Are idols real? Do gods or demons dwell in them or around them? Or are they empty, devoid of existence except in the mind of the idolater? Ancient Christians and Jews gave very different answers to these questions.

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Sonja Anderson (UCLA, B.A.; University of Notre Dame, M.T.S.; Yale University, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.) teaches courses in ancient Christianity and Judaism, religious violence, gender and Catholicism, apocalypticism, and religion and medicine. Her current book project, Idol Talk: False Worship in the Early Christian World, will be published with Edinburgh University Press and explores how ancient Christians and Jews used idolatry polemic to claim a distinctive identity for themselves over against their pagan peers and how scholarly narratives have replicated this claim to uniqueness. Her training is in ancient biblical and parabiblical texts, but lately she is interested in the history of Catholic book publishing in 20th–21st-century America, and in being more anti-AI with every passing day. Her favorite place to be is in conversation with students and colleagues about the weirdness of how we imagine ancient religion. She is a Benedictine oblate of Saint John’s Abbey.