wonderland is part of Alice’s dream. The enigmatic Cat does not overtly take Alice’s side or help her win debates, but it is the only Wonderlandian that Alice calls a “friend.”

What sets the Cat apart is its objectivity. While other characters insist that there is logic in the chaos, the Cat readily admits, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” This genuine acknowledgement of reality seems to be where Alice finds friendship, and it is the kind of authenticity that Job sought from his friends.

“Love your friend as yourself.” It seems like an easy rule. But it means we must acknowledge when the world doesn’t make sense and there’s nothing we can do about it. Sometimes being a friend means going against the grain—providing objective judgement even when the world’s rules point in the opposite direction.

_{Featured image: ‘Job and his Friends’ by Ilya Repin via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Scholastic textualities in early modernity

Approaching present-day Paris from the south, the ‘rue-Saint-Jacques’ passes through the Latin quarter near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne (Paris IV) on its way to the Petit Pont bridge that crosses to Île de la Cité near Notre Dame Cathedral. For many centuries, this was the avenue of approach to the city for travelers from all points south. The Romans included this street in the original design of the ancient city of Paris (Lutetia) as early as the 1^st century BCE; during the Middle Ages it became part of the pilgrimage route to Compostela, and a chapel to St. James the Great was established along the road close to the medieval wall to serve the pilgrims that passed that way.

The eventual name ‘Saint-Jacques’ not only reflected the association between this Parisian road and its eventual destination at the Shrine of St. James in the northwest corner of Spain, but also with the Dominican community that established a home there. Beginning in 1217, the Dominicans settled in Paris, and soon took possession of the chapel of St. James. Known more recently for its association with the Jacobite revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, during the medieval and early modern periods the ‘Couvent Saint-Jacques’ served as an important link between the Dominicans and intellectual life of the University of Paris.

Quickly becoming an international center, Saint-Jacques would draw students from across Europe for centuries. Arriving in Paris to begin his studies in 1507, Francisco de Vitoria would have likely traveled north along sections of the same medieval pilgrimage route, eventually approaching Paris from Spain along the ‘rue Saint-Jacques’ to take up residence at the Dominican convent of the same name. For Vitoria, the draw of Saint-Jacques was found not only in the access it provided to the wider university, but also in the inner academic life cultivated inside the convent. During the thirteenth century, Saint-Jacques hosted figures like Albert the Great, Hugh of St. Cher, and Thomas Aquinas. In the centuries following, it continued to provide a home for those studying to be Masters of theology at the university. During these same years, however, Saint-Jacques also consistently functioned as a studium—a house for the formation of clerical and religious students, the model for which was adopted in part from those similar forms of clerical formation found in Cathedral and monastic schools, and those clerical studia more recently established in Italy and in some other parts of Europe.

During Vitoria’s time at Saint-Jacques, he experienced a pedagogical revival within the Dominican studium, which emphasized the use of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as a basic text of instruction for the course in theology. Although perhaps surprising from a modern perspective, Aquinas’s Summa was not often used in classroom instruction before this time, and was not the subject of widespread commentary until the sixteenth century. Although a thoroughly medieval text, in many ways the reception history of the Summa theologiae is decidedly early modern. Although Aquinas himself seems to have designed the text in part to suit the needs of his own teaching in Dominican formational context, the widespread use of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in universities throughout Europe forestalled the broader adoption of the Summa. Although certainly not unknown to scholastics working in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, scholars engaged with Aquinas primarily through his Sentences commentary rather than the Summa. Because the Sentences continued to serve as a medium for scholastic discourse, even conversations between Aquinas’s critics and his defenders used commentary on the Sentences as the space in which their academic conversations took place. Even within the Dominican Order, several chapters throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries forbade the use of the Summa as an instructional text within the Order’s studia, proscribing instead the use of the Sentences in order to conform to the wider university practice. With tacit permission, however, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the studium faculty at Saint-Jacques implemented the Summa as a pedagogical text, programmatic for the course of theology offered there. During his time at Saint-Jacques, Vitoria was influenced extensively by the Flemish Dominican Peter Crockaert, and eventually by John Fenario as well. The emphasis placed by Crockaert especially on the ‘second part’ (Secunda pars) of the Summa would also leave a lasting impression on Vitoria, who was deeply influenced by the unique approach to virtue, the moral life, and Christian sanctification that can be found in this section of Aquinas’s text.

Contemporary scholarship has done much to uncover the original historical influences that shaped the Summatheologiae during the thirteenth century. The influx of Arabic Aristotelian texts in the Latin West provided a unique set of philosophical and theological challenges for scholastics of Aquinas’s generation; during this same period, the Dominican presence in the Byzantine East also began to yield a new set of questions and texts. Aquinas’s predecessor at Paris Hugh of St. Cher visited Byzantium personally in 1230 and, by the time Aquinas began work on the Summa in the mid-1260s, a wealth of new Greek patristic and Byzantine sources were newly available in the West. Although removed from this original context, as a received text in early modernity, the Summa retained many of these influences as intrinsic features of its textual structure, even as new questions and sources came to be woven into its interpretive fabric.

During the 1520s when Vitoria returned to Spain and began to teach first at Valladolid and then at Salamanca, he began to implement the practice of teaching from Aquinas’s Summa directly in class. At Salamanca, the Summa formally replaced the Sentences by the mid-sixteenth century, and many other universities throughout the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere began to formally adopt this practice as well. Originally emerging at the University of Paris in the 1530s, during the 1540s the Society of Jesus began to found a number of important colleges throughout Europe that would adopt the Summa as the foundational text of instruction; this practice would subsequently be enshrined in the editions of the Society’s Ratio Studiorum that appeared between 1586 and 1599.

As an academic methodology, the early modern practice of textual commentary often united classroom teaching and engagement with other scholars and with issues of contemporary significance. During this period, Iberian scholasticism would experience a number of important intellectual revolutions that would have expansive implications for the development of early modern thought. From the influence of the late-sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Jesuits at La Flèsche and Coimbra on René Descartes to the developing tradition of international law that traced its roots to the sixteenth-century Salamanca school, many of the developments that took place during this period provide important context for the conceptual innovations that shaped later modernity. As a result of the attention paid by twentieth-century historical scholarship to thirteenth-century scholasticism and medieval thought more generally, contemporary scholars find themselves in possession of a great wealth of information about the medieval historical context of a text like the Summa theologiae. Extant work on the subsequent reception history of this text in modernity is significantly less expansive by comparison, however. Yet as a structural feature of university life during this period, the early modern textuality of the Summa theologiae is intrinsically entwined with the intellectual history of this period—and therefore invites the attention of contemporary scholars who wish to better understand the complex reception history of this medieval text and its original sources within the spaces of modernity.

_{Featured image by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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Artificial <em>Intelligence</em>? I think not!

“The machine demands that Man assume its image; but man, created to the image and likeness of God, cannot become such an image, for to do so would be equivalent to his extermination”

(Nicolai Berdyaev, “Man and Machine” 1934)

These days, the first thing people discuss when the question of technology comes up is AI. Equally predictable is that conversations about AI often focus on the “rise of the machines,” that is, on how computers might become sentient, or at least possess an intelligence that will outthink, outlearn, and thus ultimately outlast humanity.

Some computer scientists deny the very possibility of so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). They argue that Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is alone achievable. ANI focusses on accomplishing specific tasks set by the human programmer, and on executing well-defined tasks within changing environments, and thus rejects any claim to actual independent or human-like intelligence. Self-driving cars, for example, rely on ANI.

Yet as AI researcher and historian Nils J. Nilsson makes clear, the real ‘prize’ for AI researchers is to develop artifacts that can do most of the things that humans can do—specifically those things thought to require ‘intelligence.’” Thus the real impetus of AI research remains AGI, or what some now call “Human Level Artificial Intelligence (HLAI).

To achieve this goal, AI researchers attempt to replicate the human brain on digital platforms, so that computers will mimic its functions. With increasing computational power, it will then be possible first to build machines that have the object-recognition, language capabilities, manual dexterity, and social understanding of small children, and then, second, to achieve adult levels of intelligence through machine learning. Once such intelligence is achieved, many fear the nightmare scenario of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s self-preserving computer HAL 9000, who eliminates human beings because of their inefficiency. What if these putative superintelligent machines disdain humans for their much inferior intellect and enslave or even eliminate them? This vision has been put forward by the likes of Max Tegmark (not to mention the posthuman sensationalist Yuval Harari), and has enlivened the mushrooming discipline of machine ethics, which is dedicated to exploring how humans will deal with sentient machines, how we will integrate them into the human economy, and so on. Machine ethics researchers ask questions like: “Will HLAI machines have rights, own property, and thus acquire legal powers? Will they have emotions, create art, or write literature and thus need copyrights?”

The central problem with such discussions about AI, however, is the simple fact that Artificial Intelligence does not exist. There is an essential misunderstanding of human intelligence that undergirds all of these concerns and questions—a misunderstanding not of degree but of kind, for no machine is or ever will be “intelligent.”

Before the advent of modernity, human intelligence and understanding (deriving from the Latin intellectus, itself rooted in the ancient Greek concepts of nous and logos) indicated the human mind’s participation in an invisible spiritual order which permeated reality. Tellingly, the Greek term logos denotes law, an ordering principle and also language or discourse. Originally, human intelligence did not imply mere logic, or mathematical calculus, but the kind of wisdom that comes only from the experiential knowledge of embodied spirits. Human beings, as premodern philosophers insisted, are ensouled or living organisms, or animals, that also possess the distinguishing gift of logos. Logos, translated as ratio or reason, is the capacity for objectifying, self-reflexive thought.

Moreover, as rooted in a universal logos, human intelligence was intrinsically connected to language. In this pre-modern world, symbols are not arbitrary cyphers assigned to things, as AI researchers have always assumed; rather, language derives from and remains inseparably linked to the human experience of a meaningful world. As the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer explains, “we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world.” We live, think, move, and have our being in language. As the very matrix that renders the world intelligible to us, language is not merely an instrument by which a detached mind masters the world. Instead, we only think and speak on the basis of the linguistic traditions that make human experience intelligible. And let’s not forget that human experience is embodied.

No wonder, then, that human understanding, to use the English equivalent of the Latinate ‘intellect,’ has a far deeper meaning than what computer scientists usually attribute to the term. Intelligence is not shuffling around symbols, recognizing patterns, or conveying bytes of information. Rather, human intelligence refers to the intuitive grasp of meaningful relations within the world, an activity that relies on embodied experience and language-dependent thought. The critic of AI, Hubert Dreyfus summed up this meaning of intelligence as “knowing one’s way around in the world.” Algorithms, however, have no body, have no world, and therefore have no intelligence or understanding.

The only way we can even conceive of computers attaining human understanding is a radical redefinition of this term in functionalist terms. As Erik Larson has shown, we owe this redefinition in part to Alan Turing, who, after initial hesitations, reduced intelligence to mathematical problem solving. Turing and AI researcher after him thus aided a fundamental mechanization of nature and human nature. We first turn reality into a gigantic biological-material mechanism, then reconceive human persons as complex machines powered by a computer-like brain, and thus find it relatively easy to envision machines with human intelligence. In short, we dehumanize the person in order to humanize the machine. We have in fact, as Berdyaev prophesied, exterminated the human in order to create machines in the image of our de-spirited, mechanized corpses.

In sum, our problem for a proper assessment of so-called AI is not an imminent threat of actual machine intelligence, but our misguided imagination that wrongly invests computing processes with a human quality like intelligence. Not the machines, but we are to blame for this. Algorithms are code, and the increasing speed and complexity of computation certainly harbors potential dangers. But these dangers arise from neither sentience nor intelligence. To attribute human thought or understanding to computational programs is simply a category mistake. Increasing computational power makes no difference. No amount of computing power can jump the ontological barrier from computational code to intelligence. Machines cannot be intelligent, have no language, won’t “learn” in a human educational sense, and they don’t think.

As computer scientist Jaron Lanier pithily sums up the reality of AI: “there is no A.I.” The computing industry should return to the common sense of those AI researchers who initially disliked the label AI and called their work “complex information processing.” As Berdyaev reminds us with the epigram above, the true danger of AI is not that machines might become like us, but that we might become like machines and thereby forfeit our true birthright.

_{Featured image by Geralt (Gerd Altmann) from Pixabay.}

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What can seventeenth-century sources teach us about living with climate change?

At the beginning of another summer that will likely prove to be the hottest in the planet’s recorded history, it is easy to feel like we are living through a moment without precedent in human history. But it’s a mistake to assume that our histories have nothing to teach us about living under climate change. In my work as a historian of religions, I explore the ways that the religious beliefs of common people during the early modern period were shaped by the Little Ice Age, a period of severe global cooling that peaked in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Rather than turning to orthodox or traditional religious authorities, common people in Europe and the Americas during the Little Ice Age largely turned to esoteric religious sources to make sense of their changing climate. They read and used texts like almanacs, devotional literature, and other popular writings that relied on Hermetic, alchemical, and astrological perspectives to interpret the world around them. What made these texts worthwhile to rural people living through the tumult of the Little Ice Age?

As scholars of esotericism have long suggested, the basic perspective of Hermetic literature and the alchemical traditions that arose from it is a kind of cosmotheism, a religious sense that divine forces are at work in the physical world, the environment, and that human beings are connected with these forces in their environments. These texts portrayed the cosmos as an intelligent and communicative entity, constantly transmitting divine knowledge for anyone who cared to listen. Climate phenomena like frigid cold, failed crops, and darkened skies were symptoms of our interconnection with an environment that seemed to be communicating its own decline.

One of the most popular examples of what I call Hermetic Protestantism was a German devotional author named Johann Arndt. Arndt is largely forgotten today beyond historians of Protestantism, but in seventeenth-century Germany, a place ravaged by war and climate change, he was one of the most popular authors working at the time, bar none. Arndt’s book of Protestant devotion, True Christianity, was in constant print and circulation during the period, even outselling the Bible in some parts of Germany.

What made Arndt’s book so popular? Johann Arndt used (and even plagiarized) esoteric authors like the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in order to give the Protestant people of northern Europe a religious perspective on their changing climate. As historians of modern Christianity have consistently noted, Lutheranism and an emphasis on scripture and word is entirely absent from Arndt’s work: in its place is a largely Hermetic cosmology of macrocosm and microcosm, derived from his own deep engagement with alchemy and the work of Paracelsus.

Arndt presents a Christian vision of a cosmos in which the suffering of human beings is mirrored by a wider suffering of nature:

The suffering of the macrocosm, that is, the great world, is subsequently fulfilled in the microcosm, that is, in humanity. What is to befall man, nature and the great world suffer first, for the suffering of all creatures, both good and evil, is directed towards man as a center where all lines of the circle converge. For what man owes, nature must suffer first.

In this deeply Paracelsian passage, Arndt envisions an almost ecological (if admittedly anthropocentric) Hermetic Christianity, in which the suffering of the human being is connected to and shared with a wider suffering of the cosmos.

Following the work of comprehensive histories like Geoffrey Parker’s 2013 book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, we are still at the beginning of understanding how exactly climate change has been a profound factor in even relatively recent human history. In the seventeenth century as surely as today, human beings felt the changes in their environments (even if they did not use contemporary frames of reference like “the environment” to describe them) and expressed their own understandings of themselves as connected with and dependent on the wider world around them. What is striking to me about these sources, which were intensely popular but remain largely understudied, is how they seem to reveal a common population that was remarkably intent on engaging, understanding, and drawing meaning from their changing world, while elite and university sources from the time seem largely oblivious to or unwilling to engage with the environmental signals around them. The more things change.

Reading sources from the seventeenth century will not provide us with strategies for mitigating global climate change—we already have those, and merely lack the political will to implement them. Rather, I interpret sources from this period to better understand the world we inhabit now, a world which has not stopped sending environmental signals to people who are willing to listen. If nothing else, the world of the seventeenth century shows that we are not alone as people living through climate change.

_{Featured image: Kometenbuch, 1587, State Library and Murhard Library of the City of Kassel. No known copyright restrictions.}

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The enchanted renegades: female mediums’ subversive wisdom

Amidst the tapestry of history, there exist threads often overlooked, woven by the hands of remarkable women who defied the constraints of their time. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, amidst the burgeoning intellectual and cultural movements of Europe, the fascinating phenomenon of female mediumship emerged as one such thread in the history of Western psychology.

When considering the pioneering intellectual figures of the era, prevailing narratives often cast their achievements as monuments of male genius. The likes of Charcot, Freud, and Jung have long persisted as emblematic icons of modern thought, perpetuating a mythos of masculine dominance in the annals of history.

But peer deeper into the cultural undercurrents, and you’ll find eccentric, queer feminine forces that disrupted masculine regimes of knowledge. In dimly lit parlors of 19^th-century Europe, the spiritualist séance cultivated a uniquely democratic forum where traditional gender hierarchies dissolved under trance’s transfigurative epistemology. Common housewives and daughters, through spirit possession, could channel poetic tongues, cosmic landscapes, and incarnated personae that far eclipsed their modest social status.

Hélène Smith was an unremarkable Genevan clerk who, through spiritualist séances, produced outpourings of poetic tongues, alien landscapes, and revivals of historical figures that enchanted and bewildered the rationalist thinkers observing her (interpreters of her séances have included the “fathers” of French psychoanalysis, linguistics, and surrealism: Jacques Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure, and André Breton). Smith’s embodied possessions erupted with what could be seen as a distinctly queered grandiosity–not only upending norms around feminine expression, but channeling esoteric mysteries that transcended the grasp of her renowned observers. Her glossolalia (she created a variety of extra-planetary languages), past-life narratives (she notably incarnated Marie-Antoinette), and visionary artworks (paintings of her supernatural visions) asserted a chthonic, feminine gnosis challenging modern understandings of the psyche.

Spiritualism had emerged in the 1840s as a ceremonial practice for communing with the dead. In many ways, spiritualist exploration of the séance ritual represented a subversive evolution of Western esotericism’s enchanted worldviews. While eccentric, radical philosophies of nature’s divine embodiment had circulated through esoteric undercurrents for centuries, the 19^th century saw mediums democratizing access to such landscapes. Common individuals, and most particularly women, were believed among adherents to host manifestations of the supernatural through their own consecrated bodies and psyches.

Spiritualism’s rise coincided with scientific disenchantment narratives claiming to secularize occult forces into clinical phenomena like hysteria. Yet paradoxically, medical theorists like Jean-Martin Charcot reframed the feminine body itself as a site of profound mystery—a threshold where cosmic wonders could inscribe themselves through stigmata, seizures, and automatic scripts. Séances erupted this sanctified feminine materiality into public discourse. Women mediums’ incomprehensible corporealized phenomena unsettled masculine knowledge constructs. The feminine body’s passions and flows became mouthpieces for ancient, prophetic teachings that masculine authorities anxiously reframed yet could not fully grasp.

In this light, spiritualist mediumship unfolded privileged modes of knowledge. Mediums like Smith produced otherworldly speeches and visions that scientific observers labored to secularize and inadvertently drew nourishing power from.

Hélène Smith was not an isolated phenomenon, but emblematic of women medium’s intrusions into masculine knowledge structures at a time when the boundaries between ESP (extra-sensory perception) phenomena and psychology emerged. Through their consecrated embodiments, spiritualists like her did not merely dissolve identities into passivity, but unleashed agential mysteries into philosophies that pre-encoded the sanctified feminine’s marginalization. Their refusal to cohere sparked foundational questionings at the origins of modern understandings of the mind. The enchanted renegades transmuted subversive wisdom through acts of self-dissolution—twinning pathways of submission and subversion into an undecidable, uncanny, and impossibly alive feminine force.

_{Featured image credit: “Un salon the Paris au mois de mai 1853.” L’Illustration, Paris, May 1853. Public Domain.}

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Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy?

Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world. Following advice to Christian philosophers offered by Alvin Plantinga in 1984, most philosophers of religion today are taking belief in God for granted in their work, clarifying and defending classical Christian doctrine and developing its implications for a wide range of philosophical questions.

If you were to point out that there are more fundamental issues about religion than those that Christians are grappling with, a Christian philosopher might respond: “Well, don’t let me stop you from discussing them!” Fair enough. Were you to suggest that a critical discussion of Christian ideas ought to involve considering challenges to them, a Christian philosopher would turn to you in some perplexity, asking: “Haven’t we been doing that?” (Actually, I think most non-Christians in the field would share their perplexity.)

I want to respond to this question. Sure, there has been much discussion of certain general issues relevant to the standing of Christian theism, such as whether God exists or whether religious experiences can rationally justify Christian belief. And philosophers who stake out a negative position on these issues are indeed indirectly challenging such belief. But oddly—I almost said bizarrely—the past half century has seen no thorough discussion by analytical philosophers of arguments that directly oppose classical Christian ideas about the nature of reality: arguments against, say, Christian ideas about sin or salvation or the divinity of Jesus. And so Christian philosophy has been able to grow and grow and grow without ever encountering a serious challenge to the truth of the doctrine on which it relies.

Why have non-Christian philosophers avoided directly challenging the Christian worldview? I’m not sure, though I can speak for myself. As a philosopher of religion who is not a Christian (I last maintained a Christian commitment in early adulthood), I was provoked, when starting out, to consider what seemed to me to be the most fundamental religious questions. These include whether there is a God, whether traditional theism is true. They also include questions about whether human religion, and human thought about religion, might evolve and flourish in interesting ways even after setting traditional talk of God aside. Taking a negative line on issues of the former sort—whether there is a God—and recognizing its negative implications for Christian views, I long thought this was challenge enough. Discovering plenty to fascinate a philosopher in issues of the latter sort—the evolution of religion—I thought confessionally based Christian philosophy might be given pause if reminded of all one can see only by looking beyond Christianity.

I now think differently. I think that, along with others, I have been contributing to a situation in which Christian philosophy has found it rather too easy to grow and grow and grow. The social and psychological dynamics involved when one’s work is supported by a religious community and a tradition stretching back thousands of years and when one feels the camaraderie of many hundreds of likeminded philosophers—these things, I say, are going to make it at least tempting for Christian philosophers to bat aside the general objections as best they can and carry on with an intellectual project they see as divinely ordained. By leaving alone the classical Christian doctrines underlying the whole enterprise, we have made it far easier than it should be, in philosophy, to give in to the temptation.   

So it is time—maybe past time—to stir things up a bit. What’s needed is for people in the philosophy of religion to consider classical Christian ideas—the distinctive religious ideas feeding Christian philosophy—just like they would any other ideas with broad ramifications for human life, which means, among other things, developing and assessing arguments against such ideas to test them, to see whether they stand up to critical scrutiny. Having now followed my own advice, I predict that classical Christian doctrine will not survive such scrutiny. But this isn’t the end of the story. For as I have come to see since embarking on the inquiry, there are many interesting ways in which Christianity might evolve and flourish even after setting traditional Christian talk aside. There is much to discuss here, in this more generously delineated conceptual space, which will accommodate the work of any Christian philosophers of the future but also so much more. What shall we call it? I suggest a label that ought perhaps to have been obvious from the beginning: “the philosophy of Christianity.” 

_{Feature image by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE via Unsplash, public domain.}

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Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity

In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews. But this is hardly the first season for grappling with domestic bigotry and racism. Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II, Americans began addressing some of their own antisemitism and racism problems. They wondered how Americans could fight a war abroad against fascist enemies when they had so many of their own sins of bigotry to reckon with at home. Several popular books—fiction and non-fiction—addressed these issues during the 1940s but are mostly forgotten today. I discuss some of them in my new book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.

Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is the most famous of this group of popular 1940s anti-antisemitism novels; less than a year after publication, Agreement was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. But Hobson was not alone in thinking and writing fiction about American antisemitism. She was inspired by other successful women anti-antisemitism novelists. As Hobson wrote to her editor, Richard Simon, of the publishing house Simon and Schuster, “Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don’t practice that conspiracy of silence at all.”

Several writers were, in fact, working on anti-antisemitism novels. Hobson’s writer-friend Margaret Halsey had published Some of My Best Friend Are Soldiers, a novel attacking racism and antisemitism. As Hobson wrote to Simon, she was also encouraged by the news of the Canadian novelist Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), a popular anti-antisemitism novel, being serialized in Collier’s magazine. And although Cleveland-based novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid) was farther afield from Hobson’s New York literary circles, by 1946 it would be difficult for Hobson to miss the many New York Times references to Sinclair and her award-winning anti-antisemitism novel, Wasteland, published that year. Through different narrative strategies, these women writers made anti–antisemitism into a subject fitting for popular fiction.

These novels also succeeded in making what had been considered a Jewish problem—something for Jewish communal leaders and defense organizations to worry over—into an American problem that required an American solution.

But it was precisely this approach that made some reviewers critical of what Hobson and other anti-antisemitism novelists accomplished. They asked: where was the Jewishness in these novels? Why had novelists not provided readers with more of an understanding of the religious traditions, rituals, and joyous festivals at the heart of Jewish life? To some rabbis and Jewish writers who realized how little Americans understood about the distinctiveness of Judaism, it seemed to many like a wasted opportunity.

Rabbis and other writers invested in Jewish religious life stepped in to fill the void. They seized the opportunity to present Judaism to a readership of Jews and non-Jews. In books with titles such as What Is a Jew? (1953); What the Jews Believe (1950); Basic Judaism (1947); Faith through Reason: A Modern Interpretation of Judaism (1946); and This is Judaism (1944), writers explained the basics of Judaism. In some ways, it is possible to see the anti-antisemitism genre as having paved the way to the “Introduction to Judaism” genre. These primers on Judaism were books and magazine articles that helped explain Jews and their religion to other Americans. In unexpected ways, increased concern over antisemitism led to greater understanding of what it meant to live a Jewish life.

In the past 60 years, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s and the Introduction to Judaism books of the 1940s and 1950s have faded in popularity. These books and articles were very much of their moment. But they forged genres that proved lasting in American culture: anti-antisemitism remained a popular theme in late twentieth century film, with examples such as School Ties (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the Introduction to Judaism genre continued to flourish at this time, with popular examples written by Anita Diamant, Rabbis Irving Greenberg, Hayim Donin, and David Wolpe, as well as Sarah Hurwitz, Noah Feldman, and Rabbi Sharon Brous in more recent years.

The ideas disseminated by these mid-twentieth century genres have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Americans continue to be outraged by antisemitic incidents in this country. There is still a huge discrepancy between the 1920s through early 1940s era, described in Postwar Stories, when antisemitism was much more accepted as part of the American Way—and the post-1940s reality, when antisemitism continued but lessened and was increasingly called out and interpreted as an affront to American values. As a result of the mid-twentieth century “religion moment” described in Postwar Stories, Americans continue to classify Jews as members of an American religion, despite the problems inherent in that categorization: we all know Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but not religious.

Today, we live in a culture that is very much a result of the ideas and attitudes these genres helped to inculcate. With increased antisemitism and questions about the meaning of Judaism during an era when Jewishness has become a more challenging identity, we may find Americans making their way back to these mid-twentieth century genres.

_{Featured image credit: Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck & Sam Jaffe in a scene from the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Jonah and genre [long read]

Reading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it seems odd to even talk about it. Indeed, the very phrase “reading according to genre” sounds odd itself, entirely too formal, perhaps suitable for some English or Comparative Literature class, but hardly something that normal people do when reading normal things on an everyday basis. While that is true, to some degree at least, the oddity of the phrasing only underscores the point that we read according to genre so automatically, so intuitively, that we typically don’t even know we are doing it in the first place.

Consider the newspaper. No one expects an Op-Ed piece on the front page, nor a sports column in the classified section (ads, however, can evidently go anywhere!). Why not? Mostly because we know our way around a newspaper, and newspapers have, over the course of time, become structured in certain sorts of ways—with front pages, then pages devoted to sports, cartoons, classifieds, editorials, religion, advice, movies, etc.—all clearly marked and often on completely independent sections. A similar point obtains for letter writing. We know what kind of letter begins with the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” and how it differs from a letter that begins “Dear Sweetie” or “Hey Joe.” We have been raised in the culture and its language and literature so that we have attained, through formal and informal education, a basic competency—not only in the spoken tongue (linguistic competence) but also in the literary forms (literary competence; see John Barton’s Reading the Old Testament). The same holds true even for newer developments in communication and social media. Emails, too, can begin with “Dear Professor” or “Hi Brent,” and that is enough to signal something of their tone and content. It is clear, too, that both of those emails are more formal than a text message that reads “where r u @? c u soon k?” As for those who prefer their newspapers online, distinct webpages usually keep distinct content…well, distinct. The present editorial, for instance, is not found on the same page as the scholarly entries on biblical figures, places, and the like.

All of this makes good sense, but when we turn to ancient literature like the Bible, all bets are off. The Bible comes from a very different culture and was originally composed in languages other than contemporary English. We cannot read the Bible as if it were a piece of modern literature—that is, read it according to our own literary conventions. But just as a Hebrew or Aramaic letter (cf. Ezra 4:11–22; 5:6–17; 7:11–26) isn’t quite the same as an English business letter, the forms and genres of biblical literature aren’t the same as our own. There is overlap, to be sure, but there are also significant differences, even when there is overlap (Hebrew narrative, for example, tends to be more spare than contemporary English examples); and there are cases where there’s little or no overlap at all (prophetic lawsuits, for example, or apocalyptic literature like that found in Daniel 7–12 or Revelation). A real challenge, then, is coming to grips with the genres used in the Bible—becoming literarily competent in those forms so that we can read “with the grain” and aright, rather than erroneously and anachronistically (to put it rather too simply).

Consider the book of Jonah. It is a short book that, despite its brevity, is remarkably well-known—mostly due to its “big fish” story. At the end of chapter 1, Jonah, who is a most reluctant prophet on the run from God’s call to preach to the dreaded Assyrians, is thrown overboard in the midst of a terrible storm at sea that is caused—so the story goes—by God precisely because of the prophet’s disobedience. As Jonah glugs into the deeps, God appoints a “large fish” to swallow him up. There Jonah lasts for three days, uttering a beautiful if rather ill-timed prayer (because it thanks God for a deliverance that hasn’t yet happened) in chapter 2, before the fish vomits him out—perhaps out of disgust, but evidently right on the road to Nineveh, where he finally takes up his task (though evidently still reluctantly) in chapters 3–4. This is a terribly brief summary of what is a remarkably beautiful and deceptively straightforward book, but it suffices to engage us in the key question: what genre is Jonah?

The fish story has attracted a good bit of attention. “Jonah and the whale” almost serves as a cipher or CliffsNotes kind of summary for the book, despite the facts that (1) the book never calls the animal in question a whale but simply a “fish” or “big fish,” and (2) the fish episode is hardly what the book of Jonah is primarily about. Nevertheless, focus on “the whale” highlights the genre question because many people have stumbled over precisely this point. “No one could live in a whale [or ‘big fish’!], not even one day, let alone three!”—some people say, while some others might insist that, for whatever reason (usually a religious one), they see no problem with the story being “true” or “factual” or “literal.”

The last-mentioned term is both instructive and problematic. “Literal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is derived from Old French literal and, before that, Latin litterālis, both of which have to do with “letter.” So, the first main meaning in OED for “literal” is “[o]f or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical.” From this first meaning, OED moves to the second main meaning: “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” On first blush, this second meaning seems to approximate what some people seem to mean when they ask about the “literal truth” of the Bible or a story like Jonah or the “big fish story” in Jonah. However, note that the definition in OED has nothing to do with history or “facticity” per se; instead, the matter is entirely one of words and verbal exactness, not precision in terms of history or events.

The third meaning of “literal” in OED, the one concerned with the use of the term in theological discourse, makes the same point: “Pertaining to the ‘letter’ (of Scripture); the distinctive epithet of that sense or interpretation (of a text) which is obtained by taking its words in their natural or customary meaning, and applying the ordinary rules of grammar; opposed to mystical, allegorical, etc.” The earliest attested instance of this meaning according to OED stems from 1382, in John Wycliffe’s introductory comment on the Bible (Prol. 43), that Holy Scripture has four understandings: “literal, allegorik, moral, and anagogik.” Interestingly enough, Wycliffe goes on to argue that the meanings that are most instructive for people of faith are the allegorical, moral, and anagogical (or heavenly), not the literal. This helps to explain OED’s further statements regarding this third meaning of “literal”:

b. Hence, by extension, applied to the etymological or the relatively primary sense of a word, or to the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage, as distinguished from any metaphorical or merely suggested meaning. [emphasis added]

This can then be used to describe people:

c. Of persons: Apt to take literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony; prosaic, matter-of-fact or writings of various sorts:

d. Of composition: Free from figures of speech, exaggeration, or allusion even in a negative sort of way:

e. literal-minded adj. having a literal mind; characteristic of one who takes a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things. Hence literal-mindedness.

To sum up to this point, reading “literally” is primarily about the words on the page; according to some people, “literal” readings are not the most instructive, even for readers who are interested in matters of belief or faith; in fact, “literal-minded” readers are apt to mistake or misinterpret some of the most important aspects of literature—the “literal” letters (or words) on the page themselves! Returning to Jonah now, the question is how do the letters and words on the page speak to the question of the book’s genre? This is a crucial question because we don’t want to mistake Jonah’s “sports page” for its “religion section” in a “literal-minded” sort of way. So, what genre is Jonah? What kind of literature is it?

First, Jonah is a narrative—a story, comparable to other narrative sections of the Bible such as those found in Genesis or Judges. Second, it is a short story, comparable to other short stories also found in the Bible (e.g., Ruth, Esther, or the Joseph story in Genesis 37–50). Third, it is a prophetic short story, which is to say it is a story involving a prophet as the main character. One might compare the stories about Elijah and Elisha, perhaps, in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 5 which are further examples of “prophetic literature” (see David L. Petersen’s The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction). None of this, however, speaks to Jonah’s overall force or tenor or purpose—that is, is the book of Jonah fiction or nonfiction? And what is its point?

Here is where reading “according to genre” is tricky (see Steven L. McKenzie’s How to Read the Bible). As mentioned earlier, genre is so routinely learned and practiced by members of a culture that recognizing and interpreting genres is almost automatic if not subconscious. That is why we often read ancient genres as if they are modern ones—we are simply intuiting what they must be in light of our own cultural “genre-genes.” But this is also what makes reading ancient genres difficult—not only did the ancients have different genres that we don’t have, even those genres we share with the ancients often differed in antiquity (see above). Moreover, literature typically doesn’t broadcast its genre. It just is the genre it is, and competent readers know as much. When we don’t know a genre type or if we are unsure whether it is coterminous with our own examples—both of which are situations we regularly encounter when reading ancient literature—we must rely on clues to help us determine the genre.

So what further “genre clues” do we get from Jonah? One is the highly artificial nature of the book, by which I mean the evidence that shows the book has been carefully constructed, especially around closely similar and repeating structures (see Phyllis Trible’s Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah for an extensive discussion; more briefly, you can see my essay “Jonah’s Sailors and Their Lot Casting: A Rhetorical-Critical Observation” in the journal Biblica, 2010). Jonah is no quickly jotted down eyewitness account of some event in the Iron Age; it is a carefully crafted work of literature—a literary artifice.

McKenzie has argued that a number of clues in Jonah point to its genre and overall purpose as being one of satire. He highlights elements of humor, exaggeration, irony, even ridicule. For example, Jonah is more an “anti-prophet” than a prophet: he does anything and everything he can do to escape delivering God’s word to Nineveh. To cite different humorous elements: In 1:4, the ship is personified—it thinks about breaking up (NRSV: “threatened to break up”). Meanwhile, in the midst of this “perfect storm,” Jonah is napping! The sailors come off looking far more righteous than Jonah, as do the Ninevites later in the book. Another odd, if not humorous, element concerns the big fish: in 1:17 and 2:10 the fish that swallows Jonah is a masculine noun (Hebrew dāg), but in 2:1 it is a feminine noun (dāgāh)! It is highly unlikely that Jonah’s “whale” was some sort of reef fish, like the clownfish or parrotfish, that can change gender, nor would ancient Israelites have known of hermaphroditic fish. The switch could be some sort of scribal error in the textual tradition, but according to McKenzie, it may be a genre clue as well.

More could be said in support of McKenzie’s interpretation of Jonah as satire. Regardless, there are other good reasons not to read Jonah as a straightforward historical narrative. Key historical details are left out of the story, there are chronological problems in fixing the prophet and the city of Nineveh as described in the story into the history of Assyria as we now know it, and there are even geographical problems with several of the details (e.g., Jonah going to Joppa rather than Tyre, the vast size of Nineveh, and so on).

The end result of these considerations, according to McKenzie, is that Jonah is not “history but satire or parody, a ridiculous story that makes a serious point” (p. 13). To read Jonah as history is to mis-read according to genre—to mistake its real genre and therefore to “misconstrue its primary message” (p. 2), which for McKenzie has to do with the stupidity of prejudice, hatred, arrogance, and bigotry toward others (in this case, the Assyrians). That is a serious message indeed, far more significant and relevant than debating whether or not it is possible to survive under sea for three days prior to the invention of submarines. Whether or not the latter could happen is quite another question—perhaps a live question for some people—but it is not a question that the book of Jonah is primarily interested in answering. To reduce the book of Jonah to that kind of scientific (or historical) question is to make a serious category error: an error of genre, a mistake of misreading. It is to be “literal-minded” in the worst way, taking “literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony” or adopting “a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things” (OED). It may also be an attempt to evade or escape (like Jonah!) from what may be the primary point of the book since bigotry, prejudice, and hatred are very real, very live problems in our time, no less than in antiquity. Finally, Jonah’s “lessons” on these topics are as real via satire as they are via science—more real, in fact. As the Roman poet Horace said about satires long ago: “What are you laughing at? Change the name and you are the subject of the story” (Satires 1.1.69–70).

_{Featured image credit: “Jonah and the Whale”, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles). Public domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art.}

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Conversations with Dostoevsky

The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The tenement blocks were, for the most part, those that Dostoevsky himself would have seen—indeed, one friend lived at Grazhdanskaya 19, a possible location for the coffin-like garret inhabited by Raskolnikov, the novel’s homicidal anti-hero. The area borders the Griboedov canal, along which Raskolnikov frequently walked and where the house in which he murdered the miserly old pawnbroker and her innocent sister is situated—I could even imagine that the dark figure emerging from the dingy entrance was the pawnbroker herself. Further away was the Haymarket, still crowded with gypsies, peddlers, beggars, and cheap food stalls, and—despite the old Church of the Assumption having been pulled down by the Soviet authorities to make way for a Metro station—still an atmosphere heavy with poverty and the crimes of poverty.

During those long walks, it was easy to feel that ghosts of Dostoevsky’s city lingered on in the mostly unvisited and run-down streets of the late twentieth century. There wasn’t so much traffic back then, and in the late afternoon sun, with only the distant shouts of some unseen workmen breaking the silence, there was a sense of timelessness, as if this is what it had always been like.

Sheer imagination, of course—and much more important is what Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky’s other great novels (Notes from Underground, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and more) can mean for us today. We live in a material and social world very different from that of Dostoevsky’s characters but, like them, we still have to struggle with the challenges of finding a place in a competitive society that is endlessly generating economic insecurity, social injustice, family breakdown, and the fragmentation of religion and other value systems—as well, of course, as the eternal questions as to who and how to love, and whether, in the end, there is a God who cares.

The historical study of Dostoevsky addresses these questions by taking us back to Dostoevsky’s world—less to the canal-side streets and back-alleys of St Petersburg and more to the literary and intellectual culture of his time, placing him in the context of contemporary debates about literature, politics, faith, and, not least, the future of Russia itself. Historical scholarship goes a long way towards reconstructing Dostoevsky’s world and showing the detail of his involvement in contemporary issues of art and society and his approach to fundamental questions about the ultimate purpose of human life—and what a lot of detail there is! Even apart from the dramatic events of his mock execution, his imprisonment and exile in Siberia, his gambling addiction and often chaotic love life, Dostoevsky was extraordinarily active in the literary world of his time, editing a succession of journals that published both Russian and foreign literature, from Mrs Gaskell to Edgar Allan Poe (he admired both). He was interested in philosophy and at one point planned on translating Hegel, while Russian identity and the fate of Russia in the modern world elicited some of his most intemperate and controversial statements—and, of course, there was God! As Dostoevsky himself put it, the question of belief plunged him into a ‘crucible of doubt’ as he confronted the seemingly irresolvable clash between the Christian God of love and the reality of a world scarred by poverty, injustice, gratuitous cruelty, violence against women, child abuse, and much more—all addressed in his novels.

Historical study is one way of exploring these questions, but Conversations with Dostoevsky attempts the opposite approach. Instead of going back to Dostoevsky’s world, the Conversations bring Dostoevsky into ours, specifically into a series of conversations with a mid-career academic going through a rather average mid-life crisis—‘average’, that is, until, while he is reading one of Dostoevsky’s short stories, the writer himself appears. Thus begins a series of conversations that cover many of the themes of Dostoevsky’s fiction and non-fiction, focussing especially on the ‘eternal questions’ of God and that mysterious creature we call the human being.

History cannot be ignored, of course, and the Conversations are accompanied by a set of commentaries that explore the issues raised in a more conventional manner. Nevertheless, a fictionalizing approach can help to profile the existential questions at issue in his work and to help us reflect on how we, as readers, bring our own concerns and—inevitably—biases into what we read. In the century and a half since his death, Dostoevsky has been read in many ways—as a prophet of the Russian Revolution, as a spokesman for protest atheism, or as representative of Orthodoxy Christianity, and more. Today, his work is necessarily exposed to the critical rereading of the Russian literary and intellectual tradition provoked by the invasion of Ukraine that is taking place across Russian Studies. More than ever before, it is important to be conscious not just of what Dostoevsky wrote but of how we are reading him.

_{Featured image credit: Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Does doctrine have a future in Christianity?

Why did Christianity develop doctrines in the first four centuries of its existence? After all, no other religion or worldview of late classical antiquity felt the need to do this. A school of philosophy might focus on propagating the teachings of its founders, yet Christianity seemed more concerned with clarifying the identity of Jesus Christ, before affirming his moral and spiritual vision. And what about the contemporary significance of these doctrines? Since these emerged in the culture of late classical antiquity, can they be disregarded today?

These questions have fascinated me since I began studying theology at Oxford in the 1970s. I was a late arrival in this field, having initially studied chemistry and earned my doctorate in Oxford’s Department of Biochemistry under the supervision of Professor Sir George Radda. I could not help but wonder whether there might be some interesting parallels between the development of scientific theories on the one hand, and Christian doctrine on the other. Reflecting on these questions took me the best part of fifty years. In The Nature of Christian Doctrine, I present a constructive and innovative account of the origins, development, and enduring significance of Christian doctrine, explaining why it remains essential to the life of Christian communities.

My original hunch that there might be some significant commonalities between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine is more plausible today than it was back in the 1970s. Since 2010, an increasing number of scholars of early Christian thought have explored the idea of early Christianity as a “theological laboratory,” which proposed and assessed various ways of conceptualizing its vision of reality. I suggest that doctrinal formulations are best seen as proposals submitted for testing across the Christian world, rather than as static accounts of orthodoxy. This approach aligns with the available evidence much better than Walter Bauer’s famous theory of suppressed early orthodoxies.

I argue that we can use Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a “paradigm shift” as a lens for understanding early Christian doctrinal development. Existing modes of thinking are found to be inadequate in explaining a diverse array of observations, leading to a “tipping point” in which new frameworks of interpretation are needed. There is an interesting parallel here with Christ’s remark that old wineskins are incapable of containing new wine. Furthermore, early Christian writers, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, seem to have employed something very similar to the modern scientific notion of “inference to the best explanation” in developing their accounts of the identity and significance of Christ.

While these may be the most original and interesting aspects of this volume, I also explore many other facets of Christian doctrines. I provide a robust critique of George Lindbeck’s still-influential Nature of Doctrine (1984), raising significant concerns about his crude reduction of doctrine to a single function. I point out that there are multiple functions of doctrine that we need to weave together into a cohesive whole, rather than limiting ourselves to a single preferred option. Drawing on the philosopher Mary Midgley’s concept of “mapping” as a means of coordinating the multiple aspects of complex phenomena, and Karl Popper’s “three worlds” theory, I explore how the theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects of doctrine can be seen as essential and interconnected. Christian doctrine both allows us to grasp the deep structures of reality, while at the same time creating a coordinating framework that ensures its various aspects are perceived as interconnected parts of a greater whole. Doctrine provides a framework that allows theological reality to be seen and experienced in a new manner.

So what difference does doctrine make? Why not simply embrace Christianity’s moral and spiritual vision and consider its doctrinal aspects as optional? I explore this question by considering some important connections between Christian doctrine and the Platonic idea of theoria—a new way of perceiving reality that encourages participation rather than mere observation. Doctrines provide a framework that alters our perception and experience of reality, influencing how we feel about the world and ourselves. Although many older accounts of Christian doctrine treat it somewhat rationalistically, I emphasize its imaginative and affective dimensions. It is not simply something that we understand; it is something that gives us a new vision of reality.

So does doctrine have a future? If the arguments presented in this book hold any merit, doctrine is crucial to the future of Christianity. It safeguards the core vision of reality that is essential for the proper functioning and future flourishing of Christian communities. It articulates the life-giving and life-changing realities that lie at the heart of the Christian community of faith. If Christianity has a future, then doctrine will be an important part of that future. In fact, I think the evidence allows me to go further: if Christianity has a future, it is because of doctrine.

_{Featured image credit: First Council of Nicaea (Damaskinos). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Beyond God and atheism

What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence?

Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On the one hand, there is belief in the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths, a supreme being who created the universe for a good purpose. On the other hand, there is the meaningless, purposeless universe of secular atheism. However, I’ve come to think both views are inadequate, as both have things they can’t explain about reality. In my view, the evidence we currently have points to the universe having purpose but one that exists in the absence of the traditional God.

The theistic worldview struggles to explain suffering, particularly in the natural world. Why would a loving, all-powerful God choose to create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyses its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it dies from its wounds? Theologians have tried to argue that there are certain good things that exist in our world that couldn’t exist in a world with less suffering, such as serious moral choices, or opportunities to show courage or compassion. But even if that’s right, it’s not clear that our creator has the right to kill and maim—by choosing to create hurricanes and disease, for example—in order, say, to provide the opportunity to show courage. A classic objection to crude forms of utilitarianism considers the possibility of a doctor who has the option of kidnapping and killing one healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients: giving the heart to one, the kidneys to another, and so on. Perhaps this doctor could increase the amount of well-being in the world through this action: saving five lives at the cost of one. Even so, many feel that the doctor doesn’t have the right to take the life of the healthy person, even for a good purpose. Likewise, I think it would be wrong for a cosmic creator to infringe on the right to life and security of so many by creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the secular atheist belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe struggles to explain the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain, very narrow range. If the strength of dark energy—the force that powers the expansion of the universe—had been a little bit stronger, no two particles would have ever met, meaning no stars, no planets, no structural complexity at all. If, on the other hand, it had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. For life to be possible, the strength of dark energy had to be—like Goldilocks’ porridge—just right.

For a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of the fine-tuning of physics for life. If enough people play the lottery, it becomes likely that someone’s going to get the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with enough variety in the numbers in their ‘local physics,’ then statistically it becomes highly probable that one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life to exist.

However, I have been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse violates a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning, known as the “Total Evidence Requirement.” This is the principle that you should always work with the most specific evidence you have. If the prosecution tells the jury that Jack always carries a knife around with him, when they know full well that he always carries a butter knife around with him, then they have misled to jury—not by lying, but by giving them less specific evidence than is available.

The multiverse theorist violates this principle by working with the evidence that a universe is fine-tuned, rather than the more specific evidence we have available, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. According to the standard account of the multiverse, the numbers in our physics were determined by probabilistic processes very early in its existence. These probabilistic processes make it highly unlikely that any particular universe will be fine-tuned, even though if there are enough universes one of them will probably end up fine-tuned. However, we are obliged by the Total Evidence Requirement to work with the evidence that this universe in particular is fine-tuned, and the multiverse theory fails to explain this data.

This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you walk into a forest and happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This needs explaining. Maybe it’s a trained monkey. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe you’re hallucinating. What would not explain the data is postulating millions of other monkeys on other planets elsewhere in the universe, who are mostly typing nonsense. Why not? Because, in line with the Requirement of Total Evidence, your evidence is not that some monkey is typing English but that this monkey is typing in English.

In my view, we face a stark choice. Either it is an incredible fluke that these numbers in our physics are just right for life, or these numbers are as they are because they are the right numbers for life, in other words, that there is some kind of “cosmic purpose” or goal-directedness towards life at the fundamental level of reality. The former option is too improbable to take seriously. The only rational option remaining is to embrace cosmic purpose.

Theism cannot explain suffering. Atheism cannot explain fine-tuning. Only cosmic purpose in the absence of God can accommodate both of these data-points.

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African American religions and the voodoo label

In 1932, an African American man named Robert Harris killed his tenant on a makeshift altar in the back of his home in Detroit, Michigan. Harris, who was allegedly part of Detroit’s burgeoning Black Muslim community, described the murder as a human sacrifice to Allah.

Harris was put on trial for murder; however, following some bizarre courtroom rants during which he referred to himself as a “king” and the murder as a “crucifixion,” Harris was declared insane and sent to an asylum. Even while reporting on his delusions and his confinement in the asylum, newspapers throughout the United States published stories referring to Harris as the leader of a “Voodoo cult” that practiced human sacrifice.

Although the authorities knew that Harris had a history of threatening to harm his wife, his children, and his social worker and that his actions were the result of mental illness, they detained leaders of the Allah Temple of Islam—the Muslim community to which Harris allegedly belonged—asking them about their beliefs regarding human sacrifice. They allegedly ordered the Temple’s leader, Wallace Fard, to leave Detroit. Elijah Muhammad took over following Fard’s departure and changed the temple’s name to the Nation of Islam. He also moved their headquarters to Chicago. These name and location changes were designed to shake off the negative reputation that the community had developed following the Harris case. Nevertheless, the first scholarly article about the Nation of Islam, written in 1938, was titled “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” Additionally, claims that Fard had promoted human sacrifice resurfaced when the Nation gained notoriety during the Civil Rights era and was a way to discredit the work that they were doing.

The founders of the Nation of Islam are not unique. Many African American religions have been labeled as “voodoo” by outsiders and have been falsely accused of barbaric practices.

The history of “voodoo”

The term “voodoo” is deeply rooted in anti-Black racism. Specifically, the term first came into popular use during the US Civil War and was used to argue that Black people were superstitious by nature and would “relapse” into barbaric practices if not controlled by white people through slavery. After the Civil War ended, similar arguments appeared in a variety of US newspapers, reporting the “primitive” practices that had supposedly become popular since the end of slavery. The authors argued that such practices proved that Black people were not ready for citizenship, the right to vote and hold public office and other rights extended to them by post-war constitutional amendments.

Over the following decades, the term “voodoo” evolved and was no longer used simply as a broad term to refer to Black spiritual practices in the US. By the late 19^th century, “voodoo” was also a gloss for African based religions in other parts of the Americas. In particular, false allegations that Black people in Cuba and Haiti were engaged in voodoo-related human sacrifice and cannibalism were common around the turn of the 20^th century. Such stories often reflected on the horror of such things happening so close to the US and the need for an American military presence to quash these practices. 

Biases remain in the 21^st century

The negative perceptions of “voodoo” did not end in the 20^th century. They are regularly reinforced through news reports, television, movies, and other sources. Like the founders of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, the bizarre actions of a single mentally ill individual are often attributed to entire Black religions or communities. Recent cases that have been described as “voodoo” include a mother who set her six year old daughter on fire, two women who caused third degree burns to a five-year-old while trying to cleanse her of “demons,” and a man who stabbed his dog thirty-seven times then stuffed it in a suitcase and left it to die.

In other cases, it would go without saying that such senseless acts of violence have no place in religious ritual. However, all these cases were attributed to “voodoo” and linked to Afro-Caribbean, especially Haitian, religious beliefs and practices. Such incidents have a negative impact on devotees who have felt compelled to hide their religion for fear of persecution after such cases are reported in the media. In at least one case, it led a Christian bishop in Massachusetts to denounce “voodoo” before a cheering crowd of hundreds of people. Despite the well-publicized cases of several mentally ill individuals, African American religions do not engage in human sacrifice, cannibalism, or any related acts. However, after more than 150 years of rumors and stereotypes, the term “voodoo” has little life outside of such racist myths about it that were developed to support slavery and imperialism. Aside from a small community of people in New Orleans, devotees of African American religions typically do not use “voodoo” to refer to their own faith. Nevertheless, outsiders continue to mislabel a wide variety of African and African American religions, especially Haitian Vodou, as “voodoo” and attribute barbaric practices to them. These misconceptions cause great harm to devotees who suffer discrimination and violence at alarming rates.

_{Feature image by Tracy Lundgren via Pixabay.}

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Faith in God, themselves, and the people: Black religious activist-educators

I started my first seminar on Radical Pedagogy, reflecting with students on a provocative blog entitled “10 Reasons Septima Clark was a Badass Teacher.” Beyond the shock value of using badass in a divinity school setting, the students were curious about why I started with this lesser known (if not completely unknown) figure from the 1950s Civil Rights era. Most of the students were interested in community organizing and the educational philosophies of the well-known authors on the syllabus like Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks. Septima Clark was not a “key figure” like these and even in her own time, she often did not make headlines. Yet it was she who joined Martin L. King, Jr. as he went to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, and it was her work in the Citizenship Schools which Andrew Young credits with “training” an entire generation of leaders across the southern United States (Levine, 388).

I asked my students how she could be so important to these figures and generally unknown to others? So, as my students quickly went to Google more about Clark, I began to explain that Clark embodied one of the types of radical pedagogy that I wanted them to explore. She embodied what I have come to describe as a radical, pragmatic, and improvisational pedagogy—one that empowered educators like Clark (and the many she trained) to respond to the unexpected challenges of educating children and adults who for the most part had been systemically kept from education and disenfranchised from the typical venues for advancement in the United States. Clark also embodied a deep activist faith that drew upon her Methodist roots but came to life in her genuine love of people and her ability to have faith in them (to trust them) to learn, to lead, and to be able to fully participate in their lives if they were trained.

However, describing her pedagogy did not fully convey why I researched and esteemed this woman. So, I invited the students to participate in a simple lesson, where we learned to hold pencils. Yes, we learned to grasp pencils in our hands, and wonder at the types of frustrations we would encounter if something as simple as a pencil stood outside our grasp and beyond our mastery, because our lives had not ever been accustomed to this type of labor. These were the types of students that Clark started teaching when she attempted to teach adult literacy in the rural south. Students who I imagine broke pencil after pencil because they were more used to holding a plow than a delicate writing utensil. Likewise, I asked my students to break their pencils. This simple request to break something I paid less than 7 cents each for and that did not cost the students a thing caused them to pause. Some refused outright. Others did it but were hard-pressed to explain why they felt guilt, pain, and shame doing so, even when it was the direct instruction of their professor. These reactions illumined the difficult and unforeseen hurdles to literacy and education which Clark and her fellow teachers could have never imagined, but had to creatively respond to as they attempted to help their students have a better chance at becoming fully engaged participants in their communities and lives.

The next time I taught my seminar on radical pedagogy, I started with a TED Talk by a long time public school educator, Rita Pierson. She was equally unknown at the time, but created less initial confusion than Clark, as most students assumed that if she was doing a TED Talk, she was important. And yet, I could see them waiting for the moment when she would give them the one idea that would change all their thoughts and practices regarding education. While no students voiced disappointment, there were many who just did not see her as a “radical” educator. She was not calling for a complete overhaul of the educational system. She did not start a special charter or private school. Her talk instead is most well-known for the phrase that “every child needs a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.” Pierson emphasizes the importance of relationships and human contact within education. As a veteran teacher, she had seen her share of educational reforms and new instructional techniques, but what endured was the power of relationships in helping students (even the most academically deficient students) become successful. Thus, while students initially trusted me when I presented a TED video, I got strange looks as I again presented a seemingly unlikely exemplar of radical pedagogy.

Pierson’s was a pedagogy that centered, as did Clark’s, on empowering students with basic skills, responding to unexpected challenges, and taking time to get to know the students and families they were engaging with. Pierson, over the course of her career, encountered students historically and geographically far removed from the children and adults Clark was teaching in the pre-civil rights era south; however, the social and economic challenges among their students were strikingly similar.

Sometimes, I too have wondered with my students about my focus on teachers like Clark and Pierson. I thought I wanted to research the type of education and spirituality that leads to massive change (and movements), and yet I was studying the spiritual lives of TEACHERS, long time, primarily public school teachers. But in honesty, I have found renewed joy and energy in studying “teachers”—not just the philosophies which undergirds their actions but the complex and sometime messy stories of how they came to commit their lives to teaching. They have inspired me and reminded me of the ongoing significance of education and individual teachers in transforming the lives and futures of generations (even as generations of education as a practice of freedom has been undermined and the academic study of education have been challenged or reduced to mere technique). And as I delved into their stories, I found myself drawn to the ways that their faith or spirituality often emerged as an animating factor in their work. Sometimes I could point to direct ways that teachers were inspired by a religious conviction or community to live or act in a particular way. But more often, I found in these teachers an embodiment of what Audrey McCluskey describes as “activist-educators.” McCluskey describes her cadre of Black women activist-educators as having an intriguing and unwavering faith in God, themselves, and their students. In a word, mining the spiritual wisdom of Black teachers has reminded me of the ways that Black teachers, across the 20^th century and today, while exceedingly complex, collectively inspired movements for and with Black students; and through their lives teach us to attend to the ways that Black religious traditions permeate the worlds of Black women educators in both expected and unexpected ways.

Significant portions of this blog were previously published as:

Wright, Almeda M. 2016. “Unknown, but Not Unimportant! Reflecting on Teachers Who Create Social Change.” Religious Education, 111 (3): 262-268. DOI: 10.1080/00344087.2016.1172861

^{Featured image: Part of classroom with teacher. Prairie Farms, Alabama by Marion Post. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.}

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The first women’s shelter in Europe? Radegund’s Holy Cross

‘With the passion of a focused mind, I considered how to advance other women so that—the Lord willing—my own desires might prove beneficial for others. […] I established a monastery for girls in the city of Poitiers. After its foundation, I endowed the monastery with however much wealth I had received from the generosity of the king.’

– Radegund, Letter to the Bishops

Radegund wrote these words while reflecting on her greatest achievement: the foundation of the convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. She had every reason to be proud of this monastic house, which represented a triumph over the adversity she had faced previously in life—a manifestation of her personal resilience in stone. But was it something more? Had Radegund intended to create a sanctuary for women like herself, who had suffered everything that early medieval politics might inflict on highborn girls, to find refuge and peace? If Holy Cross was in fact a women’s shelter, then it was the first of its kind.

Born a princess to the Thuringian royal house, almost 1500 years ago, the young Radegund endured a series of tragedies: orphaned in her earliest years, she then witnessed the invasion of her homeland by the Frankish king, Chlothar, who slaughtered most of her remaining family and took her as his war captive. The king placed her in one of his rural villas, where she was guarded, raised, and in some ways treated like a slave. While still very young, she was forced to marry him, despite her efforts to run away. Radegund endured her marriage until Chlothar ordered the murder of her brother, her only surviving close kin.

After Radegund escaped her miserable marriage, but before she founded Holy Cross, she created her first institution for women in need: a hospital in a villa in Saix, which offered beds specifically for infirm women. ‘She herself washed them in warm baths, treating the putrid flesh of their diseases’, wrote one of her biographers. Radegund also provided treatment for men in Saix, but separately and without beds. This foundation can be fairly described as the first women’s hospital in Europe.

In her next effort to support her stated goal—the advancement of other women—Radegund founded Holy Cross in Poitiers. She accepted other highborn women into what became a religious house of considerable size, with around 200 nuns. Although the circumstances of entry are usually obscured from the historian, the example of Basina is both evidenced and instructive. The daughter of the Frankish king Chilperic I, Basina lost her mother, who was murdered at the hands of a rival—Queen Fredegund, who became Basina’s stepmother. Fredegund next turned her malevolent intentions to Basina, who was, according to the Histories of Gregory of Tours, ‘dishonoured by the slaves of the queen and sent into a monastery’. While most translators have interpreted the word deludere (rendered here as ‘dishonoured’) to mean something like ‘tricked’, it is much more likely that the word functioned as a euphemism for sexual assault, as suggested by Bruno Dumézil and explained in greater detail by Rachel Singer. Thus, historians have mistakenly thought that Radegund conspired in Fredegund’s trickery, when in fact she had offered refuge to a victim of sexual violence.

Radegund ensured that Holy Cross served as a protective environment for Basina, who was sheltered from the consequences of political life outside its walls. When Chilperic tried to reclaim Basina and marry her to a Visigothic prince, for example, Radegund resolutely refused. This was a fear that Radegund herself knew all too well: she had long worried that her former husband Chlothar, might try to reclaim her. This possibility was, according to one of her biographers, a fate she feared worse than death. History records one occasion, when a terrified Radegund successfully implored a high-ranking bishop to urge Chlothar to change his mind. Legend records another instance, in which nature herself protected the former queen. In an incident known as the ‘Miracle of the Oats’, Radegund fled into a field to escape Chlothar’s grasp. Recognising the vulnerability of the holy woman, the oats quickly grew so high that Radegund was concealed from Chlothar’s view. When the king saw that he had no hope of finding his former wife, he abandoned his pursuit.

Whether or not she was assisted by miraculous plants, Radegund ensured, just as she wrote in her Letter to the Bishops, that her efforts were beneficial not only for herself, but also for other women.

_{Featured image by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Cosmopolitan, cad, or closeted Catholic?

Having just arrived via ferry to the Dutch town of Sluis in mid-May 1611, William Cecil, Lord Roos (1591-1618), promptly exposed his “privy member” (penis) to what one assumes were rather surprised townsfolk. The gesture, repeated “5 or 6 times” for emphasis, was meant to display Roos’s disdain for the Protestant Dutch rebellion against Catholic Spanish rule. Later the same day, Roos emphasized this contempt by his “speeches uttered against the Hollanders” while touring a church.

The dangers of foreign travel in the early seventeenth century

The English Lord Roos was hardly the first young man to display boorish behavior while abroad on educational travels, and he would not be the last. In the early seventeenth-century, it became more common to send young men from elite families abroad for a year or two to acquire language skills, knowledge of foreign courts, customs, art, and history. Creating friendships and networks with important people was also a boon. A young man from a good family with such skills, knowledge, and networks was well-positioned for a career at the royal court, or perhaps royal service abroad. Many families thought the potential payoff worth the expense.

In addition to monetary cost, however, sending impressionable youngsters abroad also posed risks. They might be seduced by foreign vices, princes, and religions. Worried parents hired tutors to accompany their sons and ensure they stayed away from bad influences. Unsurprisingly, some tutors found it difficult to control their independent-minded charges.

We know of the above incident with Lord Roos because Thomas Lorkin, tutor to Thomas Puckering, found the behavior disturbing enough to report it to his charge’s brother-in-law Sir Adam Newton, secretary to Crown Prince Henry. Puckering made Roos’s acquaintance while they were both in Paris. Roos asked Puckering to accompany him on his tour of the Low Countries. Lorkin agreed to this arrangement because he thought this was a worthwhile connection for Puckering to foster: Roos’s great-uncle Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the most powerful man in England next the king. Roos also sought an appointment in the prince’s household, making the connection to Puckering useful. It was precisely the sort of networking that educational travelers were after.  

After traveling with Roos, Lorkin regretted his decision. The negatives far outweighed the few positives: seeing sites, being kindly received at the court of the regents of the Spanish Netherlands in Brussels, and making the acquaintance of Roos’s cousin, Salisbury’s son. In Roos, Lorkin found every danger with foreign educational travels personified. Roos drank and partied too much, stayed up late and slept the mornings away. He lost money gambling and engaged in “unsavory & obscene discourse.”

The company Roos kept was more troubling, because Lorkin thought it dangerous for his pupil’s very soul. For Protestant Englishmen, Catholicism constituted the greatest danger abroad. One could not avoid Catholics when travelling in Catholic regions, obviously, but one should keep one’s distance and not engage in religious debate. By contrast, Roos surrounded himself with Catholics. One of his travel companions was Sir Tobie Mathews, a Catholic Englishman who lived in disgraced exile. Roos regularly dined and conversed with Catholic priests and visited English Catholics living in Brussels. Rumors of Roos’s potential conversion to Catholicism persisted during his educational travels.

The disdain that Roos developed for his own home-country was also worrisome. After a long sojourn in Spain, Roos had fallen in love with everything Spanish. Lorkin said he had “never heard any so highly magnify any nation or country, as he doth” Spain, and while praising Spain, Roos was vilifying other countries, even “his owne.”  Many Englishmen were highly suspicious of Spain, as the enmity of the war during the late Elizabethan age lived on, and Spanish attempts at reconverting England continued. Lorkin noted Roos’s association with people who were suspected of being Spanish spies. Roos’s love of Spain led to his disagreement with the Protestant Dutch rebellion against the Spanish crown, which then led him to expose himself in Sluis. His peculiar penis protest became the crescendo of his caddish behavior.

While Lorkin expressed concerns, others might dismiss Roos’s behavior as ill-advised youthful antics. Indeed, English agents and ambassadors abroad found him charming company, an affable young man with a keen interest in wider Europe. Just a year after the trip with Puckering and Lorkin, King James sent Roos on a formal mission to congratulate the election of a new Holy Roman Emperor.

In the case of Roos, his family’s significant investment in his educational travels thus initially seemed to pay off. When he came home, he made a good marriage. He received a royal appointment to go as extraordinary ambassador to Spain. But his high hopes were soon squashed, and the foreign lands where he spent his youth became a source of respite from Roos’s growing troubles at home. His marriage soured, his career stalled, and his relationship with his in-laws fell apart spectacularly. According to his critics, Roos’s foreign travels had ruined him.

_{Feature image by Clark Young via Unsplash.}

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