Finding Faithfulness in all the Wrong Places: Making Sacred Sense of Drunkenness, Deceit, and Debauchery in the Hebrew Bible This talk will be “birthed” out of Dr. Peter Lanfer's current book project (Reading Sacredness in the Badly Behaving Bible) exploring the morally questionable stories of the Hebrew Bible that early Jewish and Christian interpreters had...

This talk examines the effect of the sixth century BCE deportations to Babylonia on Israelite identity. Paying close attention to the prophetic book of Ezekiel, whose community was deported from Jerusalem to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar, it explores how the experience of forced migration changed the way the people talked about themselves, their past, and their...

In this lecture, Prof. Concannon tells the story of Dionysios of Corinth, a largely forgotten Christian bishop from the late second century CE.  While Dionysios was forgotten by ancient Christians and modern scholars, the traces that remain of his writings suggest that he was connected to a series of early Christian networks bigger than the...

Muslim-Christian-Jewish Reflections on Compassion and Peace Kelly James Clark, Aziz Abu Sarah, Nancy Kreimer Strangers, Neighbors, Friends is an informed and robust Abrahamic defense of compassion toward neighbors, strangers and even enemies. It aims to show that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the resources to motivate respect and love for those of very different faith...

This lecture seeks to clarify the status of Buddhism as a non-atheistic religion, that is, a set of religious concerns that aren’t supported by the various structures of theism: the creator God, divine beings, and corresponding practices such as worship, obedience, and supplication. Comparing Buddhist non-theism to atheism in the West we summarize Friedrich Nietzsche’s...

The Bible presents Moses as Israel’s prophet par excellence and among the most prominent members of the Israelite tribe of Levi. But how does this picture of Moses square with actual history? How did the memory of an early Transjordanian holy man become part of a priestly tradition in ancient Israel? Answering these (and other)...