Lawrence M. Wills— The books of the Hebrew Bible were likely composed in the ninth through second centuries BCE, under a range of very different political conditions. Israel was established as a kingdom by David in about the year 1000 BCE, and his son, Solomon, ruled successfully for about forty
Michael Pifer— Sometime in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a Sufi poet named Sultan Valad was trying his hardest to get out of delivering a public sermon. He had just spoken before a private gathering of religious scholars while on a visit to the city of Kayseri, located
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper— When the Yiddish-language Hasidic online chat forum Kave Shtibel (Coffee House) began a thread about our book, A Fortress in Brooklyn, less than two weeks after it was published in May, we were pleased but not surprised. The extensive Hasidic print culture that traditionally included
Nicholas Orme— This is a scene from a fifteenth-century stained-glass window at Doddiscombsleigh: a country church in Devon, in the south-west of England. It shows what would have been a familiar event. A baby is brought to church to be baptized. The ceremony takes place at a font: a stone
Bentley Layton— The Gospel according to Thomas (“The Gospel of Thomas”) is an anthology of 114 “obscure sayings” of Jesus, which, according to its prologue, were collected and transmitted by St. Didymus Jude Thomas. The sayings do not appear within a biographical narrative about Jesus, although some of them individually
Kevin Madigan— Around 1870, evangelical Christians, as their Catholic adversaries would put it, “invaded” Italy in large numbers. Before unification and the inception of a new liberal order, the extension of rights of toleration to Jews and non-Catholic Christians, and the dispossession of the papal states, Protestant missionaries, by and
Jennifer A. Quigley— People today don’t usually think of going to the bank, buying groceries, and signing a lease as religious acts, but in the ancient world, they very often were. While many people today tend to think of religion and the economy as distinct, in the ancient Greco-Roman world,
Kathryn Tanner— The Protestant ethic was the spirit of industrial capitalism in its Fordist varieties, where investments sunk in expensive equipment dedicated to the production of one thing meant mass production and mass consumption. That Protestant ethic was composed of a set of values in which hard work was a
Ambrogio A. Caiani— On the night of 5 July 1809 French forces kidnapped Barnabà Chiaramonti, Pope Pius VII, from his private apartments in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. He would spend the following five years as a prisoner of Napoleon. Ultimately, the Pope refused to renounce his central Italian kingdom,
John J. Collins— For many Christians the importance of biblical law and ethical demands has been relativized by the Christian emphasis on faith. “We know,” writes Saint Paul to the Galatians, “that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith of Jesus Christ.” The Pauline