Christian Humanist Profiles

Some ancient lives start with core texts and move out from there.  The canonical gospels are obvious, as are Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Augustine’s Confessions.  But other lives take some historical work, some investigation and some retrieval from the corners of the sources.  Those lives, when people have done the work to assemble them, often surprise us, and women’s biographies remind me that I don’t really know how prominent women lived in the ancient world–I’m discovering their courses and their motives and their significance every time I study anew.  Bruce Chilton’s recent book Berenice: Queen in Roman Judea is precisely that kind of surprise and precisely that kind of discovery, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him back to the show.

The gospel of John relates a memorable detail of the crucifixion of Jesus that doesn’t appear in the synoptic gospels: fixed to Jesus’s cross is a sign on which Pontius Pilate wrote the same thing in three ways: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Judeans.  That detail, when I took my first New Testament college class, brought to my attention the multilingual character of Jesus’s world.  Later I learned that the common language of the region was something called Aramaic, which wasn’t Greek but wasn’t Hebrew either.  And things got even more complicated after that.  Bruce Chilton’s recent book Aramaic Jesus sets forth layers of complexity still, showing how the constellations of Semitic languages in Roman-occupied Palestine and beyond play into the narratives and rhetoric and language by which we receive Christian traditions.  Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes back to the show Dr. Bruce Chilton.

 I always think I know what Romans is about, and then I reread Romans.  I don’t fault the Reformed for fixating on the formulas that confirm Calvin, and I don’t blame Lutherans for taking “law” as consistently a term of abuse when it seems more fluid to my eyes, but I do wonder at the confidence with which so many read this confounding epistle–how are people so convinced that they know what Romans teaches?  Today Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Beverly Gaventa to talk about her book Readings in Romans: Interpreting Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel from Baylor University Press, and perhaps she can tell me either to read more confidently or perhaps to continue in my caution, but either way, we welcome Dr. Gaventa to the show.

In the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus revolutionized homiletics by bringing the insights of Ciceronian and later humanist rhetoric to bear on preaching, and historians of Protestant and Catholic traditions in the following centuries agree that worship gatherings transformed radically with that crossover.  Not long after, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and others brought the humanist love for human individuality into the theater and replaced allegorical representations of spiritual forces with individual human characters, changing drama in Europe.  And more recently, Dr. James Cone brought Black Church traditions of worship and activism into academic theology, shaping the discipline irreversibly.  And now, the Reverend Dr. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough invites us to think about American oratory, specifically public speech by Black women, in the light of academic homiletics and as preaching in its own right.  Her recent book Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women, from Baylor University Press, is our text today.  Does it preach?

Talk to an American Protestant about her spiritual life, and you’re as likely as not to hear about reading a printed Bible, usually in solitude, for the sake of resisting the distractions that an image- and video-saturated world.  There’s nothing inherently bad about any part of that picture--certainly I’ve meditated on the Psalms in a quiet place for similar reasons.  But spirituality does not always take that form.  Whatever one posits about human nature–whether it’s a historically-developing reality or trans-historical, the documented, concrete practices of Christian spirituality have changed substantially over the course of the centuries and have taken different forms in different places.  The study of such things is daunting, and Volker Leppin’s new book Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction aims at a moment–some time between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries–and a place–largely in the German-speaking regions called the Holy Roman Empire–that show us modern Americans just how interesting and just how various Christian spirituality has been.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Leppin to the show.

For Americans, in the twenty-first century, the first association between Shakespeare and schools is obvious: we read Shakespeare in school.  Whether we’re thinking of the ubiquitous Romeo and Juliet unit in ninth grade, later high-school tragedies, or perhaps even a play or two in college, in our moment the Bard shows up in school, and then some might go and see a play in a theater.  In Shakespeare’s own time, plays were entertainment, the things that law students went to hear when they weren’t reading for the bar.  And in both moments, along with many moments in between, Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies themselves feature characters who are former students, would-be teachers, and other educational figures.  Sean Keilen’s book Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts journeys from stage to school and back a few different ways, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

I first learned about Pierre Hadot in a John Milbank book, and ever since I’ve read everything of his that I could get my hands on.  Hadot’s revolutionary power resides not in a particular claim or argument but in a method: he investigates Plato and the Stoics and eventually even Wittgenstein as shapers of lives, teachers who lead disciples into new ways of life through philosophical disciplines.  Although Hadot is not one of the heroes of The Kantian Religion–and we might get back to Hadot at some point–Dr. Ian Hunter’s recent book, Hunter brings Kant into that same revolutionary matrix, investigating the ways that Kant, for many the picture of a detached modern philosopher, was making disciples with his philosophy.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Hunter to the show to talk about this fascinating book. 

I’ve spent a fair bit of my professional life among devils.  Dante’s gigantic Satan never was much of a talker, but Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and Goethe’s diminished version of Mephisto never shut up.  Milton’s Satan lies so much he convinces himself, and the strange devil who visits Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov remains a logic-chopping favorite.  But as much time as I spend with literary devils, and as much time as I spend talking to theologians, I don’t spend a lot of time talking with theologians about devils.  Today we’re going to try to correct that as Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Philip Ziegler to talk about his recent book God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil.

I’ve never been in the same room as Stanley Hauerwas, but he’s been part of my life for thirty years.  One of his graduate students taught me philosophy and theology, and I worked as a research assistant for one of his Yale classmates.  I’ve read a shelf of his books, and he’s talked with me about a pair of those on this show, and that’s not even to tell the tale of an episode of this show about Hauerwas exclusively and a handful that have interacted with his work.  Today we’re coming back to Hauerwas as Charles E. Moore returns to the show talk about the recent book Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible.  Moore has assembled some of Hauerwas’s writings to give shape to a peculiar kind of book, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him back to the show.

The New Testament book of Revelation is light on scenes of battle but never hesitates to announce that God has won a battle.  Whether the text implies that a battle never actually happened or just moves the battles so far out of the narrative’s zone of attention that they’re rendered unimportant, Revelation as a narrative never says that the disciples of Jesus don’t need to be killers because God has already won the battles but seems to imply something like that.  David Zahl’s book The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World brings a version of that good news to 21st-century folk, to scenes of exhaustion more than persecution, exploring some of the fake news that tries to do the work of grace and showing why only grace really saves.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome David to the show to talk about fake grace and real.