Social Justice in the Stories of Jesus

I'm excited to announce that my new book, Social Justice in the Stories of Jesus: The Ethical Challenge of the Parables, is now available. I wrote this book for all who have an interest in what Jesus taught and how he taught it, but who also may be interested to consider how aspects of his message have been eclipsed over the centuries through modes of interpretation that either miss the point or, worse, fit the teaching of Jesus into a box in which it really can't be contained. With an eye toward first-century culture and the role of stories in antiquity, this book examines how the teaching of Jesus has something to say to all of us today as we wrestle with some very complex and daunting societal and human rights issues.

The idea for this book started early in my time at Carlow University when I began teaching a new kind of course that is unique to Carlow: a Contemplation and Action course. These courses invite first-year students to explore a particular topic in the liberal arts as they learn about the heritage and values of the Sisters of Mercy. At the same time, they engage in a small act of mercy each day throughout the course, and reflect on that activity in conjunction with the readings about the Sisters of Mercy and the subject matter of the course. As a biblical scholar, it seemed obvious to me that the parables--short stories told by Jesus to challenge, provoke, and engage his listeners in reflection on their own values and actions--would be a great area of exploration for this course. And I was right! But the challenge for me was to find a textbook that both provided an accessible introduction to understanding parables in their original context (many students [and adults for that matter] do not even know what a parable is) as well as linkages to the possible implications of those parables in our world today. In the end, I chose Amy-Jill Levine's excellent book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, which provides a great entry point, but is a little advanced in some regards for first-year students with no background in the academic study of religion. As I taught the course over several years and connected the parables with the concept of mercy as lived out by the Sisters of Mercy, I began to see that there was a need for a book that could explicitly make those connections and also share them with others at an accessible level. 

And so I began working on this book in 2018. Since that time, it feels like the world has changed dramatically in some unpredictable and scary ways. Not only the world but it seems that segments of north American Christianity have been changing as well, to the point where messages of exclusion, hatred, and intolerance--things that one would think were incompatible with the love of Jesus for people in need--are praised as virtues. Writing and teaching on the parables in the context of our increasingly fragmented religious, political, and social worlds made it clear to me that this book was more needed than I originally even considered. My hope is that this book will be an encouragement to people of goodwill to engage in the kinds of contemplation and action that are needed in our world today in the face of injustice and inhumanity. 

Social Justice in the Stories of Jesus: The Ethical Challenge of the Parables is published by Wiley-Blackwell and will be in print January 9, 2024.

Greek Religion in the Iliad

In working on course content and lecture material for my upcoming graduate seminar "Worship in the New Testament," I have been focusing on the cultural matrix of early Christian worship practices. After cataloguing important aspects of Greek and Roman religious practices (with due acknowledgment of the problems inherent in the differences between contemporary meanings of the term "religion" as opposed to ancient conceptions), I have been looking for primary texts that illustrate the phenomena I am discussing.

At the same time (but for unrelated reasons) I have begun reading the Iliad. Reading it with eyes and ears attuned to the people, practices, prayers, and perspectives of Greek religion, I was quite pleased to find displayed before my eyes a fine sampling of the staples of Greek and (later) Roman religion. Within just the first three hundred lines of the Iliad, are references to prayers, sacrifices, vows, and offerings to the gods. We meet a priest (Chryses) as well as an augur (Calchas), with references to the flights of birds, knowledge of the past, present, future, and other tools of divination. In addition, there is the narration of the gods answering prayers, the belief that honoring the will of the gods may lead to their responding favorably to human wishes, the recognition that Zeus grants authority to rulers, and the understanding that the gods assign humans their place in life (they gifted Achilles and made a spearman of him). There is the clear belief that calamity comes from the gods for a variety of reasons including human negligence in fulfilling vows to the gods. In addition, there is the confidence that a diviner can discern the reason for the gods’ wrath and identify the appropriate way to appease them. There is direct communication to humans by the gods who come to humans directly (e.g. the visit of Athena to Achilles) or by means of dreams (which are understood to come from Zeus). The human-like personalities of the gods is in full play as Apollo becomes furious at Agamemnon’s disregard of Chryses the priest. The affairs of humans and gods are thus fully intertwined through a network of connections and relationships.

In these first few pages alone I found quick confirmation of N. T. Wright's claim in Paul and the Faithfulness of God that the people of Greco-Roman antiquity lived in a "myth-soaked culture" (255) in which "the gods were everywhere" (274). Like Wright, I'm convinced that a richer understanding of the practices by which the ancients interacted with their gods can lead to a fuller appreciation of the cultural matrix in which early Christian worship took its shape. And this can lead to a better grasp of the significance of the earliest Christian worship practices. Looking forward to exploring these ancient texts with my students next spring.