Life of Faith
Who wrote the Bible?: Enslaved people and the New Testament with Candida Moss (S3:E5)
“Once we accept biblical collaboration as fact and recognize its participants as oppressed human beings who nevertheless had agency, we are forced to confront a truth that can be unsettling to some readers of scripture: that the meaning of the Bible is fluid.”
Reading scripture through the experience of disability
Julia Watts Belser sees in the Torah a God who is in love with the creative possibilities of difference.
Days of wanting
My family didn’t want to go to America at all; we left Vietnam on pain of death.
Intelligence moved by love: Thecla as philosopher with Dawn LaValle Norman (S3:E4)
“Thecla shows us how women could be important models, not only insofar as they overcame their femininity, but in their femininity, as models for men and women.”
De-commodifying time
Jenny Odell argues that we need to get back in touch with our preindustrial sense of time.
Showing up for church when I don’t want to
When I show up, God shows up—although not always in the sermon.
Christian life in The School of Athens
My upbringing made me a Platonist. Motherhood made me an Aristotelian. I never left either behind.
Speaking of death
Christians have an opportunity to eschew euphemisms and talk honestly about mortality.
Pentecostals laboring in the field
Lloyd Barba shows how Mexican farmworkers established a viable life in the face of California’s industrial agriculture machine.
The women around Augustine with Kate Cooper (S3:E3)
“This is an enslaved girl in Africa in the fourth century. Just talk about lost voices. And yet this child is literally creating the theological groundwork for the greatest of Latin theologians”
In search of Rumi’s live heart
Looking for an Arabic translation of a favorite line, I found myself on a treasure hunt.
Too old to be president?
Critics of Biden’s memory slips fail to mention any of the positive traits associated with aging.
Spending Lent with people in recovery
In the company of church members in recovery from addiction, I’m feeling more open to the doctrine of original sin.
The Samaritan Woman’s Well of Interpretation with Caryn Reeder (S3:E2)
“Sin is not part of the story.”
What is forgiveness?
Myisha Cherry and Matthew Ichihashi Potts each challenge a new American mythology.
Holy attachments
During the pandemic, I went six months without touching another human being. I felt starved.
There’s Something about Mary Magdalene, with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer and Diana Butler Bass (S3:E1)
“What if the text was changed to suppress Mary Magdalene as not only the first witness of Jesus in John 20, but as the Christological confessor, which would make her a central character in the Gospel of John? Not one of several women, but a central character.”
We are all going to die
During my first several hours administering ashes as a hospital chaplain, I kept cringing.