Christian Humanist Profiles

The New Testament book of Revelation is light on scenes of battle but never hesitates to announce that God has won a battle.  Whether the text implies that a battle never actually happened or just moves the battles so far out of the narrative’s zone of attention that they’re rendered unimportant, Revelation as a narrative never says that the disciples of Jesus don’t need to be killers because God has already won the battles but seems to imply something like that.  David Zahl’s book The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World brings a version of that good news to 21st-century folk, to scenes of exhaustion more than persecution, exploring some of the fake news that tries to do the work of grace and showing why only grace really saves.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome David to the show to talk about fake grace and real.

Stories of spiritual origins often begin as the new way emerges against the dominant traditions of the region.  Thus Siddhartha grows up among the Brahmins and Moses among the Egyptians.  Joseph Smith and Elijah Muhammad, each in his own way, emerges among American Protestants.  But what about the much older, Arabian Muhammad?  Many stories of Islam’s rise situate Muhammad among polytheists, proclaiming one God to folks with plentiful spirits.  But Gabriel Said Reynods invites us, in his recent book Christianity and the Qur’an, from Yale University Press, to consider another possibility: what if Arabian Christianity stands as the Qur’an’s earliest conversation counterpart?  Christian Humanist Profiles stands glad to welcome Dr. Reynolds on the show to talk about his research on these questions. 

 When teachers complain about the ways that schools evaluate our teaching–and we do so with frequency and enthusiasm–one of the common refrains has to do with the measuring instruments and their inability to account for randomness and adjustment to randomness.  Many a hallway story involves a moment when a teacher’s plans became irrelevant and the teacher responded.  Sometimes in these stories we adapt.  Sometimes we invent.  But as often as anything else, we improvise, a word that we share with the worlds of jazz music and stage comedy.  Nick Sorensen has taken that moment and proposed ways to evaluate the work of teachers in more complex and ultimately more adequate ways, and his recent book The Improvising Teacher: Reconceptualising Pedagogy, Expertise, and Professionalism presents his research and some proposals for moving forward more intelligently.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Sorensen to the show.

Ask six Americans what the adjective or the noun “evangelical” means, and you’ll get as many answers.  Ask six historians, and you might get twelve.  But what if you ask a rhetorician?  We’re going to find out today as Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Bethany Ober Mannon to the show to talk about her book I Grew Up in the Church: How American Women Tell Their Stories.  Along the way we’ll visit and revisit some figures and some phrases that our long-time listeners will remember from episodes of The Christian Feminist Podcast, and perhaps we can add to the conversations that we inherit from them.

Most of the world happens when I’m not in the room.  That’s been a guiding principle for me as I’ve read and heard about all kinds of things I’ve never seen.  I know some folks prefer David Hume’s assumption that anything that doesn’t resemble closely enough what one has witnessed directly is more likely delusion or deception than real testimony, and I know others would just as soon dismiss the experiences of folks not from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as primitive or worse, but I’ll take Hamlet over Hume on these kinds of matters: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And although our approaches to these matters differ somewhat, I think I found an ally in Joy Vaughan’s book Phenomenal Phenomena: Biblical and Multicultural Accounts of Spirits and Exorcism.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Vaughan to the show to talk about her research.

 When Amaziah, Priest of the Shrine of Bethel, confronts the prophet Amos for conspiring against King Amaziah, Amos replies with a very specific denial: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.”  And it’s hard to run for president of the United States without insisting early and often that “I’m not a politician.”  What about philosophers?  What happens when you ask a philosopher whether or not she’s a philosopher?  We might find that out today as we talk with Rebekah Spera and David M. Peña-Guzman about their recent book Professional Philosophy and Its Myths from Lexington Books.  And even if we don’t, I imagine we’ll find ourselves posing questions about the field that we call academic philosophy that are worth posing.

Living among human beings gives an observant person plenty of occasions to think about delusion.  Whether one watches the young revolutionary or the aging politician, the conspiracy theorist or the devotee of conventional wisdom, human beings take a peculiar joy in fooling ourselves.  And we don’t have to limit ourselves to a single explanation of delusion either: Calvin’s workshop for idols and Nietzsche’s clever forgetting ape both make good sense, depending on whom one watches and in which moment.  One could even imagine someone wondering, and forgiving the gendered language of his moment, “What a piece of work is man!” And if that last one rings true, you’re already geared up to hear about Shakespeare’s explorations of human delusion, specifically in his tragedies.  Rhodri Lewis’s recent book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art puts delusion in the center of the conversation, and Christian Humanist Profiles, with a very clear mind indeed, is glad to welcome him to the show.

In the middle of the twentieth century a process of collection started, one that would profoundly shape of Biblical studies for decades to come, all the way to our own moment.  To say more than that would run afoul of any number of chapters of Andrew Perrin’s book Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds: Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls from Lexham Press, so I’ll try not to overstep.  Instead I’ll say that his book stands both as an introduction to this fascinating collection and its place in our knowledge of Biblical cultures and that for someone like me who studied Qumran back when Bill Clinton was president, the book provides some interesting new questions to pose.

Every story of thought and thinking runs into its own kinds of problems.  Progressive accounts do well showing how predecessors were not quite as sharp or as moral as we are, but they have a hard time saying what might come to pass in years or generations to come.  Conservative narratives have to distinguish between things worthy to conserve and things best left to antiquarians.  Revolutionary accounts anticipate radical ruptures but tend to neglect good things that revolutions tend to leave behind.  And Christian stories of the history of thought face the struggle of deciding when to say, with Jesus in Matthew, that whoever is not with us is against us; and when to say, with Jesus in Mark, that whoever is not against us is with us.  Gerald Bray’s book Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Theology, and the Mind of Christ takes up that work of distinguishing influences of Christian theology from resistance to the same, and Dr. Bray is here to talk to us about that project.

If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again.  With that image, from Job 17, the book’s title character indicts the violence of the LORD and the finality of that violence.  But many centuries later, in a very different book, Philip S. Thomas enlists that image to do very different rhetorical work, and that’s what we’re here to investigate.  Dr. Thomas’s new book Hope for a Tree: Artistic Afterlives of Job examines films and poetry and literary nonfiction and other artifacts that take up Job’s lines and do other things with them.  The investigation leads to persistently interesting questions that arise from traditions whose books are holy, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Thomas to Christian Humanist Profiles.

Do not think any man happy until he has died, free from suffering.  That line, or something like it depending on the translator, ends the grand tragedy Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus the King.  Such meditations on death give us memorable aphorisms, and they come to us not only from the Greeks or the Egyptians but from the teachers of Israel as well.  Among the troubling texts of Israel’s wisdom tradition is Qohelet, whose title in English Bibles is often the transliterated Greek word Ecclesiastes and among whose questions one can find this one: what makes a life worthwhile if succeeding generations undo the good that one has done?  Scholars and preachers and readers have disputed for centuries where the intellectual center of the book resides, how the author relates to the persona who seems to be Solomon, and a dozen other questions from and about and related in other ways to this puzzling book of the Bible.  Today Menachem Fisch, a philosopher, and Debra Band, an artist, will be helping me ask new questions of Qohelet and talking about their book from Baylor University Press titled Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome both to the show.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Growing up under that Constitutional law, even as an amendment, gave me the idea that there were two things, one called religion and the other called government, and that they existed in nature separate from each other.  A working knowledge of history shatters that separation, and Philip Jenkins, in his recent book Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions, shows just how varied and how complicated the interactions between crowns and churches and technology and pilgrimages have been.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to talk about politics and religion today with Dr. Jenkins.

When I got serious about Christian discipleship in the early nineties, Christian worldview was in the air.  The menace of secular humanism loomed large, and when I enrolled at Milligan College (now Milligan University), a Christian liberal arts college, several people in my life were quite pleased precisely because there, I might emerge with something called a Christian worldview and do battle against something called secular humanism.  That was more than thirty years ago, and Simon P. Kennedy has some questions for the folks who promoted that vision of Christian education.  His recent book Against Worldview from Lexham Press proposes not an abolition of Christian worldview but new postulates, namely wisdom and cultivation, as alternatives to the old war-metaphors.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Kennedy to the show.

In 1917 four seismic shocks rocked the human species: in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution brought a specter from Europe into the center of the world’s most expansive land empire.   In Europe, an armistice ended the Great War.  Around the world, a pandemic virus began to kill its millions.  And in America, the first jazz recording became available.  Communism and viruses and jazz had been around before then, of course, but history tells stories with sources, so here we are.  A hundred and eight years later, the span between Chicago Cubs World Series wins, the Reverend William Carter is here to join us and talk about the spirituality of it all.  Okay, mainly of jazz.  His book Thriving on a Riff from Broadleaf Books meditates on spiritual matters with one hand on the Bible and the other on the piano keys, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

With the obvious exception of Plato’s Phaedrus, really old books don’t spend much time on technology.  Perhaps the tools didn’t change fast enough.  Perhaps their writing materials were expensive enough that they didn’t want to spend time on instrumental matters.  Perhaps the questions just never occurred to them.  But some time in the modern era, folks started to write about the ways that our tools change and the ways that new sets of tools shape our souls for good and for ill.  And one of the moments when those changes were doing the most–the most harm or the most benefit we’ll talk about as the hour rolls along–was the nineteenth century.  Jeff Bilbro’s new book Words for Conviviality explores some of the writers engaging with those changes and invites us to hold up those nineteenth-century moments as mirrors to our own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to invite him back on the show.

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it.   Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate.  Do we spring fully free into this world?  Does participation in certain kinds of communities make us free?  Can education of this or that sort develop freedom?  This last question leads a conversation into the possibility of liberal arts, and Richard Detweiler’s book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs takes up not only a discussion of what makes an education a liberal-arts education but also why and how people in our moment still should make the case for liberal arts.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Detweiler to the show.

My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.”  For what intentions are worth, my forerunners seem to have had good ones: in the historical moment, confessions and catechisms and boundary-documents of all sorts were proliferating among Protestant communities, and one way for a unity movement to make progress might be to pare away the documents that some but not all Christian communities took to be central.  That was the nineteenth century; now we’re in the twenty-first, and Dr. Phillip Cary has other work for the Nicene Creed to do: we need to learn how to ask Christian questions.  That’s what his recent book The Nicene Creed: An Introduction sets out to accomplish, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

Among education writers, the phrase “critical thinking” can run from nebulous notions to utter ciphers.  Few will disagree that critical thinking is good and needed, but relatively few will agree about what it is in the first place.  Colin Seale has not only written about critical thinking in more precise language but established institutions for developing critical thinking as a group of practices that teachers in different places can deploy for students of all kinds of ability levels.  His recent book Thinking Like a Lawyer, soon to be released in a new edition, proposes a core set of classroom sessions that develop flexibility and power in thinking, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Seale to the show.

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but also the world that the Bible gives us, to read the canonical text as world-generating as well as world-contingent.  As I continued in the discipline, another world emerged, namely the world that teaches us to pose certain questions and attend to certain realities within the text.  And so I learned to understand the interplay of Torah and creation and wisdom and prophecy in these texts not only as emerging from their moments of composition–that never goes away–but also from the intellectual and cultural and military struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The stories of the Bible’s readers stand just as important as the stories of the Bible’s writers.  Katherine Dell’s book The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth: Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology renews our inquiries into all of these worlds, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.