Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome from the Vatican (1820) Tate Modern [WikiArt]
AJR is happy to host the the review panel on Dr. Ellen Muehlberger’s recent publication, Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity.
Read MoreGustav Klimt, Death and Life (ca. 1910-1915) Leopold Museum [Wikimedia].
Hieronymus Bosch, Death and the Miser (ca. 1494), National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC [Wikimedia]
Hieronymus Bosch, Death and the Miser (ca. 1494), National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC [Wikimedia]
Moment of Reckoning is full of bold and compelling arguments. But to my mind the most intriguing, if subtle, concerns the relationship between rhetoric and identity. How do words define people? How might personhood be conjured, and changed, by language?
Read MorePhoto by Luke Southern on Unsplash
Photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash
Muehlberger is asking about the late antique period and how a “moment of reckoning” affected Christian notions of death and the afterlife and therefore Christian ethics. I am puzzling over how and why I see Black people imagine their death, particularly via social media.
Read MoreAlma Thomas, Elysian Fields (1973) Smithsonian American Art Museum [Wikimedia]
Alma Thomas, Elysian Fields (1973) Smithsonian American Art Museum [Wikimedia]
The contribution of the book lies not only in these impressive historiographical analyses, and the opening up of new vistas of possible research, but also in Muehlberger’s analysis of late antique Christian texts and exposition of the ways in which thinking about death came to form the Christian’s ethical, physical, etc. choices in antiquity.
Read MoreFor 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, the SBL’s “Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity” Unit and the AAR Unit, “Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence,” co-organized a review panel for Ellen Muehlberger’s Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity (2019).
Read MorePiet Mondriaan, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black (1921) Kunstmuseum Den Haag [Wikimedia]
Using Zoom for Online Instruction: Tips for Undergraduate and Graduate as well as Adult Education Courses
Read MoreGeorges Braque, Road near L'Estaque (1908) The Museum of Modern Art [Artstor]
Georges Braque, Road near L'Estaque (1908) The Museum of Modern Art [Artstor]
This collection of essays reflects a core assumption that Marcus shares with his scholarly contemporaries: the parting between Christianity and Judaism did not happen at one definite moment, but occurred in different places and at different times in different communities.
Read MoreWhen a society undergoes a dramatic change—like a forced migration to Babylon, for example—its members call everything into question. There are important political and religious investigations into how such an event could happen. But on a more basic, day-to-day level, the community has to exist in a new location.
Read MoreCeiling of the Temple of Hathor within the complex of Denderah (Image courtesy of Wikimedia).
Ceiling of the Temple of Hathor within the complex of Denderah (Image courtesy of Wikimedia).
In Christianizing Egypt, David Frankfurter continues this trend. He examines by what standards scholars should dissect the process of Christian conversion in Egypt and investigate the continued presence of traditional Egyptian religious behaviors and practices.
Read MoreShoemaker’s study is a contribution to a rapidly expanding body of scholarship that locates Islam firmly within the contexts of late antiquity. He points to imperial eschatology as the crucial late ancient discourse for the development of early Islam.
Read MoreI didn’t fully anticipate what became a central thesis of the book: that Jews were neither the first, nor the only, nor the greatest targets of these pressures. On the contrary, the pressures on Jews were part of a larger project to transform the entire Roman Empire (if not the entire known world) into a homogeneous orthodox catholic polity.
Read MoreRecent studies on the legal, social, and religious status of children are part of this development. Reconstructing the voices and lived realities of children and, indeed, other groups largely overlooked by biblical writers requires scholars to utilize different strategies in interpreting the extant evidence.
Read MoreEdtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Francis Picabia (1913); Oil on canvas © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Francis Picabia (1913); Oil on canvas © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Like so many feminist works on the Bible, the concern in this volume is not simply ancient gender politics, but also modern ones; as the terrain of the field shifts, so must our maps.
Read MoreDimitry Martynov, The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul
Dimitry Martynov, The Shade of Samuel Invoked by Saul
In this project, I map spirit language, rituals, and myths in select texts from the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature using conceptual categories and frameworks incubated in the fields of ethnography and cultural anthropology. While spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament, I argue that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm.
Read MoreChrist Cleansing a Leper by Melchior Doze (1864). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Christ Cleansing a Leper by Melchior Doze (1864). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
For early Christians, questions of embodiment, ethics, and the construction of communal boundaries turned around (im)purity discourse as a central node.
Read MorePeter receiving the keys to heaven by Pietro Perugino (1481-1482)
Peter receiving the keys to heaven by Pietro Perugino (1481-1482)
Structured meetings of the populus, even if they are chronologically irregular, reveal more clearly the systematic and propagandistic thought of the papal administration, and so demonstrate how the institution of the papacy used rhetoric and propaganda to build and maintain power.
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![Gustav Klimt, Death and Life (ca. 1910-1915) Leopold Museum [Wikimedia].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1586099901770-4NFRYO6802LVINJERIG0/1024px-Gustav_Klimt_-_Death_and_Life_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
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![Alma Thomas, Elysian Fields (1973) Smithsonian American Art Museum [Wikimedia]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1585752850354-BPFCA7N0RS33WK3IVOG8/SAAM-1980.36.8_1.jpg)
![Piet Mondriaan, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black (1921) Kunstmuseum Den Haag [Wikimedia]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1585573389657-QX85KI6N3EGVRARW6V6T/Piet_Mondriaan%2C_1921_-_Composition_en_rouge%2C_jaune%2C_bleu_et_noir.jpg)
![Georges Braque, Road near L'Estaque (1908) The Museum of Modern Art [Artstor]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449167fe4b078c86b41f810/1572645695040-YYJ2SKRLY3MUVT2MITRX/AMOMA_10312310398.jpg)
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