Christian Humanist Profiles

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 that one later.)  But relatively few of us know much about the Assyrians as they present themselves and how they fit into the changing landscape of ancient civilization.  So Christian Humanist Profiles is glad today to welcome Eckart Frahm, whose recent book Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire does just what the title promises, showing us what that ancient world looks like from inside Assyria as well as the spectrum of views from beyond the fall of those grand urban walls.

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 few readers would mistake them for loving intercessions.  How can a follower of the one who forgave his enemies from the cross pray onthe same God that God break those enemies’ teeth?  That question has always been before us, whether we know it or not, and Dr. Trevor Laurence’s book Cursing with God takes it as seriously as Holy Scriptures demand, articulating a theology of Scripture, of forgiveness, and of the role of the faithful along the way.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Laurence to the show.

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 the Eucharist and seventeenth-century English poets, I knew I was going to be talking to my kind of thinker.  Shaun’s recent book The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from Oxford University Press poses some really great questions about some really great poems, and Christian Humanist Profiles is really glad to welcome him to the show.

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 those who still teach it in mid-career must have fumbled somehow.  Mercifully, in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, a sort of rhetorical renaissance has blossomed in English departments, and Dr. Heather Hoover’s book Composition as Conversation: Seven Virtues for Effective Writing has taken a seat at that grand banquet of teachers who celebrate writing rather than fleeing the same.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Hoover to talk with us about the book.

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 and had a conversation, with the benefit of a few months’ reflection, based on our notes from that weekend. Visit www.christianhumanist.org to view Penner's talk from Theology Beer Camp for some context.

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 narrative and Psalmic and apocalyptic start to make demands of their own, and theology becomes even more a ground for contest than it seems to be in the texts that we call Bible.  Where does that leave us when it comes to theology?  Dr. Thomas Gardner’s book Lyric Theology calls us back to verse and narrative and on ahead into film, reminding us that it can’t hurt to come back home when it comes to theology.

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 have not become any less interesting in the two and a half millennia since.  Dr. Valerie Tiberius has brought that conversation off the mythological battlefield and into the very real tensions between money and reputation and peace of mind and different kinds of abstract principles in her recent book What Do You Want out of Life, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.

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. Landau’s recent book The Secret Gospel of Mark is going to show us just how complicated and sometimes how weird the world of textual criticism can be.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome them to the show.

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 right, seeks nothing less than to set the world’s eyes back on the Christ who saves by suffering and whose passion does not begin on a cross but in his very infancy.  His book Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon, from Fortress Press, tells the story of that icon, beginning as it does with an artist who departs an imperial city and continuing in our day as his work journeys everywhere people call out to the heavens.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Matthew to the show.

“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 good news for you, listeners: Ben Witherington and Jason Myers are here to get those ideas off the table.  The second edition of their book New Testament Rhetoric demonstrates that not only Paul but all sorts of New Testament writers exhibit familiarity with and formation through ancient canons of rhetoric, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome them to the show.