In this episode we discuss the relevance of empire criticism for understanding Paul’s letter to the Ephesians with Dr. Justin Winzenburg, who is Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek, and the Director of the Honors Program at Crown College (St. Bonafacious, Minnesota). Dr. Winzenburg is also the author of the forthcoming volume that we discuss in this episode, Ephesians and Empire (Mohr Siebeck). In our conversation, Dr. Winzenburg situates his study within the context...
At my local church here in Minneapolis, Mill City Church, we’ve been reading through and preaching through the New Testament, and the plan was always to preach through Revelation for Advent. This was planned long before 2020 became the “apocalyptic” year that we all think of it as. At present, one of the particularly relevant aspects of Revelation for our cultural moment is the notion among some concerned Christians that maybe the COVID-19 vaccine might...
You’ve probably seen by now all the pictures of children being taken away from their parents. You’ve also probably seen the detention centers, the TIME magazine cover, the blog posts, the tweets, AG Jeff Sessions defending the practice by quoting Romans 13, President Trump saying that he couldn’t do anything about it, blaming Democrats, doing something about it, and then turning the issue into illegal immigrant crime. No hyperlinks needed; We’ve all seen them. We’ve...
Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism?: The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. Wissenchaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testamentum II.392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. 160 pages + 39 pages bibliography & indices. Softcover. Retail: €69.00. Questions concerning the New Testament’s relationship to aspects of the Roman Empire—and in particular the political claims of Caesar as “lord” and the religious worship of the Roman rulers in the imperial cult—have been at the forefront...
Horsley, Richard and Tom Thatcher John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2013. 207 pages. Paperback. $20.00. In John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel, Thatcher and Horsley argue for a fresh reading of John’s Gospel. They contend that John presented Jesus as one whose ministry enacted Israel’s renewal in opposition to the Judean establishment and their Roman supporters. The larger goal of their work is to establish John as a valid source for Historical...
I am excited to let you all know that a new volume that I co-edited with Dan Batovici is nearly in print. The collection is called, Reactions to Empire: Sacred Texts in their Socio-Political Contexts (WUNT II/372; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), and is the result of a session of the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature that Dan and I co-organized in the summer of 2013. Here is the official blurb about the...
“Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of the best constituted governments. If Sparta and Rome have perished, what state can hope to endure for ever? If we wish to form a durable constitution, let us, then, not dream of making it eternal. In order to succeed we must not attempt the impossible, nor flatter ourselves that we are giving to the work of men a stability which human things do not admit. The Body politic,...
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