Christian Humanist Profiles

Christian Humanist Profiles 257: David Jasper

Christian Humanist Profiles 256: Jeffrey Bilbro & David Henreckson

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 colleges seem to advertise exclusively (or pretty dang near exclusively) what kinds of financial benefits their scho...

Christian Humanist Profile 255: Michael F. Bird

 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 historically central texts.  Sometimes the parallelomaniac insists that the similarities render orthodox Christianity ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 254: Gary Dorrien

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 wonder about the directions that theological and political and cultural movements took and what possibilities, ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 253: Eckart Frahm

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 to avoid the Gorge of Eternal Peril when the old man asks us “What is the capital of Assyria?”  (We’ll address t...

Christian Humanist Profiles 252: Trevor Laurence

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 Testament and pray the Old Testament run into another problem: certain of the Psalms pray regarding enemies, but fe...

Christian Humanist Profiles 251: Shaun Ross

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 caught up to in the late twentieth century.  So when I found out that Dr. Shaun Ross had a book for me to read about th...

Christian Humanist Profiles 250: Heather Hoover

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 decline from a day when the professor of rhetoric stood at the pinnacle of undergraduate education to a moment when t...

Theology Beer Camp Remix: Myron Penner

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 laptop on which the interview was being recorded cut out 30 minutes in. So Myron and I got together on Zoom some time later ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 249: Lyric Theology with Thomas Gardner

Genesis–Bereshith in the Hebrew–opens with grand narratives of beginnings and generations, and the New Testament starts with four distinctive narrative accounts of Jesus, the anointed one.  For traditions that consider theology an interpretive endeavor at the outset, then, stories are the start, and Psalms and hymns and prophetic verse follow close behind.  But somewhere along the line, the propositions and syllogisms and refutations and such that get their start as commentaries on the narra...

Christian Humanist Profiles 248: Valerie Tiberius

Philoctetes is not the best-known Sophocles tragedy, but its questions stick with me.  When the title character insists on his dignity as a man of war, he runs afoul of the Odysseus of Sophocles, who could not care less about the wounded warrior’s sense of being wronged, so he enlists Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who insists that abstract virtues of war must govern everything that concerns the struggle.  I won’t spoil the ending of Philoctetes today, but I will say that conflicting values h...

Christian Humanist Profiles 247: The Secret Gospel of Mark

What’s on the table when we claim that a newly-discovered text came from a Biblical author?  To answer that question might take an investigation that spans the Roman Empire, desert monasteries, New York City apartments, the academic publishing industry, and the libraries and universities that change hands during wars and elections and all sorts of other events that intervene between us and that glorious first century.  Such a story is before us today, and Geoffrey S. Smith’s and Brent C. Lan...

Christian Humanist Profiles 246: Matthew Milliner

Tell me where you spend your Sunday mornings, and then where your grandmother spent her Sunday mornings, and I’ll venture a guess at what you think Christian art looks like.  In the realm of Christian art that involves basilicas and mosaics the icon holds a special place: by some accounts mainly a window through which one looks upon divine reality, the artistry of the icon nonetheless promises a different view of the world we inhabit, and the Virgin of the Passion, if Matthew Milliner is rig...

Christian Humanist Profiles 245: Ben Witherington & Jason Myers

“I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom.”  When I first read those words from St. Paul, they inoculated me against certain kinds of inquiry.  St. Paul must not have been an orator the way we think of orators, because he didn’t rely on eloquence when he spoke.  His education, therefore, must have been irrelevant to his epistles.  And certainly we won’t learn anything by attending to the rhetorical form when we take on his writings.  But here’s some go...

Christian Humanist Profiles 244: Paul Blaschko

The one who saves his life will lose it.  The one who sows to the spirit will reap life.  I am the way and the truth and the life.  Life is like a box of chocolates.  Ways of life and forms of life and such matters concerning life have occupied sages and philosophers and poets and preachers as long as human beings became word-slingers, and yet attempting the good life seems to require that each generation start anew somehow, to shape lives and to seek life for the first time every time.  Meg...

Christian Humanist Profiles 243: Bren DuBay

Somethin’s brewin’ on the podcast.  I wonder what it could be?  If you’ve seen the stage musical version of “The Cotton Patch Gospel” you know what and whom we’re talking about, but just in case you’ve never heard that musical, or if you’ve not read The Cotton Patch Gospels, or if you have no idea about anything I’ve mentioned up to this point, you’re just the person to have a seat and chat with us.  Clarence Jordan, Georgia Baptist preacher and the best kind of trouble-maker, was preaching ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 242: Peter K. Fallon

The book I expected to read would present all the ways in which human communities in the digital age are dealing with a decentralized authority structure, how any given woman or man might jump on the Internet, either through a browser or a social-media program or by some other means, and encounter half a dozen figures, all competing for status as authorities on the question at hand, disagreeing with each other not on marginal matters but on the most important, most central parts of the publi...

Christian Humanist Profiles 241: Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann did not only teach me to read the Bible: he taught me to read.  In the twenty-two years since I first read A Theology of the Old Testament I’ve been bringing the questions that book poses to Biblical texts over to every literary text I’ve come across: in what ways am I reading primary testimony or counter-testimony as I take on Toni Morrison or John Milton or Sophocles?  How are these texts relating to and creating audiences when I teach Shakespeare or Plato or James Baldw...

Christian Humanist Profiles 240: Eric Vanden Eykel

I don’t often talk about my own high-school years on this podcast, but I remember in high-school jazz band playing a Christmas medley called “Heaven and Nature Swing.”  It led with a “Caravan”-inspired arrangement of “We Three Kings”--if you don’t know “Caravan,” hit YouTube post-haste–and when I hear the hymn, these thirty years later, I always feel cheated when it doesn’t break out into snake-charmer saxophone runs at the ends of the rhyming lines.  Today we’re not talking about jazz, but ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 239: Shaun C. Brown

 Some intellectuals are famous, and some are intellectual-famous.  N.T. Wright appeared on The Colbert Report, and Reinhold Niebuhr testified before Congress, and Cornel West was in a couple Matrix movies.  George Lindbeck didn’t do any of those, as far as I know, but in certain circles of Christian theologians, he’s indisputably intellectual-famous, opening up possibilities for ecumenical engagement and influencing Stanley Hauerwas and attending Vatican II and such.  My own engagement with ...

Christian Humanist Profiles 238: Matthew Ichihashi Potts

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  I pray those words every Sunday morning at Bogart Christian Church, and I think I have a basic idea of what I mean when I do.  But that sense of solid knowledge conceals philosophical and theological disputes not only what the verb “to forgive” and the noun “forgiveness” mean but also how those realities relate to violence, reconciliation, narrative, memory, and all sorts of other complex matters.  In his recent book F...

Christian Humanist Profiles 237: Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography

Every ethics presumes a sociology.  That formula has followed me through nearly twenty-five years of study, and its source text, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, has been a constant conversation partner as I have studied and taught.  What I haven’t attended to nearly enough is the life of the human being behind After Virtue, but Nathan Pinkoski is here to remedy that.  His translation of Emile Perrau-Saussine’s book Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography walks through the where and...

Christian Humanist Profiles 236: Theology of Consent

When we set several theologies next to each other, naming their core claims helps us to make sense of their relationships, even as we grant that more complexity rewards careful reading and study.  So without necessarily reducing them, we can speak and write about Calvin’s theology of sovereignty, Schleiermacher’s theology of experience, Bultmann’s theology of kerygma, Thomas Aquinas’s theology of revelation, and so on.  In his book Theology of Consent from SacraSage, Jonathan Foster proposes...

Christian Humanist Profiles 235: God after Einstein

As a student in a good Old Testament Introduction class will be able to tell you, Genesis 1 borrows structures and symbols and maybe even vocabulary from Babylonian texts like Enuma Elish to paint its particular picture of creation.  Likewise Proverbs 8 casts world-making in terms of international wisdom traditions, and John 1 appropriates Greek philosophical vocabularies to tell us of the logos who becomes sarx.  In his recent book God After Einstein: What’s Really Going on in the Universe,...

Christian Humanist Profiles 234: The Right

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should rule France, so once that question is settled, I’m pretty well in place on that question.  Of course, the seating arrangements in the Estats General have come down to us as our lexical inheritance, so I suppose we should talk a bit about the Right.  The good news here is that we’ve invited Matt Contin...

Christian Humanist Profiles 234: The Right

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should rule France, so once that question is settled, I’m pretty well in place on that question.  Of course, the seating arrangements in the Estats General have come down to us as our lexical inheritance, so I suppose we should talk a bit about the Right.  The good news here is that we’ve invited Matt Continetti to the show,...

Christian Humanist Profiles 233: Reading History with Michael Burger

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move.  So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something.  Teaching a mechanic how to maintain an automobile’s engine involves things that teaching differential calculus doesn’t, and neither of those is quite the same as teaching Shotokan karate.  Michael Burger’s new book Reading History from University of Toronto Press sets out to explore what it might look li...

Christian Humanist Profiles 233: Reading History with Michael Burger

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move.  So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something.  Teaching a mechanic how to maintain an automobile’s engine involves things that teaching differential calculus doesn’t, and neither of those is quite the same as teaching Shotokan karate.  Michael Burger’s new book Reading History from University of Toronto Press sets out to explore what it might look like to teach histo...

Christian Humanist Profiles Episode 232: Bart Ehrman

I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else. Milton’s devils and especially his version of Satan lead a reader into some profound worries about the powers of rhetoric and reason. Goethe’s Mephistopheles can’t seem to keep up with the ambition of Heinrich Faust, and his attempts at temptation are farcical compared to the grandeur of the great man’s desires. And certainly nobody who’s read ...

Christian Humanist Profiles Episode 232: Bart Ehrman

I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else. Milton’s devils and especially his version of Satan lead a reader into some profound worries about the powers of rhetoric and reason. Goethe’s Mephistopheles can’t seem to keep up with the ambition of Heinrich Faust, and his attempts at temptation are farcical compared to the grandeur of the great man’s desires. And certainly n...

Christian Humanist Profiles 231: Roosevelt Montas

When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project.  In each of my first four semesters we read history and theology and literature and philosophy and all kinds of texts from different eras, always letting each inform the others.  Dr. Roosevelt Montas’s journey from the Dominican Republic to New York City differs from my own from Indiana to Georgia, bu...

Christian Humanist Profiles 231: Roosevelt Montas

When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project.  In each of my first four semesters we read history and theology and literature and philosophy and all kinds of texts from different eras, always letting each inform the others.  Dr. Roosevelt Montas’s journey from the Dominican Republic to New York City differs from my own from Indiana to Georgia, but we share a love...

Christian Humanist Profiles 230: Falsehood and Fallacy

 I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession.  Back in the fall of 2000, when first I started, John Bean convinced me that the goal of core-curriculum classes should be to introduce novices to the practices and standards of the university disciplines, and I still think that’s about right.  A decade later, concerns had shifted to helping students engage in metacognition, the examination of one’s o...

Christian Humanist Profiles 230: Falsehood and Fallacy

 I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession.  Back in the fall of 2000, when first I started, John Bean convinced me that the goal of core-curriculum classes should be to introduce novices to the practices and standards of the university disciplines, and I still think that’s about right.  A decade later, concerns had shifted to helping students engage in metacognition, the examination of one’s own thought-proces...

Christian Humanist Profiles 229: My Body Is not a Prayer Request

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Amy Kenny about her new book "My Body Is not a Prayer Request."

Christian Humanist Profiles 229: My Body Is not a Prayer Request

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Amy Kenny about her new book "My Body Is not a Prayer Request."

Christian Humanist Profiles 228: Render Unto Caesar

Nathan Gilmour talks with John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Render Unto Caesar."

Christian Humanist Profiles 228: Render Unto Caesar

Nathan Gilmour talks with John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Render Unto Caesar."

Christian Humanist Profiles 227: Restless Devices

Christina Bieber Lake talks with Felicia Wu Song about her recent book "Restless Devices."

Christian Humanist Profiles 227: Restless Devices

Christina Bieber Lake talks with Felicia Wu Song about her recent book "Restless Devices."

Christian Humanist Profiles 226: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People

Nathan Gilmour talks with Larry Shapiro about his recent book "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People."

Christian Humanist Profiles 226: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People

Nathan Gilmour talks with Larry Shapiro about his recent book "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People."

Christian Humanist Profiles 225: The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Mary DeMuth about her recent book "The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible."

Christian Humanist Profiles 225: The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Mary DeMuth about her recent book "The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible."

Christian Humanist Profiles 224: Ars Vitae

Nathan Gilmour talks with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn about her recent book "Ars Vitae."

Christian Humanist Profiles 224: Ars Vitae

Nathan Gilmour talks with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn about her recent book "Ars Vitae."

Christian Humanist Profiles 223: Nothing Less than Great

Nathan Gilmour talks with Harvey Weingarten about his recent book "Nothing Less than Great."

Christian Humanist Profiles 223: Nothing Less than Great

Nathan Gilmour talks with Harvey Weingarten about his recent book "Nothing Less than Great."

Christian Humanist Profiles 222: Following the Call

Nathan Gilmour talks with Charles Moore about his recent anthology "Following the Call."

Christian Humanist Profiles 222: Following the Call

Nathan Gilmour talks with Charles Moore about his recent anthology "Following the Call."