The unbelievable Christian Creed (Grawemeyer winner 2019)

Congratulations to Stephen Patterson, winner of this year’s Grawemeyer Award in Religion, for his book , The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, & Sexism (Oxford University Press, 2018):

 

 

 

Concentrate on something very, very small

“If you want to write about big things, you have to concentrate on something very, very small and then unpack from there.”

-Helen MacDonald, podcast interview with Tim Clare, “Death of 1o00 Cuts,” Season 2, Episode 38, at 1 hr. 25 min 59 seconds. Listen to the interview

 

 

Public Health, Religion, and Spirituality Network: Fall Bulletin now live!

Delighted to see the inaugural Bulletin now live on the Public Health, Religion, and Spirituality Network! Read it HERE!

Justice for the Poor in early Rabbinic Law (book summary)

New book summary: Benjamin Porst’s English summary of his new book, Justice for the Poor: The Principles of Welfare Regulations from Biblical Law to Rabbinic Literature in the November 6 Ancient Jew Review. The book (only available in Hebrew) focuses on “jurisprudential” theory (as a lawyer) rather than historical analysis. His short summary provides a very useful comparison between “biblical precepts” on societal justice and “the framework of the laws of charity” in those whose voices are found in Rabbinic literature (“the Sages”). He argues that the texts push not for a “minimum basic standard” but in fact “standards to which we must aspire,” and suggests the book as useful to “anyone wishing to fashion his [sic] socio-economic outlook on the basis of a dialogue with the Jewish sources.”

Spirituality, Theology & Health (Durham UK): New website!

Click on the image above to visit the new site, which now lives at: https://www.dur.ac.uk/csth/. Note the Centre’s interdisciplinary research “that engages theologically with health and human flourishing.”

For more about religion as it connects with health and human flourishing, check out the website of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Manners

 

Garb of Being!

Off the press & spotted in real time! More information here. It has been a joy to work on this with amazing co-editors Georgia Frank and Andrew Jacobs. And abundant thanks to all of our phenomenal chapter authors. And thank you to George Demacopoulos and Telly Papanicolaou at Fordham, and the folks at Fordham University Press for making it all possible And at its ground of being, the book is inspired-to-its-core by our beloved and indomitable scholar, teacher, and colleague, Susan Ashbrook Harvey.

[photo (book neatly positioned by herringbone and needlepoint) by Andrew S. Jacobs]
[book cover image is from a Syriac lectionary from Mosul (Iraq), dated early 13th century, British Library, Add. 7170, f. 100]