Christian Humanist Profiles

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation. We can learn a fair bit about public life and public speech just tracing the course and changes and counter-thrusts surrounding words and phrases like fake news, alt-right, social justice, and woke. Sola Scriptura goes back cen

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another. But etymological roots don’t go far making sense of the fascination and the division and the devotion and the emotion that literature and scriptures bring forth in readers of all sorts. David Jasper has spent a car

What is education for? The oldest grand library of which I have any knowledge is the tablet-collection of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly a collection of magic spells for the court sorcerers to draw from when they need this or that kind of wizardry. And on the other end of things, in our little corner of the twenty-first century, some coll

If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical studies seem bent on discovering, naming, and insisting on a particular significance for any text that looks like, sounds like, works like, and otherwise resembles canonical and orthodox and h

History as a practice examines the contingent. Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things that might have been. In the realm of Black religion in the United States, the what-if questions and counterfactuals wonder about a seventy-year-old Dr. King, to be sure, but they also

Some of us first encounter them as the wicked city that Jonah eventually visits. For others they’re one of the Asian empires that Herodotus surveys on his way to the grand showdown between the Persians and the Greek-speaking city-states. Some of us have run into their legendary figures Sardanapallus and Semiramis in Dante or Byron. And of course some of us still aren’t sure how

You have heard that it is said: love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Translations might differ, but what follows comes across well in most translations: Jesus enjoins those hearing the Sermon on the Mount to love enemies and pray for persecutors. Those unsettling commandments never stop scandalizing those who spend time meditating on them, and those who contemplate the New Testa

Theology and literature have always seemed a natural pair to me. In fact, I’ve written a Master’s Thesis examining Ezekiel with the help of William Blake; another digging into Christology through Aemelia Lanier and John Milton; and a doctoral dissertation arguing that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were making moves in theological ethics that the theological academy only caug

The stereotype, whether we want to dismantle it or acknowledge it, holds that those who teach college English begin a quest in graduate school to be rid of teaching writing. As early as the mid-twentieth century Richard M. Weaver told the same story, and Weaver was among the first to take that stereotype not as an acknowledgment of rerum naturem but as the story of a fall, a declin

With Theology Beer Camp 2023 just around the corner (alas, I won’t be here, as I’m trying to be judicious taking days off during year one of my career change), I wanted to get Myron Penner’s talk from last year’s camp, along with our conversation that happened a spell later, out to you. Here’s the backstory: Myron and I did a live podcast back in October 2022, but the lap