Sabbatical Blog 1: Mushrooms

So my sabbatical project is to write as much of my book The Ancient New Age: The Birth of Christianity and the Triumph of Gnostic Spirituality as possible.  At the moment, I have been working on honing my abstract and table of contents.  So I want to share the abstract with you in this first post on the sabbatical.

Since I am going to be making my old subject contemporary with the analogy to the New Age, I have been thinking deeply about Gnostic(ism) and about its re-insurgence in the modern period.  I keep going back to Irenaeus' description of the Gnostics as mushrooms popping up from the terrain.  I rather like this metaphor and am thinking about structuring the book around it.  Besides there is great mushroom art from the medieval Christians.  Take a look at this Eden with the mushroom as the tree of knowledge (Plaincourault Fresco).

Abstract: Early Christianity was very radical in its approach to perennial questions about God and humanity because, DeConick explains, the Christian tradition was seeded with a Gnostic spirituality from the start. DeConick argues that Gnostic spirituality itself was a brand new concept in the ancient world, a new way of being religious that emerged in 1st c. Alexandria, and quickly was dispersed across the Mediterranean.  It reflected a subversive metaphysical outlook and included an understanding of humanity as divine.  Unlike early catholic Christianity which developed traditional Jewish teachings about the mortality of the human being created in God's image and subject to sin, the Gnostics framed their teaching along Platonic lines, understanding the essential human being to be an uncreated piece of God living in exile and suffering on account of this separation.  These 2 metaphysical outlooks were diametrically opposed to each other, competing for dominance from the start of Christian history to today.  While the catholic churches were able to sustain mass conversion and the western Gnostic churches ultimately perished, Gnostic spirituality did not die.  It survived as an underground religious current.  It remains today at the root of New Age and Self-help movements, and at odds with traditional forms of Christianity just as it was in the ancient world. The Ancient New Age focuses on the way in which Gnostic spirituality has triumphed.  Not only did it foster countercultural metaphysical or “New Age” movements in past, but it continues to do so in the present, where its message of the divine human thrives.

The Patio Tomb Box and the Fish

It appears that the fish controversy may have a productive "end".  Professor James Charlesworth and Robert Deutsch (an Israeli epigrapher) have found an overlooked inscription in the nose of the fish that reads in Hebrew "JONH" or Jonah.  The lines of the stick figure form an inscription according to a new report that can be found HERE. 

I continue to agree that the figure on the box is a fish.  And now with this inscription and photos of it, I find the evidence convincing that the artist was depicting Jonah.  Further, given that this pictorial is on a bone box from first-century Jerusalem, it is plausible that the reference is to resurrection. 

With this find, we have some type of Jew in the first century for whom the Jonah story made sense within the context of death. So I am moving in the direction that we may be seeing here evidence of an early Christian-Jewish tomb.   

The Bart Ehrman Blog

Congratulations to Bart Ehrman for creating a new blog on the early Christian world. Welcome to the world of blogging! See his blog HERE.

The Pope and non-canonical sayings

Michael Peppard (Fordham University) has written a fun piece in the online Commonwealth Magazine on the Pope's recent reference to a non-canonical saying.  Take a look HERE.

Thanks to Fr. Imbelli for drawing our attention to the Pope’s homily from Easter Vigil (full text here). I am always enriched by Pope Benedict’s utilization of early Christian texts and traditions in his explication of Catholic faith and practice. The Vigil is the perfect time to recall the centrality of “illumination” (photismos) in the early Church. For contemporary listeners, ideas of illumination or enlightenment might sound more at home in Buddhism or even “new age” spirituality, but in fact, they were at the heart of early Christian initiation, especially in the east (Egypt, Palestine, and Syria). For example, when Cyril of Jerusalem describes those preparing for initiation, he often calls them “those about to be illuminated/enlightened” (photizomenoi). Moreover, the “light from light” image was so indispensable as a symbol of the idea of undiminished giving that it can rightly be thought of as the foundational image of Nicene Christology (cf. Jaroslav Pelikan’s little gem of a book, The Light of the World: A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought, 1962). 

But what caught my attention even more is the quotation of Jesus with which Fr. Imbelli’s excerpt concludes. The Pope said: “‘Whoever is close to me is close to the fire,’ as Jesus is reported by Origen to have said.” It’s true that this is one of the so-called agrapha from the early Church, things which early Christian writers said that Jesus said, but which the New Testament does not record. And it’s true that Origen said that Jesus said this, and Jesus certainly might have said this.

But another true way of reporting the quote would be: “‘Whoever is close to me is close to the fire,’ as Jesus is reported by the Gospel of Thomas to have said.” (It’s logion #82, for those interested.) MORE...

A Sabbatical Blog?

Well I am finally making it to my second sabbatical in my career.  Once I turn my grades in in May, I am considering myself to officially be on sabbatical.  It is much needed, believe me, and it will be for the entire next academic year thanks to the success of a Rice Individual Faculty Fellowship generously granted to me by the Humanities Research Center at Rice University which is funding the second semester.  My project?  You guessed it.  I will be writing my book The Ancient New Age: The Triumph of Gnostic Spirituality and the Birth of Christianity.

So I was wondering whether or not to start blogging about what I am doing while on Sabbatical?  It might be interesting to log my progress.  It might help me think through the tough spots, the blind spots and the discouraging spots.  And it would be a boon to get feedback from you on some of my ideas as I am in the process of writing.

Is this something that you would be interested in following?

Nightline on the Patio Tomb

Here is a link to the Nightline featuring James Tabor and Mark Goodacre last night.  I don't have cable so I had to watch this on the internet this morning.  The link is HERE.

"Un"Convention at Rice

This year has flown by.  Or at least it seems like it.  I have been busier than ever (in case you haven't noticed that I nearly abandoned my blog because I couldn't keep up with the blogging world, my office, my students, my research, and my home this year).

I am in the last weeks of courses here at Rice and this week Rice is having an "Un"Convention to open up the campus to Houstonians and other visitors to see what we are all up to here on the most beautiful campus in the world.  Our logo at Rice is the Owl (it is Athena's bird, the symbol of wisdom) and we pride ourselves as those who seek and teach innovative thinking, what we call "Unconventional Wisdom".

There are many activities planned over the next few days and you can find a link to them HERE.  I invite you to come to campus and enjoy some of these activities if you are in town.

An explanation from the media:

For 100 years, Rice faculty, researchers and students have believed that anything is possible — that drive, devotion and innovative thinking can turn ideas into achievements. We call it unconventional wisdom. Help us celebrate an unconventional century at the UnConvention, a campuswide open house April 12–14. As we move towards our Centennial Celebration in October, we’re inviting all of Houston to venture inside the hedges and explore Rice through tours, demonstrations, concerts, lectures, athletic events, art exhibits and more.

A Book Review of The Jesus Discovery

This just published in the Winnipeg Free Press on The Jesus Discovery by Bill Rambo (link sent to me by John McGinley):

Sensational discoveries and unconventional interpretations of religious art and archeology got a black eye in the last decade with the success and backlash surrounding Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and its prequels and sequels.

Much less glitzy, but much better researched and presented, The Jesus Discovery by James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici is sensational, unconventional and thought-provoking.  MORE...

On my way to Groningen

I am getting on a plane in a few hours to make the trek across the Atlantic to Amsterdam and then by train to Groningen.  I am speaking at the University of Groningen on the subject of the Gnostics and the Ancient New Age.  This is a first peek at the research I am currently conducting as I write my latest book, The Ancient New Age: The Birth of Christianity and the Triumph of Gnostic Spirituality.  I will be sharing the initial work I have done on recovering the Gnostic from the ancient testimonies.  My approach is quite different from what has gone on before.  I am looking at the question from the angle of the cognitive, in other words, how did the ancients understand and use the concept Gnostic?  This allows me to get at a new type of religiosity that I argue emerges in the first century: Gnostic spirituality.  You heard it first here!

Frustrations about the fish

I know that people are frustrated with the Patio tomb ossuary.  It is okay that there are differing opinions emerging.  This is how scholarship works.  Whenever there is a new find, it is important for us as a community to weigh all the options and decide which opinions best support the evidence so that a hypothesis or two can emerge and some consensus reached.  This may take some years.  The start of this is what is going on right now. 

At this point, there is no single solution.  There are a number of solutions that must be vetted and more investigation is likely going to be necessary.  At this point we have a reading of the ossuary that has been put forth by Simcha and Tabor, and others are now weighing in and presenting their views since this is all new information for all of us. 

I hope that we don't make a war out of this, but can proceed with caution, logic, collegiality and professionalism. 

Let's get all the options out on the table, and talk them through.  The Jonah option is one.  The vase is another.  I think these are the two most logical options at this moment.  What do the ossuary experts say when this image is compared to ossuary art?  We need funerary context to figure this out. 


James Tabor writes in the comments to my previous post on this subject:

Yuval...has said of all the ossuaries in the Bet Shemesh/Rockefeller collection (upwards of 1500 now I think--as Rahmani only goes back to 1989), with at least 350 inscribed (estimate based on Cotton, CIIP) he has never seen anything like our image, that it is definitely not a nephesh or a vessel of any time known on ossuaries. He thinks the fish/Jonah suggestion is the most convincing yet.

Tabor also writes about the image in the same comment on my blog:

What I have said is that none of our photos have been altered, doctored, or photoshopped in any way. They are precisely the images the camera produced taken from the hundreds of hours of video tape and freeze frames taken during the actual process. That is what is false, plus the charge/implication that we are dishonest and manipulate evidence to try to fit a theory. Nothing has been touched. There is no single photo showing the entire image, however, by moving the robotic arm in all positions the complete image is visible. In addition to the photos, to allow people to see the entire image at once, there are CGI images produced by GE Information Technologies. These are clearly labeled as such (see thejesusdiscovery.org)...

Tom Verenna continues to think it is a vase of some sort and posted a second round of evidence HERE.

Book Note: Revelations by Elaine Pagel

Elaine Pagels has published a new book on Revelation and revelations in early Christianity.  There was a terrific review of it in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik HERE. 

I must confess that if Mr. Gopnik ever needs a book to review, I would be completely beside myself with joy if he were to review one of mine.  Wow can he write!  Give him a raise!

There is another review of the book in The Washington Post HERE.

It looks like a fish to me

I don't know what to make of the ossuary in the Patio tomb because I haven't had a chance to study it as thoroughly as others, and really I'm not that keen on the fact that the tomb hasn't been physically excavated yet, so there is no telling what contextual information we are missing.  But from the pictures in Tabor's and Jacobovici's book, I see a fish too.  Either the fish has really big lips, or it is eating something, or it is coughing something out of its mouth. But it looks like a fish to me.  What do you think it is?

UPDATE: Bob Cargill examines the digital enhancement of the photograph in detail HERE. It is a very detailed post, suggesting that the pictures in the book have been manipulated so that the image is viewed straight on instead of from an angle.  This change of perspective makes the image look more like a fish than the original photograph, he argues.

All of this leaves me puzzled.  I am not sure what to make of any of this.  I don't see a tower because it would have to be upside down on the ossuary if it were a tower.  Nor do I see a vase because vases do not have a small round knob as a base.  If it is a vase, it is one that would not be able to stand on its own.  I think we need to entertain as many options as we can.  What else could it be?

UPDATE 2: James Tabor left this in the comments:

The charges of manipulation and alteration are simply false. There are no doctored photos and the "fish," no matter how it is positioned, is a fish... Those who have objected that a fish would not be nose down have missed the main point--the notion of Jonah being vomited on the land. Fish don't swim in tail first...again, see my latest blog post. The perfume bottle will not fly. We know what those flasks looked like in that time and culture, and even the Persian examples that Tom and others site do not look like fish. Lots of comments on the ASOR blog.

UPDATE 3: Tom Verenna's link to a discussion of vases can be found HERE.  Some very interesting comparisons, although the top part of the figure looks more like a tail fin to me than the top of a vase.  What I would really like to see is more examples of artwork on ossuaries.  What are the common patterns?  How does this ossuary compare to others?  Are vases common drawings on ossuaries?  If so, do they look like this figure?  

A Book Review of Holy Misogyny

This nice write up on my book, Holy Misogyny, was just published by Midwest Book Review:

The earliest decades of the Christian movement saw the beginnings of gender role conflicts exemplified by Paul's exhortation against women preaching in church gatherings. The suppression of women's roles in favor of male ecclesiastical privilege continued to strengthen in the succeeding early centuries and still have immense ramifications in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant congregations and churches today. "Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter" is a superbly researched 200-page compendium by April D. DeConick (Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies, Rice University) presenting the origins of such Christian doctrinal issues as to why God is male, the association of women with sin, the denial of priesthood to females, and more. Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, "Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter" is a strongly recommended read for anyone concerned with the origin of gender equality issues within the contemporary Christian community.

Book Note: Esotericism and the Academy (Wouter J. Hanegraaff)

This is just a quick note to let you know that Hanegraaff's newest book on esotericism has been published by Cambridge.  The book studies the Academy's marginalization of esotericism in the modern era. Hanegraaff puts forward a convincing argument that esotericism has had an incredible impact on western thought since the Renaissance, and the time has come to acknowledge and study this.  It is about time!

Wouter J. Hanegraaff,  Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. 

The Table of Contents:

Introduction: Hic sunt dracones

1. The History of Truth: Recovering Ancient Wisdom

Competing Macrohistories – Platonic Orientalism – The Christian Apologists – The Wise Man from

the East: Gemistos Plethon – The Platonic Theologian: Marsilio Ficino – Secret Moses: Giovanni Pico

della Mirandola and Christian Kabbalah – The Universal Catholic: Agostino Steuco – The End of a

Cycle

2. The History of Error: Exorcizing Paganism

Against the Pagans – Against the Fathers – The Anti‐Apologist: Jacob Thomasius – The

Heresiologist: Ehregott Daniel Colberg – The Pietist Reaction – The Birth of Religionism: Gottfried

Arnold –Enlightenment and Eclipse – The Historian: Jacob Brucker – The Parting of the Ways

3. The Error of History: Imagining the Occult

Tainted Terminologies 1: Superstition – Tainted Terminologies 2: Magic – Tainted Terminologies 3:

Occult – Alchemy between Science and Religion – The Organization of Secrecy – The Occult

Marketplace – Elemental Fiction – Compendia of Rejected Knowledge – Secret Traditions and

Hidden Histories – The Waste Land

4. The Truth of History: Entering the Academy

Magnetic Historiography: German Romantic Mesmerism and Evolutionism – The Archetype of

Eranos: Carl Gustav Jung and the Western Unconscious – Eranos and Religionism: Scholem, Corbin,

Eliade – The Return of the Historians: From Peuckert and Thorndike to Frances Yates – Antoine

Faivre and Western Esotericism – Esotericism in the Academy

Conclusion: Restoring Memory

Here is the publisher's description:

Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.

Book Note: Dark Mirrors by Andrei A. Orlov

Andrei Orlov presents us with a new book on a wicked subject: the origins and development of the demons Azazel and Satanael in early Judaism and Christianity. 

I remember when, a few years ago, Professor Orlov was working on the temptation narratives in the gospels and presented a paper in the New Testament Mysticism Project on Satan.  He noted that the narrative of Satan was an upside down version of patterns of ascent of heroes in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  I recall how this insight was met with enthusiasm among the group, and it appears to have become the impetus for Professor Orlov to explore this symmetry more fully.  Now he gives us the results of that exploration in a wonderful book just published by SUNY.  It is called Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology. 

The book takes up the correspondence of inverse symmetry, when the antagonist or protagonist of the story takes the place of his opponent by acquiring peculiar attributes and conditions of his counterpart. He notes that in the Book of the Watchers, the fallen angels and the hero Enoch mirror each other in the exchange of offices, roles, attributes, and even wardrobes (5).  Professor Orlov traces this pattern in two traditions, one involving Satan as the source of evil, the other Azazel.  His study plays close attention to the sacerdotal dimension of this demonology, showing that the peculiar transformations of the adversaries have cultic signficance within the liturgical settings of the Jewish tradition (7).

The book is written along these chapter lines:

1: "The Likeness of Heaven": Kavod of Azazel in the Apocalypse of Abraham
2: Eschatological Yom Kippur in the Apocalypse of Abraham: The Scapegoat Ritual
3: The Garment of Azazel in the Apocalypse of Abraham
4: The Watchers of Satanael: The Fallen Angels Traditions in 2 Slavonic Enoch
5: Satan and the Visionary: Apocalyptic Roles of the Adversary in the Temptation Narrative of the Gospel of Matthew
6: The Flooded Arboretums: The Garden Traditions in the Slavonic Version of 3 Baruch and the Book of Giants

It is wonderful to see this book come into being from its glowing inception during our seminar to its book form.  And wow! SUNY finally made a gorgeous cover.

I leave you with a verse that opens his book, which leaves me to ponder the power of the deep and dark which the Gnostics I study also knew:

Come and see: There are chariots of the left in the mystery of the Other Side and chariots of the right in the mystery of the supernal Holiness, and they match one another...(Zohar I.211b).

On my way to San Francisco

AAR/SBL are back together and in San Francisco.  Off to the meeting in a few minutes.  So glad to be able to see friends from AAR that I haven't seen in years.

News about Holy Misogyny

Wow this semester has really gotten away from me.  So sorry.  A couple of items to bring to your attention.  First, the Kindle version of Holy Misogyny is now out HERE.  I know that several of my readers were hoping for the e-version, so here it is.  I still haven't any response from Barnes & Noble, so if you want it in Nook format, please let Barnes & Noble know.  Honestly, this is about you and what you want.  These companies are listening to you because things are so much in turmoil in the publishing world right now. 

Second, my Tolle Lege talk on Holy Misogyny has been rescheduled for February 21, 7-8:30 pm in the Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library, Rice campus.  Sorry that we had to reschedule, but I was very ill and unable to make the Nov 1 presentation.

The Houston Chronicle has just posted a story on our Tolle Lege series HERE.  Hope you like it!

Get Sparked by the Humanities

For years I have been listening to the critique of the Humanities and watching its erosion.  I have noticed a couple of things contributing to its demise.  The first, in my opinion, has been the direct result of post-modern thought, which has emptied texts and other cultural productions of authorship and meaning.  It takes my breath away when I think of what this single claim (and it is nothing more than a claim that so many have bought into) has done to the Humanities.  When credit is no longer given to an author and meaning is derivative only of the reader, why bother studying the culture that produced the text or object?  Why bother learning the language that the text was produced in?  Why bother spending years training in a field when there can be no expert knowledge of or about the text or object, but only perceptions of those who read it and view it?  We are critiquing ourselves out of fields of knowledge.

The second is tied to the first.  If there are no expert fields of knowledge, then what are we supposed to do?  If the disciplines are perceived to be useless, then we better work across disciplines.  So the call for interdisciplinary knowledge arose in the universities and has taken center stage, even to the point that interdisciplinarity has been argued to be the next step.  There should be no more departments.  We should all work together and eliminate the limitations and constructed boundaries of departmentalized knowledge.  We are critiquing ourselves out of departments.

The third is tied to the second.   If we aren't experts in a particular field of knowledge anymore, and departments dissolve, then what?  What purpose can we have?  What use?  When I look around, I see a fast scramble now to the sciences and social sciences (whose professors, by the way, have never bought into the postmodern critique and have maintained strongly expert fields of knowledge and disciplinary boundaries).  How can the humanities make use of the sciences?  Terms like Medical Humanities are becoming the rage.  Environmental Humanities.  Emerging Humanities.  We are critiquing ourselves into the sciences.  

Now you might think that my post is about the need for we in the Humanities to resist these things.  But this would be a false impression.  Critique is good for us, as long as it is constructive.  While the Medical Humanities may turn out to be a fascinating field of study, this does not mean in my opinion that traditional Humanities disciplines should receive any less attention.  In fact, I think we are doing ourselves a real disservice by not highlighting traditional disciplines too.

I think that we have to look at this for what it is.  I think we need to take the discourse back to a healthy constructive place.  I think interdisciplinarity is healthy, as long as we have real disciplines that are interacting and sharing knowledge.  I think that disciplines and departments are not only necessary, but foundational.  You need strong healthy disciplines in order to work across them successfully.

I don't buy into the postmodern argument that has killed the author, authorial intent, or meaning, because I realize (this insight is from the sciences) that humans are embodied, and the things that we produce leave our cognitive imprints, and these imprints are bound to cognitive maps from cultural worlds in which the productions were made.  There is no mind, no knowledge, that floats around out there.  Knowledge is made in us and we make it from within the webs of knowledge culturally shared by us in very specific locations.  I will post more on these ideas in later posts.

For now, what I would like to do is to think about Humanities as a spark.  Those of us who became Humanities professors did so because something was sparked in us when we read a poem, saw a vase, studied a text, listened to a piece of music.  Something happened to us when we read Plato, or Josephus, or the Gospel of Thomas, or Dante, or Blake, or Shakespeare.  What?  What sparked you?

For me, whatever it was, and I have yet to name it, was totally absolutely life-changing.  When I first read Plato, it was nothing less than an epiphany.  When I first started to think, I mean really think about what makes us human, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  When my first philosophy professor showed us a film about what a fire storm would be like if a nuclear explosion went off, and he asked us, would you push the button given this circumstance and that circumstance, well I was shaken to the depths of my very being.  When my religion professor examined biblical texts without preferential treatment, but as cultural productions that had left the imprint of their societies on them, I was so upset I didn't want to go back into his classroom.  Who did he think he was?  Obviously I went back, my curiosity winning my private battle of faith.  I understand fully why curiosity is framed as demonic by so many faith traditions and is proverbial in our culture (curiosity killed the cat).  For all that the sciences had to offer me at the time (I was headed to medical school, and had been in nursing school initially), the call to the Humanities would not leave me alone.  I had been changed by the encounter.  My life had been transformed by its spark.

Byzantine Icons from the Menil Collection

I am excited to pass this information on to you.  The Menil Collection here in Houston (my favorite museum ever) is putting on an exhibit of their rare Byzantine and Russian icons.  The Menil's collection of icons is considered one of the most important in the U.S. with rare pieces from the 6th to the 18th centuries.  The name of the exhibit is Imprinting the Divine (MORE...). 

PHOTO: Saint Marina, Lebanon, possibly Tripoli, 13th century, Tempera and metal leaf on wood, 8-1/2  x 6-3/8 x 7/8 inches. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester

This is how they describe the exhibit:

Orthodox Christianity developed in the Near East during the rule of the Byzantine Empire. Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian Orthodox churches maintained a tradition of icon painting rooted in Byzantium but each expressed it in distinctive ways. Transcending time and place through a delicate balance of tradition and innovation, these images of saintly figures and divine events were designed to imprint their holy subjects on the human mind. Though largely overlooked by Western audiences for much of their history, icons captured the imagination of early modernist painters and their distinct qualities were appreciated by contemporary audiences.
 
An icon, whether in an ancient or modern context, is a sign or likeness of something of greater significance. Throughout history religious icons have been used to instruct, adorn and inspire worship. To be an effective conduit to the sacred, an icon must achieve fidelity to the subject it represents, be accessible enough to be easily remembered, and blend new messages with familiar elements. The icons of Imprinting the Divine reveal a variety of visual strategies that repeat figures and scenes but that also refresh, revise and renew the various elements that go into their creation. As Carr writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, “The art form evolved in both meaning and technique, yet maintained the continuity and fidelity to type so crucial to its purpose. Even now, centuries later…icons have lost none of their power to intrigue and impress.” (p. 33)

A first review of Holy Misogyny

I want to thank Ms. Jasmine Wilson for her thoughtful review of Holy Misogyny on the Englewood Review of Books website.   This is a very interesting and brave website I think.  It is written for a Christian-centered audience, but its reviewers comment on books that are not necessarily written from that same perspective.  I especially appreciated what she had to say toward the end of the review, which I quote here:

It seemed she was writing to a wider audience of those interested in gender studies, not just Christians who were interested in redeeming their own muddled history toward women. Because of that, she does not take at face value that the Scriptures have any sort of spiritual identity, and might make some Christians uncomfortable because of that. However, if readers recognize that she is writing toward a wider audience, I do think her account is appropriately dangerous, and can hopefully jar Christians into action to reverse the long tradition of misogynistic interpretation of Scripture and misogynistic action in the church.