2022–23 New Title Catalog

Greetings from Baylor University Press!

We are very pleased to present our catalog of new releases for 2023–2024. This year’s list features Philip Jenkins’ absorbing account of the Byzantine Iconoclasm, Maja Whitaker’s study of the significance of resurrection hope for our understanding of embodiment, Katharine J. Dell’s analysis of the biblical themes of creation and covenant through the lens of worship, and a revised edition of our celebrated textbook, Associations in the Greco-Roman World. In their timely new book, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, Amy Carr and Christine Helmer challenge us to consider how the Christian doctrine of justification by faith might come to our aid in an era of intractable divisions.

Renowned poet Micheal O’Siadhail turns his eye to the threats presently facing humanity in Desire.

In the beautiful volume Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living, artist Debra Band and philosopher Menachem Fisch team up to illuminate a favorite sacred text. And Todd C. Ream and Jerry Pattengale provide a sobering but hopeful prognosis of the future of the Christian college.

At Baylor University Press, it is our joy and privilege to partner with authors to bring their ideas to light. We are deeply grateful for the community of enthusiastic readers who take interest in our books year after year.

A department of Baylor University, Baylor University Press is a mission driven, not-for-profit organization that serves the academic community by publishing works of original scholarship in subject areas such as biblical studies, theology, ethics, philosophy, and religious studies. Our activities and operations are made possible by the sales of our books, the generous support of Baylor University, and gifts from donors like you.

By scanning the QR code below, you can partner with us in our mission by donating to the Press. All gifts go to the Baylor University Press Excellence Fund and are used to support the acquisition, production, and promotion of innovative works of scholarship like those you will find in this catalog. Your generosity also enables us to provide opportunities to students and young professionals pursuing careers in publishing.

With appreciation,

R. David Nelson, PhD Director Baylor University Press

A Storm of Images

Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World Philip Jenkins

In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors’ zealous movement involved other acts that closely foreshadowed the Reformation movement that would sweep Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Like that later Reformation, iconoclasm marked an authentic revolution in religious sensibility, with all that implied for theology, culture, and visual perceptions of holiness. This was a pivotal moment in the definition of Christianity and its relationship to the material creation. It was also a time of critical encounters with the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam.

With A Storm of Images , Philip Jenkins offers a compelling retelling of the saga of how the iconoclastic movement detonated ferocious controversy within the church and secular society as icon supporters challenged the image breakers. Decades of internal struggle followed, marked by rebellions and civil wars, purges and persecutions, plotting and coups d’état. After their cause triumphed, image supporters made the cult of icons ever more central to the faith of Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm marked a watershed in the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and it contributed to Western attempts to establish new empires.

The questions raised during these struggles are all the more relevant at a time when such controversy rages over public depictions of history and the removal of statues, monuments, and names associated with hated figures. As in those earlier times, debates over images serve as vehicles for authentic cultural revolutions.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1822-8 | $42.99 | Hardback | 287 pages | 6 x 9 | 16 page color signature

2 b&w maps | September 15, 2023

PHILIP JENKINS is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. He is also the author of Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions.

“This book is the new gold standard for understanding the iconoclastic era and its profound impact on the Christian faith.”

Dyron B. Daughrity, Professor of Religion, Pepperdine University

“I could not have imagined how interesting the subject of iconoclasm could be until I read A Storm of Images by Philip Jenkins. You can’t put this book down.”

Craig A. Evans, Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins, Houston Christian University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1931-7

$47.99 | Hardback

296 pages

6 x 9

October 15, 2023

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Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times

Justification and the Pursuit of Justice Amy Carr and Christine Helmer

Christians in the United States and around the world are politically polarized today, unable to speak to one another across deep divisions regarding urgent social issues. Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice addresses this dire reality by offering a theological framework for Christian justice-seeking. Amy Carr and Christine Helmer draw on Paul’s theology to center the idea of justification by faith in Christ as the primary ground of Christian belonging and community.

This approach yields a theology of ordinary faith that resists the temptation to equate Christian identity with the performance of a heroic “here I stand” posture against moral and political positions felt to be inimical to a properly Christian life. An ordinary faith situates Christian identity on a baptismal belonging to Christ. Baptism draws Christians into the messy process of discerning together the shape of justice in and through the Beloved Community. With justification by faith as the touchstone of Christian unity, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times reveals how Christians who inhabit different ethical and political positions can navigate the disorientations and reorientations that arise when they debate what justice-seeking looks like from within the body of Christ.

Carr and Helmer articulate ways that justification by faith grounds Christian practices of affective listening and storytelling, even on the most contentious ethical questions today, with the hope that mutual conversation in and through the Beloved Community can orient Christians who disagree towards each other again for the good of the world.

“This book speaks faithfully, compellingly, and earnestly into the current crises of politically divided Christians in the US today, providing brilliant re-framings of core Christian commitments to offer sacred spaces of generative engagement and the possibilities of transforming ’high conflict into good conflict.’”

—G. SUJIN PAK, Dean of the School of Theology, Boston University

“A grace-oriented approach that seeks common ground in a shared baptism in Christ in order to explore how justification can establish a renewed way of being in the world.”

JENNIFER POWELL McNUTT, FRHISTS, Wheaton College

“This crucial endeavor involves giving a properly theological account of the possibility and importance of patient encounter, reflection, and dialogue in our fractious and polarized cultural moment.”

PHILIP G. ZIEGLER, University of Aberdeen

“By beginning with ’ordinary faith’—the conviction that our identity is secured by grace rather than by any ethical or political performance—Carr and Helmer provide a framework for moral discernment in an ecclesial context where there often seems little on offer except silence or shouting.”

IAN A. McFARLAND, University of Cambridge

“This much-needed volume should be read by Christian leaders everywhere.”

CHERYL PETERSON, Wartburg Theological Seminary

ISBN 978-1-4813-2093-1

$119.99 | Hardback

ISBN 978-1-4813-2094-8

$59.99 | Paperback

640 pages

6 x 9

April 15, 2024

Anglican Identities

Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism

Gary Dorrien

The Anglican Communion currently finds itself at an inflection point as it weighs its future prospects in light of discordant social, political, ecclesiological, and theological commitments. In this intellectual and political history of Anglicanism, Gary Dorrien shows that the Communion’s present challenges are the upshot of a centuries-old clash of Anglican identities. Tracing the narrative of Anglicanism from its ancient and medieval origins through the English Reformation and up to the last quarter of the twentieth century, Dorrien argues that Anglican Christianity is at once an ecumenical project, residing at the halfway point between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, a theological movement informed by a brand of idealism centered in the incarnational faith of Logos theology, and an imperial enterprise complicit in the racist sickness of Western civilization.

A book long in the making, Anglican Identities offers a comprehensive, informative, and sobering account of the story of Anglicanism. Dorrien covers the key figures, periods, movements, and theological concerns from the Communion’s history, framing them in an interpretation of Anglican Christianity informed by decades in the classroom and his unique liberal-liberationist and activist reading of theology, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

Dorrien contends that Anglicanism has been sort-of ecumenical from the beginning, with a radical ecumenical aspirational vision, and in its liturgies and teachings has embodied and enacted an idealist approach to the claims of the Christian theological tradition. But Dorrien urges that these features of the Anglican story are deeply at odds with English Anglicanism’s entanglement with white colonialism. Indeed, in Dorrien’s telling, this antinomy between its identity as an ecumenically generous religion of the incarnate Logos and its willing involvement in white supremacy is at the very heart of Anglican Christianity.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

Hardback | $89.99

GARY DORRIEN is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological

Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Anglican Idea

2 English Christianity and English Reformation

3 Proto-Anglican Reason and Empire

4 Caroline Divinity and Lockean Liberalism

5 Enlightenment Reason and Romantic Idealism

6 Catholic Visions and Liberal Crises

7 Renewing Christian Socialism, Anglo-Catholic Style

8 Modernizing the Anglican Mainstream

9 Gospel Catholicism and Process Theology

10 Beyond Colonial Anglicanism

TIM JUDSON is Lecturer in Ministerial Formation at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. He is an accredited Baptist Minister and serves as Pastor of Honiton Family Church, Devon. He is also a member of the International Bonhoeffer Society.

Awake in Gethsemane

Bonhoeffer and the Witness of Christian Lament Tim Judson

“’A reformation is afoot,’ Tim Judson writes, ’a reformation in the Western church toward ’recovering lament.’ Awake in Gethsemane takes part in this reformation, using key insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology to root this renewed impulse toward lament in the person of Christ and the nature of the church. In his last days, Bonhoeffer expressed profound gratitude for the insight that ’one becomes a human being, a Christian’ through faithful solidarity in suffering’ a solidarity often expressed in lament. That Judson attends to this insight with such rare learning and sensitivity will evoke gratitude among many who value Bonhoeffer’s work.”

JOEL LOOPER, author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land without Reformation

Throughout the Psalms we witness David cry out for deliverance in seasons of anguish and grief, seeking refuge and strength from the Lord. Likewise, Jesus petitioned God in the garden of Gethsemane for strength in a time of dire need. The cries from both David and Jesus to God reflect the forgotten spiritual discipline of lament. Lament is not sorrow without ultimate hope—that is despair. Rather, lament is trust in God despite, and even by way of, the experience of hopelessness.

In Awake in Gethsemane Tim Judson envisions the place and meaning of lament for the Christian community through close engagement with the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. After documenting the historical decline and current lack of lament within much of the Western Church, Judson offers a threefold approach to the subject, arguing that a basis for lament is necessarily located in theology, ethics, and liturgy interdependently. This relationship frames the critical work carried out alongside Bonhoeffer, interpreting lament through his Christology, ecclesiology, and biblical exegesis. A constructive lamentology emerges, aimed to facilitate the church’s engagement with some critical contemporary issues.

Judson presents lament as a faithful aspect of the truly human life which, in and through Christ, is for and with others. Lament is a means by which disciples stay “awake with Christ in Gethsemane” in a wounded world where sin, suffering, and sorrow abide. Such an outlook challenges prevalent ideological horizons and common presuppositions about lament which preclude or distort this crucial spiritual discipline. Hence, Judson opens new imaginative possibilities for construing lament positively and creatively, witnessing to the reality that faithful freedom is embodied perfectly by the lamenting Jesus himself, who, by way of his own lament, is the salvation of the world.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1830-3

$69.99 | Hardback

220 pages

6 x 9

Now Available

“In our politically fraught, post-pandemic world, Tim Judson’s exploration and commendation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s use of lament seems overdue. Judson calls out the Western church for failing to name and mourn suffering, to lament, and calls it what it is: a failure to support the most vulnerable among us. His careful exploration of Bonhoeffer’s intersecting theological, christological, ethical, and liturgical understanding of lament holds the church accountable and offers a much-needed word of hope.”

LORI BRANDT HALE, Professor of Religion, Augsburg University

“The spectre of cheap grace has haunted White ecclesial bodies since Bonhoeffer charged the bourgeois and comfortable in his short but memorable ministerial and academic career. Judson’s prophetic book is a bold restatement of the radical claims of Bonhoeffer’s legacy. Judson outlines the significance of a critical understanding of lament as the means for demonstrating greater equity in models of reconciliation and justice making for the contemporary church.”

ANTHONY G. REDDIE, Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford

ISBN 978-1-4813-2050-4

$44.99 | Hardback

280 pages

6 x 9

April 1, 2024

The Fire and the Cloud

A Biblical Christology

Chris E. W. Green

The Fire and the Cloud is a non-supersessionist biblical Christology developed from close readings of Israel’s Scriptures. In this work, the second in a trilogy that began with All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology, Chris E. W. Green tracks the recurrent and interwoven themes of exile, journey, and return across the canonical order, beginning with the story of Cain’s exile and ending with the homecoming of Naomi and Ruth. He examines crucial passages and their significance in later Jewish and Christian interpretations, reckoning honestly with the history of Christian anti-Jewishness and reminding us of the good news that the nations are being grafted into the people of God.

Beginning to end, Green’s figural—indeed, mystical—Christology lays itself open to the mysterious and transformative power of imaginative exegesis, seeking both to honor Israel’s unique, ongoing vocation as the people of God and to honor the church’s faith in and witness to Jesus, striving not to impose a dead image of him onto the ancient texts but to recognize his living likeness in their Spirit-inspired movements.

Green believes such interpretation is necessary and necessarily difficult, requiring us to read both with and against the grain of our convictions and commitments, expecting and allowing the biblical texts to teach us what we did not know we needed to learn differently. This is so, he argues, because a biblical Christology, if it is to be true to its purposes, must be capable of surprising us as the living word of the living Christ— confronting us in judgment, decentering us in praise, and sweeping us up into the covenant-making work of the Spirit for the sake of the nations.

CHRIS E. W. GREEN is Professor of Public Theology at Southeastern University.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I

1 Exile

2 Pilgrimage

3 Settlement

Part II

4 Exodus

5 Wandering

6 Occupation

Part III

7 Exile as Exodus

8 Settlement as Occupation

9 Pilgrimage as Homecoming

Conclusion

STEVEN EDWARD HARRIS is Pastor of Discipleship at Elim Church Saskatoon and Adjunct Professor of Theology at Horizon College and Seminary.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Death, the Last Enemy

2 Prefigurative Resurrections in 1–2 Kings and the Gospels

3 The Resurrection of the Lord Jesus

4 Post-figurative Resurrections in Acts and Beyond

5 The Holy Spirit and Present Spiritual Resurrection

6 Awaiting the Return of Christ

7 Resurrection as Configuration to Christ

8 Constraining Speculation by the Figure of Christ

9 The Same Body or Another Body?

10 Resurrection as/and Judgment

11 Ascension as Christian Destiny

12 Resurrection as (New) Creation

Conclusion: Resurrection, the End of Scripture, and Theology

Refiguring Resurrection

A Biblical and Systematic Eschatology

Steven Edward Harris

In Scripture, a number of individuals are raised from the dead prior to Jesus Christ. Whereas these were once interpreted as prefigurations of that climactic event, a series of challenges in the modern period led to the dismissal of the accounts of the widow’s son at Nain, Lazarus, and others as irrelevant to a theology of resurrection. For “they would die again,” as scholars as diverse as Karl Barth and N. T. Wright have argued.

With Refiguring Resurrection, Steven Edward Harris contests this position by drawing on recent literary and theological interpretation of the Bible, as well as the deep wells of premodern exegesis and theology, to demonstrate how Scripture itself views these events as dialectical signs, shadows, or figures of Christ’s resurrection—and humanity’s own future. Furthermore, Harris develops a comprehensive eschatology in which the figural character of these earlier resurrections is taken into account while considering the four last things of Christ’s return, final resurrection, last judgment, and new creation. An eschatology thus emerges that sets a new direction for theology in several areas of recent discussion: inaugurated eschatology, the figural reading of Scripture, puzzling cases regarding resurrection in analytic theology, whether believers can properly be said to “go to heaven” when they die, and the debate between narratival and apocalyptic interpretations of the apostle Paul.

Refiguring Resurrection offers a robust, canonically holistic “figural eschatology” that has not been defended in three centuries. By being more faithful to Christian Scripture, this is an approach more theologically promising than any offered in the modern era, including the twentieth century “rediscovery of eschatology.”

“This is an immensely learned and provocative essay in dogmatic theology. By drawing our attention to the prefiguring of Jesus’ resurrection in a wide range of biblical stories in both parts of the canon Harris challenges us to stretch our eschatological imaginations. Might it be that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is still ’practicing resurrection’? Harris helps us see how this might be so.”

JOSEPH MANGINA, Professor of Systematic Theology, Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology

ISBN 978-1-4813-1643-9

$64.99 | Hardback

318 pages

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August 15, 2023

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“Steve Harris’ eschatology works with an assumption that is as indispensable as it is uncommon—that Christ’s resurrection rips history wide open to divine intervention. Insisting that Christ himself is the true telos of our eschatological hope, Harris retrieves premodern figural interpretation by arguing that Christ’s resurrection is ontologically linked to earlier and later resurrections from the dead. The result is a superb systematic and biblical eschatology that creatively and boldly casts new light on key contemporary eschatological debates. Refiguring Resurrection extricates us from the unhelpful cul-de-sacs that modern metaphysical constraints have placed upon us.”

HANS BOERSMA, Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

ISBN 978-1-4813-1730-6

$64.99 | Hardback

208 pages

6 x 9

November 1, 2023

Theology in Many Voices

Baptist Vision and Intercontextual Practice

Amy L. Chilton

Western evangelical and baptist theologies have largely avoided experience as a source of theology. By not seeing, or not utilizing, lived experience in its own theologies and rejecting it in “contextual” theologies, these traditions have failed to recognize the full presence of God as revealed in the world. Current theological dialogues arising from admittedly contextualized experiences, such as LGBTQI+, Black, or various women’s theologies struggle to find a place at the theological table, because they ring untrue to evangelical and baptist ears. What we are then left with is an idiosyncratic deity who mirrors the community in power.

Theology in Many Voices presents an understanding of theology as a practice of the church, one that both makes space for lived community experience in theological content and also provides the means necessary for encountering, engaging, and incorporating the theological insights of the global and historic church into Western theological discourse. Amy L. Chilton engages the contemporary use of Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of “practice” in theological method, particularly through the writings of James Wm. McClendon Jr., to show how it can be used as a means of moving beyond the “Scripture vs. experience” divide while still retaining the norming role of Scripture and the essential nature of God’s revelation in context.

AMY L. CHILTON is a native of the Pacific Northwest and completed her MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Seattle Campus. She then earned her PhD in systematic theology and philosophy and now teaches as an adjunct at Fuller. She is a clergywoman for the American Baptist Churches and is the Senior Minister of Phillips Memorial Baptist Church in Cranston, RI.

“In this thoughtful analysis, Amy Chilton overcomes the supposed gulf between abstract doctrine and lived experience by showing how the reality of our lives and practice inevitably shapes all theological thought. Her work opens space for a range of voices from around the globe and deserves the attention of all—even if they disagree—who labor to help faith seek understanding.”

ELIZABETH NEWMAN, Adjunct Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School

Two other figures illuminate Chilton’s vision of experience-oriented theology, giving fuller voice to the church’s witness of faith and practice: the Roman Catholic Jon Sobrino, whose work with the Salvadoran poor influenced his Christology through his “Christopraxic” method, and Muriel Lester, whose communal living practices influenced her theology of peace and ability to move across religious boundaries and showed how to do theology as practice intercontextually. Finally, whereas the methodological use of practice has found few inroads to Christian doctrine, Chilton explores the doctrines of the Trinity and theological anthropology in light of the practiced contributions of the church global, especially women and the marginalized.

“The three main lessons to be learned from Amy Chilton’s profound analysis and constructive proposal are simple and profound, namely that theology cannot be done without practice, neither without context nor without community. Facilitating a dynamic theological dialogue with a leading late American baptist and a Spanish-born Salvadorian Jesuit liberationist, the author brings to the task rich philosophical, theological, and ’common sense’ insights and intuitions. While critically navigating her path in the market of diverse theological and ecclesiastical programs, Amy never fails to practice hospitality and inclusion. This is truly Theology in Many Voices.”

VELI-MATTI KÄRKKÄINEN, Professor of Systematic Theology,

Fuller Theological Seminary and Docent of Ecumenics, University of Helsinki

“This deeply important book makes clear that Amy Chilton is one of the most exciting younger voices in theology today, whether among Baptists or in the wider Christian church.”

PAUL S. FIDDES, Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Oxford

RYAN ANDREW NEWSON is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Campbell University. He is also the author of Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption and co-editor of the three-volume set The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr.

The End of Civility

Christ and Prophetic Division

Ryan Andrew Newson

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1 The Genesis of Civility

2 Whose Etiquette? Which Christ?

3 Civil Rites and Uncivil Bodies

4 The End of Civility

5 Agonism, Abolition, Absolution

“I have come not to bring peace, but a sword.” These words of Christ echo in our current times. In recent years, a growing number of commentators have decried a lack of civility in public discourse Considered in isolation this concern is innocent enough, but no call for civility happens in a vacuum, and there is good reason to be suspicious of civility in our current political context. Calls for civility can encourage passivity and blunt prophetic action against injustice; truly heinous policies can be pursued under the guise of civility. And yet civility should not be dismissed outright, especially as presented by its more nuanced defenders— when it is presented as a limited good in a pluralist society.

In The End of Civility, Ryan Andrew Newson analyzes the development of the concept of “civility” as we know it in modern discourse and names some of the criteria Christians can use to judge between healthy and toxic appeals to civility

The challenge, Newson contends, is discerning when civility is called for and when its pursuit becomes vicious. Pleas for civility cannot be assessed without considering the context in which they are made. Some appeals to civility merely seek to lessen conflict, even conflict necessary in the struggle for a more just world. But when issued by people struggling for justice on the margins of society, calls for civility can name the types of conflict that might lead to liberation.

One must be attentive to what counts as “civil” in the first place and who gets to make that determination. Which bodies are considered civil and “ordered,” and which people are under suspicion of being “uncivil” before they ever say a word? For Christians, civility can never be an ultimate good but remains subordinate to the call to follow Christ—in particular, the Christ who is not always “civil” but who calls people to an ethic of resistance to injustice and solidarity with people who are suffering.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1901-0

$54.99 | Hardback

248 pages

6 x 9

Now Available

“The End of Civility confronts its readers with erudite, urgent thinking that cuts against the grain of some of our seemingly most unshakable contemporary political proprieties. In an era riven by intractability, such entrenched proprieties become obstacles we most need to think through and beyond, toward genuinely transformational forms of engagement. Those who read and follow along will find their intuitive presumptions about good order, common sense, and respectable political behavior challenged, and perhaps, even their virtues burned away.”

JASON A. SPRINGS, Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

“Amid continuing calls for ’civility’ in our political and ecclesiastical life, Ryan Newson asks us to consider the complex, often varied, meaning of civility itself. In so doing, he has produced an insightful, carefully documented, and creative analysis of the often-conflicting approaches to the issue in biblical, theological, ethical, historical, and political realms. The book offers an important challenge to and for our times.”

BILL J. LEONARD, Founding Dean and Professor of Divinity Emeritus, Wake Forest University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1915-7

$54.99 | Hardback

230 pages

6 x 9

September 1, 2023

Perfect in Weakness

Disability and Human Flourishing in the New Creation STUDIES IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND DISABILITY Maja I. Whitaker

One of the central and novel convictions of the early Christian movement compared to the existing Greco-Roman beliefs was the dogma of bodily resurrection. The Stoics esteemed temperance, disciplining the body to curb the flesh; the Epicureans embraced pleasure, indulging their worldly desires. However, Paul’s letters to the Corinthians convey a countercultural idea: what you do with your body matters because it will still be with you in the resurrection. But when many contemporary Christians consider the new creation, they imagine the new Jerusalem filled with unblemished people living with normalized and idealized resurrected bodies: “healing” is assumed as a fundamental reality of the resurrection.

MAJA I. WHITAKER is Lecturer in Practical Theology in the School of Theology at Laidlaw College.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Body, the Resurrection, and Disability

2 Personal Identity across Life, Death, and Resurrection

3 Identity-Forming Features in the Preand Post-resurrection Body

4 The Diversely Embodied Resurrection Body

“Whether disabled bodies will be present in the resurrection is a poignant question that reveals implicit assumptions about God, personal identity, and what is considered ’right’ or ’normal.’ In this scholarly rigorous but also eminently understandable book, Whitaker tackles the question of disability in the resurrection with thoughtfulness, insight, and a courageous yet humble approach. Drawing on disability theology, biblical passages, and philosophical perspectives on identity, Perfect in Weakness is bound to ignite the pastoral and theological imaginations of those who read it.”

KEITH DOW, author of Formed Together: Mystery, Narrative, and Virtue in Christian Caregiving

In Perfect in Weakness, Maja I. Whitaker develops the proposition that people with disabilities might retain their diverse embodiment in the new creation—that the resurrected body might still be “disabled.” This theological claim is based in the accounts of the resurrected Christ appearing with the stigmata, and it is supported by the intuitions of those persons with disabilities who consider that their unique embodiment is identity-forming and entirely unproblematic in itself. If the human person is an essentially embodied metaphysical unity, then there may be features of our particular bodies that must be continuous through the transformation of resurrection for personal identity to be secured. However, this “retention view” has faced conceptual objections on the grounds of theological anthropology, continuity of identity, and biblical conceptions of flourishing human life. Whitaker confronts these objections, integrating philosophical, biblical, and theological methodologies in order to present a reasonable and coherent defense of the retention view.

The possibility of persons with diverse embodiment enjoying fullness of life in the new creation can expose negative attitudes towards disability and unlock a critique of ableist bias in Christian thought and practice in the modern church. Moreover, it can function as an eschatological parable to subvert the powers of this age that idolize success, mastery, and autonomy to the neglect of theologies of weakness, limitation, and dependency. In this way, Perfect in Weakness is important not only in the realm of disability studies but also in the wider Christian community that is mired within the cultural ideologies of our time.

5 Implications for Pre-resurrection Thought and Practice

Conclusion

“Maja Whitaker approaches the complexities of disability and identity with a wonderful sense of dignity, wisdom, and empathy. She draws on many voices to challenge and expand our thinking around perfection, encouraging new expressions of love, inclusion, and acceptance. In this robust book, Maja poses the question ’If we look beyond perfection, can we bring about more of God’s love here on Earth now, for all people, across the whole spectrum of ability?’ Maja invites us to reconsider those we may have dismissed, to see more of God in them, and in ourselves. Disability is not a deficit. We are all human and are all worthy of receiving love. If there is breath, there is life, and there is the presence of God. This book’s message of life, love, and acceptance is not constrained to resurrection, but is relevant right now, right here in today’s human experience.”

RACHEL CALLANDER, author and speaker

ARMAND LÉON VAN OMMEN is Senior Lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is also co-editor of Disciples and Friends: Investigations in Disability, Dementia, and Mental Health.

Autism and Worship

A Liturgical Theology

Armand Léon van Ommen

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Starting the Conversation on Autism and Worship

1 Setting the Scene: Language, Autism Theology, and Autistic Experiences of Worship

2 How Autism Came to Be: The Problem of “Autism Is . . .”

3 The Tyranny of the Normal: Exposing the Cause of Absence and Ignoring

4 Presence and Participation: Toward a Theology of Availability

5 A Temple Community: A LiturgicalTheological Redrawing of “Normal”

6 Availability in Practice: Autistic Worship in Singapore

Conclusion: A Church That “Gets You”

“How do worshiping communities acknowledge the presence of people with autism? What are their assumptions about normalcy? Could a kenotic understanding of liturgy itself result in acts of worship fully available to those whose neurodivergence is not always generously and wisely embraced? These are the courageous and timely questions which Léon van Ommen’s gracious and profound study explores. It is a book that congregations should study and an essential for seminary libraries.”

BRIDGET NICHOLS, Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, Church of Ireland Theological Institute

In churches today, those on the autism spectrum are often at best overlooked by neurotypical church members or at worst infantilized. Viewed as “other,” autistic people who feel excluded from the church community abound, and statistics show that they are less likely to attend church than others. Other autistic people do participate in worship but testify to being dismissed when asking for “reasonable accommodations,” and they are routinely given fewer formal roles in the liturgy.

In Autism and Worship, Armand Léon van Ommen offers an in-depth analysis of the absence and ignoring of, but also the presence of, autistic people in worship. Van Ommen recounts the experiences of autistic people and considers how those experiences might reframe liturgical theology and the worship practices of the church. He identifies the “cult of normalcy” as the root of the marginalization of autistic people. Normalcy is boundary keeping, the protective set of dynamics that determines who belongs to the community and who is excluded. The answer to absence and ignoring is found in presence and availability, rooted in kenosis. Through the act of making himself available to humankind by becoming human, Christ participated in humanity. Believers are invited to participate in the life and prayer of Christ in turn and accordingly make themselves available to one another.

The new identity in Christ redefines what is deemed normal and redefines who is “in” or “out.” Van Ommen argues that this redefinition results from a kenotic liturgical theology of availability. He illustrates this fresh vision by analyzing the Chapel of Christ Our Hope, a church in Singapore that is centered on autism and provides a paradigm for a renewal of Christian worship. Autism and Worship contributes to liturgical theology and the emerging field of autism theology as well as the practices of worshiping communities.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1989-8

$44.99 | Hardback

264 pages

6 x 9

October 1, 2023

7 b&w photos, 3 b&w figures

“This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of autism theology. Through nuanced engagement with autistic voices, theology, and particularly liturgical studies, Van Ommen writes a compassionate, hopeful, and novel work that rails against the ’cult of normalcy’ and draws the church closer to a faithful relationship with autistic people within their congregations.”

CLAIRE WILLIAMS, Associate Lecturer, Regents Theological College

“Do you have to be able to ’act normal’ to belong in Christian worship? Worship should be centered on Christ, but Léon van Ommen shows that it is often centered instead on worshipers’ ideas of what is ’normal.’ The good news of this book comes from the experience of our autistic siblings, who call us to a radical availability to one another in Jesus Christ. The clarity of this book’s treatment of autism makes it accessible even for readers who know little of the spectrum. This book shows how it is possible to make Christian worship more truly the work of the whole assembly, not only by the fuller incorporation of those with autism, but also by promoting a truer vulnerability and mutual kenosis among all Christians.”

KIMBERLY HOPE BELCHER, Associate Professor in Liturgical Studies, University of Notre Dame

Bioenhancement Technologies and the

Vulnerable Body

A Theological Engagement

edited by Devan Stahl

What Is the Good Life?

Perspectives from Religion, Philosophy, and Psychology edited by

Drew Collins and Matthew Croasmun

The field of biomedical technology has experienced rapid growth in recent years. New technologies promise to diagnose, treat, and prevent human diseases. Increasingly, however, the ability of these technologies to “enhance” normal human functioning beyond what is necessary to restore or sustain health has raised considerable debate about the proper limits of biotechnology. Any moral assessment of technology must consider its effects on all people, principally those who have not benefited equally from technological advancements. From the premise that minority perspectives yield new insights into biomedical enhancements, this volume centers the bodies of persons who are vulnerable to health disparities—particularly persons with disabilities and persons of color. Contributors critically examine bioenhancement technologies with two key questions in mind: What does it mean to be human? and What does it mean to be vulnerable? Each chapter uses distinct Christian theological methods and ontological suppositions to reflect on the distinctiveness of human creatureliness in relation to technology and what difference bioenhancement might make for our conceptions of vulnerability. Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable Body is aimed primarily at Christian scholars and graduate students already conversant in bioethics but will also appeal to contextual theologians and others not well-versed in these debates.

DEVAN STAHL is Associate Professor of Religion at Baylor University.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1827-3 / $54.99 / Paperback / 230 pages / 6 x 9 / November 1, 2023

We have more options and choices to make about how we want to live than ever before. But where do we turn for guidance as we choose how to live? Are we so focused on choosing what we want for our lives that we have forgotten to ask ourselves what is a good life and what is worth wanting? In What Is the Good Life?: Perspectives from Religion, Philosophy, and Psychology, leading scholar-practitioners from nine different traditions religious and secular—each offer an account of the good life. These accounts explore the distinct visions construed by their respective traditions from within a shared threefold heuristic schema of agency, circumstance, and affect. Presented in this way, the existential concern and normative force of these traditions are brought to the fore, inviting readers to explore the commonality of this central question across a variety of traditions alongside their unique and distinct responses. What Is the Good Life? offers readers a conceptual guide for navigating our pluralistic world and specific examples of the visions of the good life they might encounter.

“We live in an era dominated by the material, by getting what you want as quickly as possible. This text gathers wisdom from a diverse array of world religions and philosophical traditions on a far more important question: what’s worth wanting. It nourished my soul.”

EBOO PATEL, Founder and President of Interfaith America

DREW COLLINS is Associate Research Scholar at Yale Divinity School.

MATTHEW CROASMUN is Associate Research Scholar and Director of the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Lecturer of Divinity & Humanities at Yale University.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1801-3 / $49.99 / Paperback / 250 pages / 6 x 9 / October 15, 2023

T. LAINE SCALES is Professor of Social Work and advisor for part-time instructors at Baylor University.

JOÃO B. CHAVES is Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in the Américas at Baylor University. He is also the author of Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora.

CONTRIBUTORS

David Bebbington

Seidel Abel Boanerges

Ryan J. Butler

Meghan Byerly

Terry G. Carter

Ivan Dias da Silva

Paul S. Fiddes

Rebecca Anne Hilton

Myra Ann Houser

Aidan Luke

Jeanette Mathews

Stephanie Peek

Skylar Ray

Joshua T. Searle

Karen E. Smith

Nicole Starling

Roger Ward

Michael S. Whiting

Baptists and the Kingdom of God

Global Perspectives

edited by T. Laine Scales and João B. Chaves

Throughout the history of Christianity, the concept of the “kingdom of God” has been constructed and understood in a multiplicity of ways. From direct identifications of the kingdom with the church to purely eschatological notions to competing revolution-inspiring views of God’s reign, differing understandings of the kingdom engendered a rich variety of ideological frameworks, social arrangements, and historical actions.

The Baptist faith, with substantial worldwide numerical, cultural, social, and political power, has been the site of a number of approaches to the idea of the kingdom that informed its trajectory. Issues that transcended Baptist circles, such as slavery, foreign missions, and social activism, have significant connections to Baptist notions of God’s will and work in the world. The essays in Baptists and the Kingdom of God, written by scholars from several countries and disciplinary perspectives, approach the question of the kingdom under four major themes: ecclesial, eschatological, social, and providential. Considered as a whole, the volume illuminates historic and contemporary views of Baptists wrestling with ideas surrounding the kingdom concept, providing a unique resource for students and scholars of Baptist heritage and thought.

“Baptists and the Kingdom of God converges on a provocative, theologically rich, morally compelling, and yet often misunderstood biblical theme: the kingdom of God. This powerful Gospel idea stands at the intersection of four distinct conversations about the shape of Baptist ecclesial identity, the eschatological hope for God’s reign, the moral impulse to social action, and the providential perspective on the historical process and God’s action. With each chapter laser-focused on the concept of the kingdom of God, this volume both contributes to and creates a new conversation for the global Baptist community.”

ADAM C. ENGLISH, Professor of Christian Theology and Philosophy, Campbell University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1719-1

$59.99 | Paperback

ISBN 978-1-4813-1965-2

$69.99 | Hardback

356 pages

6 x 9

October 1, 2023

“The ’kingdom of God’ has figured prominently in the biblical vocabulary of Baptists since their beginnings, helping them give utterance to the contrast with the kingdoms of the civil order that marks this distinctive Christian tradition. But as the essays in this groundbreaking volume demonstrate, Baptists have spoken this language of Zion with different accents that reveal the theological diversity of the people called ’Baptist.’ This volume is a contribution to scholarship on Baptist identity unparalleled in the literature.”

STEVEN R. HARMON, Professor of Historical Theology, Gardner-Webb University

ISBN 978-1-4813-2006-1

$23.99 | Hardback

128 pages

5 x 8

October 15, 2023

Desire

Micheal O’Siadhail

Critically acclaimed and award-winning poet Micheal O’Siadhail’s Desire is a quartet of poems which addresses the pressing global concerns of our times

The poet describes the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it spread worldwide, paralyzing our society and instilling daily fear of death, particularly in older people. Hospitals were unable to cope, restaurants and businesses closed, workers were laid off, schools and universities taught remotely, and few weddings or funerals could take place throughout a pandemic which he sees as ultimately reflecting our relationship to the damaged environment and to climate change. The current ecological crisis is rooted in new reckless patterns of rapacity which threaten our habitat as our flawed stewardship has led to global warming, heat waves, raging fires, and hurricanes. Still, we fail to curb our greed. Our need for comfort, convenience, and instant communication on the internet, which began as an idealistic dream of making knowledge universal, has resulted in an overconsumption that further harms our planet, a consumerism driven by algorithms and internet surveillance.

MICHEAL O’SIADHAIL is an internationally acclaimed poet whose works include The Five Quintets, Collected Poems, One Crimson Thread, and Testament

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Epigraph

Pest

Habitat

Behind the Screen

Desiring

Epilogue

“In this devastating, scathing, penetrating analysis of our world’s vulnerability to self-inflicted existential crises, Micheal O’Siadhail is revealed as the poet, prophet, pastor, preacher par excellence of our time and for our time. Desire is a revolutionary call to care. It is a juggernaut flattening our negligence, our greed, our passivity, our stupidity. Can we meet, in time, his magisterial challenge to redeem our ecocidal mania? His deep-set faith in humanity’s desire and need to dwell in love, in respect for God’s creation and one another opens the door that lets hope in.”

MARY McALEESE, President of Ireland 1997–2011

It is time to regain a more modest perspective on our part in the natural world and learn again to be better forebears for the generations to come, responsible stewards of the earth we share. A greater sense of our role as humble, trusted custodians can free us for wonder and praise and allow us to rediscover sources of meaning worthy of life-enhancing desires. O’Siadhail affirms with realism, imagination, and inspiring wisdom how our human desires and longings can open up ways through our unprecedented global challenges.

“O’Siadhail poses one of the most pressing questions of our day: ’Have we learnt what matters most of all?’ He sets it in the broad sweep of a poetic diagnosis of the climate crisis, global pandemic, misinformation, and surveillance capitalism and challenges us to consider what forms of desire would honor the goodness and givenness and limits of our common home.”

MIROSLAV VOLF, MATTHEW CROASMUN, and RYAN McANNALLY-LINZ, authors of Life Worth Living

“Micheal O’Siadhail’s new cycle of poems, reflection on our time poet’s wisdom, humor, compassion, and razor-wire sensibilities explore the fate of our new century as we ricochet between hope and hopelessness. The world is ready and waiting for this poetry. Yearning for it, really.”

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF Emeritus,

Harvard University

“A poet fit for an age of interlocking global crises.”

Kenneth L. Woodward, former Religion editor of Newsweek

“This is poetry as the highest art, breath into song.”

—Laurie Zoloth, University of Chicago

“A dazzling array of rhyme schemes and evocative language.”

Eugene O’Brien University of

Limerick

ISBN 978-1-4813-2043-6

$54.99 | Paperback

250 pages

6 x 9

December 1, 2023

12 color illustrations

Art Seeking Understanding

edited by David Lyle Jeffrey and Robert C. Roberts

Fides quaerens intellectum is the idea that living faith naturally seeks a more complete understanding of God in relation to his creation. It has motivated Christian education from the very start. Although Ars quaerens intellectum—“art seeking understanding”—is by contrast a contemporary locution, in the Christian context of this volume it is a parallel to the more familiar phrase. “Art” here includes human making of the sort associated with any craft; this volume focuses on those usually called “fine” arts, namely poetry, painting, sculpture, and musical composition.

The contributors to Art Seeking Understanding contend that art in almost any medium is typically born of a desire for some kind of understanding—perhaps of the potential in their medium, an aspect of the external world, or of the artist’s own compulsion to create. An artwork may be prompted by a desire for greater understanding of transcendent realities. A distinctive value of the collaboration represented in this book is thus the reflection of artists themselves set alongside remarks by philosophers, theologians, literary critics, art historians, and musicologists. Together, these authors argue that there is a tacit if not explicit theological dimension to art-making that reveals itself readily in religious art but also in works that may have no such conscious motivation.

The artist, like all human creatures, is made in the image of God (imago Dei), but as both Scripture and tradition suggest, artists may in fact realize more intensively than the rest of us an aspect of the divine Maker. In turn, those who appreciate art may come to acquire an understanding of the nature of the Original Artist indirectly through allowing the works of gifted artists to spark their imaginative reflection. In this way, art “speaks” to us theologically in ways that substantially enrich our knowledge of our Creator and his creation. This volume invites readers to consider how God speaks, his characteristic poetic voice, and the influence of that voice on our knowledge of the holy

DAVID LYLE JEFFREY is

Emeritus

Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University. Jeffrey earned his PhD from Princeton University and is also the author or editor of many books, including The King James Bible and the World It Made and We Were a Peculiar People Once: Confessions of an Old-Time Baptist

ROBERT C. ROBERTS is Professor of Ethics and Emotion Theory at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, Houston Christian University. He also has a joint Chair with the Royal Institute of Philosophy and is a Resident Scholar at the Institute for Faith and Learning, Baylor University.

CONTRIBUTORS

Cristina Carnes Ananais

Jeremy Begbie

Douwe Blumberg

Katie Calloway

Phillip Donnelly

Makoto Fujimura

Barry Harvey

Thomas A. Hibbs

David Lyle Jeffrey

Micheal O’Siadhail

Robert C. Roberts

Brent A. Strawn

Abram Van Engen

DAVID JASPER, FRSE is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Literature and the Power of the Old Testament

2 On Reading the Scriptures as Literature

3 Settling Hoti’s Business: The Impossible Necessity of Biblical Translation

4 “Down through All Christian Minstrelsy”: Genesis, James Joyce, and Contemporary Vocabularies of Creation Stories

5 “In the Sermon Which I Have Just Completed, whenever I Said Aristotle, I Meant St. Paul” (Attrib. Revd. William A. Spooner)

6 Evil and Betrayal at the Heart of the Sacred Community

7 Jim Crace: Inventor of Worlds

8 J. M. W. Turner: Interpreter of the Bible

9 The Desert in Biblical Art: William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat

10 The Bible, Christianity, and War in English Literature

11 Teaching the Bible and Literature

Afterword

Selected Reading List

“This anthology of essays by David Jasper, spanning forty years of thoughtful engagement with the Bible, theology, and culture in its broadest sense, demonstrates the breadth and depth of David’s expertise, influence, and enthusiasm. His reflections on literature, art, ethics, translation, teaching, and much more stand the test of time while also being rooted in his own experience as a university lecturer and Anglican priest.”

ALISON JACK, Professor of Bible and Literature and Principal of New College, University of Edinburgh

Scripture and Literature

A David Jasper Anthology David Jasper

For some, the Bible and literature are at odds. The Bible, it is argued, is not properly literature but a piece of outmoded fiction that ought not to be studied or taken seriously. However, the relationship and impact between the Bible and, in turn, proceeding literature cannot be overlooked. The Bible is an ever-fruitful source for creativity that has contributed to all the great achievements of Western thought, writing, and artistry for the last two millennia.

With Scripture and Literature, David Jasper has compiled forty years of his writings on the relationship of the Bible, literature, and art. These writings are interdisciplinary in nature and are not the work of a specialist in biblical scholarship. Rather, while acknowledging the Bible as a sacred text in more than one religious tradition, they recognize the Bible as literature in conversation with other literary works and traditions as well as the visual arts. During the forty years which these essays span, enormous changes have taken place in our world. Postmodernism has come and gone; issues in feminism and gender are now acutely, and properly, with us; and the world has become much more of a global village, despite its many divisions. On the other hand, and at the same time, it is remarkable how little has changed, and the reader will find that some older pieces remain relevant and necessary today.

Parts of the book deal broadly with questions of translation, rhetoric, war, and evil, while others focus on specific writers and artists, from J. M. W. Turner to the English novelist Jim Crace. Yet behind Scripture and Literature lies a lifetime of careful thought and teaching of the Bible and literature. In the end, Jasper synthesizes his work, offering some reflections on pedagogy and the changes that have occurred from the 1980s up to the present day.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1958-4

$49.99 | Paperback

260 pages

5.5 x 8.5

December 1, 2023

3 b&w images

“No one can actually read the Bible for the first time, because it is almost everywhere in literature and art, as well as in the encounter of China and the West. Such a juxtaposition, with mutual and reciprocal illumination, makes David Jasper’s research always fascinating and also reactivates our recognition of the sacred and the profane.”

“This collection of essays invites the reader to explore the terrain of artistic engagements with the Bible in the company of one of the wisest and most knowledgeable of guides. Through subtle but profoundly scholarly means it lures the reader away from well-worn paths, drawing them into wilderness places as well as green pastures. A lovely, lyrical work that is also full of radical reading challenges.”

HEATHER WALTON, Professor of Theology and Creative Practice, University of Glasgow

YANG HUILIN, Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, Renmin University of China

ISBN 978-1-4813-2046-7

$21.99 | Hardback

230 pages

5 x 8

October 15, 2023

1 b&w illustration

“In this valuable volume, Ben Witherington III tackles a large topic— biblical authority. He does so insightfully and, for my part, convincingly. Tradition, reason, and experience notwithstanding, Witherington contends that sacred Scripture is the final and ultimate arbiter for matters of faith and practice. Whether or not you are inclined to embrace this theological position, you will benefit from reading this thoughtful and timely book, written by one of the foremost biblical commentators of our time.”

TODD D. STILL, Charles J. and Eleanor McLerran DeLancey Dean & William M. Hinson Professor of Christian Scriptures, George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University

Sola Scriptura

Scripture’s Final Authority in the Modern World Ben Witherington III

In modern times, evangelical Protestants have advocated for the belief that the Bible is the only real standard of truth and true Christian praxis for the church. But is this how the early Jews and Christians, who wrote the biblical books, viewed their sacred texts? And what counted as those sacred texts? Furthermore, there is often a lack of clarity as to what is meant by the famous phrase that became a motto of the German Reformation: sola scriptura. Does it mean that the Bible is the only authority for Christian faith and practice, or does it mean the Bible is the final authority, allowing non-biblical traditions, human reason, and perhaps even experience to have some authority in the church?

With this magisterial study, Ben Witherington III invites readers to go back to the time of the writing of the Bible and look at what is said about the sacred texts with a specific focus on how the authority of such texts was viewed. Witherington then walks through Christian history until the point where the phrase sola scriptura actually appears as an authority claim of some kind. Surprisingly, it does not show up until the fourteenth century A.D. and not in the writings of a Protestant. From there, Witherington examines how the phrase continued to be used in the various Reformations and into the modern era. The story of Sola Scriptura also involves the rise of science, the effect of the Enlightenment, and changes in views about human sexuality that have affected the discussion of the Bible’s authority in various ways.

Students of Scripture, budding scholars, pastors, and laity alike stand to benefit from this book as Christians of all stripes are confronted by the same crises: a profound historical amnesia that is affecting even churches that are bibliocentric; the general chaos in Western culture that has further alienated younger generations from the church and angered the older generations who still attend church; and the increasing biblical illiteracy in the church, including in its pulpits, which has led to churches taking their signals and sense of direction from the culture rather than the biblical witness itself. Such crises will not be overcome without a serious coming to grips with the Bible, its history, and its authority for the Christian life.

BEN WITHERINGTON III is Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary. His publications include Troubled Waters: Rethinking the Theology of Baptism (2007), Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord’s Supper (2007), The Living Word of God: Rethinking the Theology of the Bible (2007), What’s in the Word: Rethinking the Socio-Rhetorical Character of the New Testament (2009), and The Problem with Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, Wesleyanism, and Pentecostalism, Revised and Expanded Edition (2015).

CONTENTS

Preface

1 The People of the Book: Early Christian Appropriations and Additions

2 The Origins of Sola Scriptura

3 The German and Swiss Reformation: Scripture as the Final Authority

4 The English Reformation and John Wesley: Anglican Views of Scripture

5 The Rise of Modern Science and the Conservative Christian Response

6 The Modern Quadrilateral, Inerrancy, and the Overruling of Scripture

7 Quo Vadis?: The Legacy and Future of Sola Scriptura

“Ben Witherington is one of the best, wisest, clearest, smartest, most sensible, most prayerful, and most inspiring Bible scholars around. Everything he writes is worth reading. And everything he writes will help you open up the Living Word of God.”

JAMES MARTIN, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage

“An admirably accessible work of fine scholarship.”

PHILIP JENKINS, Baylor University

“A gift to Christians who desire to ground their trust in the Bible with accessible historical evidence.”

—HOLLY BEERS, Westmont College

“A timely and well-nigh prophetic work in its examination of authority in the Christian churches throughout the millennia.”

—DAVID A. DESILVA, Ashland Theological Seminary

“A helpful corrective that will assist theologians and biblical interpreters as they wrestle with the meaning and application of the sacred text.”

—CRAIG A. EVANS, Houston Christian University

“The wisdom traditions of the Old Testament have not always been as appreciated as they should be among biblical theologians. Given the ever more audible groaning of all creation that surrounds us, Dell’s learned and compelling reconsideration of creation (and its connection to covenant) within wisdom literature is all the more timely. Dell unmuffles our ears to the voice of Wisdom, which we have never needed to hear more than we do today.”

—JACQUELINE LAPSLEY, Professor of Old Testament, Princeton Theological Seminary

“Dell’s integrative approach to creation, covenant, and wisdom is a welcome corrective to a discipline that has too long relied on imposing false taxonomic boundaries on texts and concepts. Her ’wisdom lens’ focuses our attention on new and long-forgotten features of Israel’s Scriptures, creating a rich and rewarding synthesis. This threefold cord will not be quickly broken.”

—WILL KYNES, Professor of Biblical Studies, Samford University

“With clarity and insight, Katharine Dell guides readers through the key issues involved in the interplay of wisdom, creation, and covenant. Dell’s deep awareness of the sources shines through, as does her judicious assessment of the main debates. Anyone interested in biblical theology will treasure this book because it provides an in-depth and readable guide that connects biblical wisdom books such as Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes with the main theological traditions of the Hebrew Bible.”

—BERND U. SCHIPPER, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, Humboldt University of Berlin

KATHARINE J. DELL is Professor of Old Testament Literature and Theology in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth

Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology

Katharine J. Dell

CONTENTS

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Creation and Wisdom in Scholarly Assessment

2 Creation in Wisdom Texts: Proverbs and Ecclesiastes

3 Creation in Wisdom Texts: Job

4 A Wisdom Lens on Two Creation Accounts: Genesis 1–3 and Psalm 104

5 The Dialogue between Creation and Covenant: Genesis 9

6 Creation and Covenant in Cosmic Dialogue

7 Wisdom and Covenant in Relationship

Conclusion

In Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who is with God at the creation of the world, delighting in what God has made. In Job, God appears in theophany and describes the wonders of the earth and heavens. There are thus revealed detailed descriptions of God’s work in creation in the wisdom literature. Key themes that emerge from these passages are the foundation of the earth, its division from the heavens and the waters, God’s provision of all of nature as well as human and animal life, God’s relationship to the world, and the ethics and morality of our human response. There is also a wealth of covenant language that includes creation and links up with wisdom texts as well. This is epitomized in Noah’s covenant with God and the sign of the rainbow.

In The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth, Katharine J. Dell illuminates the Old Testament theological themes of creation and covenant, interpreting them through the lens of wisdom. Dell shifts attention from the Genesis accounts of creation to allow for a fresh reading from texts in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes She subsequently assesses Genesis and certain “creation” Psalms for similarities and differences. This approach allows the creation theme to be prioritized in new ways and then brought into dialogue with covenant ideas, leading to a reconsideration of Genesis 9, with its profound image of the rainbow as a sign within creation of the covenant between God and the world, and various prophetic texts—passages wherein the close symbiosis of covenant with creation has been overlooked. Furthermore, a “cosmic covenant” emerges over time, a covenant of peace that will characterize the eschatological age, as found in some later prophetic literature.

Dell contends that wisdom literature is often misrepresented for its lack of reference to covenant, demonstrating key relations through intertextual parallels from the Psalms and Deuteronomy. The figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 3 and 8, in the emphases on relationship and communication, anticipates the ultimate merging of themes of wisdom, creation, covenant, and torah in later apocryphal texts. Likewise, Dell also suggests that Solomon emerges as the canonical figurehead of wisdom’s “covenant” with humanity and the world.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1704-7

$54.99 | Hardback

252 pages

6 x 9

October 1, 2023

ISBN 978-1-4813-1873-0

$59.99 | Hardback

208 pages

8 x 10

Now Available

full color interior

“In this fresh approach to Qohelet, philosopher Menachem Fisch and scholar-artist Debra Band radically re-vision a text whose interpretation was ’settled.’ Through exciting exposition that ranges from the history of rabbinical thought to analytical philosophy to the pain of personal loss, and illumined by Band’s glowing paintings, the authors return us to the original Hebrew word on which Qohelet pivots: hevel When hevel is not read ’figuratively’ but is restored to its literal meaning as ’vapor’ or ’mist,’ an unexpected theology is revealed.”

KIMBERLEY C. PATTON, Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion, Harvard Divinity School

Qohelet

Searching for a Life Worth Living Debra Band and Menachem Fisch

How to live a life of wisdom and fulfillment in a far-from-perfect world? Philosopher Menachem Fisch and artist Debra Band together probe Qohelet’s inquiry into the value of life “under the sun” in this brilliant work—the first illuminated manuscript of the entire biblical text, the first philosophical analysis tracing the coherent path of this biblical thinker’s full argument. Whereas modern readers influenced by the famous declaration “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” from the 1611 King James Bible have commonly understood that Qohelet found only futility and hopelessness in human life, Fisch restores the literal meaning, “vapor,” to Qohelet’s key word, hevel, with implications that reveal Qohelet’s path to wisdom and even serenity. Through linguistic precision and careful unfolding of the book’s philosophical argument, Fisch uncovers Qohelet’s twin concerns: life is short, and situated as we are, far below the heavens, we can never be assured of comprehending our world, or understanding divine will and intent. He reveals Qohelet’s understanding that since we can never fully predict or understand our fortunes or the heritage we leave behind us, the best we can do is to live our lives fully, relating to others attentively, always aware of the limits of human life.

In her glowing, immersive, and discursive illuminated paintings of the entire text, Band imagines Qohelet’s teachings, employing the grandest of palaces, the Alhambra, as the central metaphor for the beauty and impermanence of human life and accomplishments. She fills its halls and gardens with often surprising imagery, symbolism, and related poetry, creating a visual midrash that reveals the relationship of Qohelet’s thought to other biblical texts and Jewish lore and its reverberations across the centuries and cultures of Western civilization, from ancient Israel to today’s America. Each illuminated page is complemented by lucid commentary explaining its full meaning. Renowned scholars Ellen F. Davis and Moshe Halbertal crown the work with a penetrating foreword and preface.

DEBRA BAND draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts and the Jewish textual tradition in her acclaimed illuminated manuscripts. Her paintings have been widely exhibited across the United States and Canada. She resides in Potomac, Maryland, with her husband, Michael Diamond, MD, and menagerie.

MENACHEM FISCH is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, TAU codirector of the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and senior fellow of the Goethe University Frankfurt’s Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.

“Illuminated manuscripts have a rich tradition to which this gem adds creatively. Not only does Debra Band’s exquisite micrography, calligraphy, and artwork invite us to marinate in and meditate on Qohelet’s suggestive composition, Menachem Fisch adds a unique and penetrating philosophical analysis. This work takes us from the ancient world of the Bible through medieval traditions of illumination and into a reading of Qohelet as a harbinger of post-modern thinking.”

PETER A. PETTIT, Teaching Pastor, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport, Iowa

“A feast for the eyes, the mind, and the heart.”

RABBI SHAI HELD

“A biblical, philosophical, artistic, and (ultimately) theological account.”

—TOM GREGGS

“An exquisite combination of pictorial imagination with abstract reflections.”

—MOSHE IDEL

“

Qohelet is like no other in offering two Jewish perspectives, a philosopher’s and an artist’s.”

—JOHN GOLDINGAY

“An important contribution to philosophical theology.”

—HINDY NAJMAN

“These two religious Jews let Qohelet speak from the Jewish canon.”

—ELLEN T. CHARRY

“Inventive, probing, and thought-provoking.”

—JON D. LEVENSON

“Debra Band’s illuminations and commentary beautifully complement Fisch’s meditation in Qohelet.”

—DAVID NOVAK

“A wonderful display of art interpreting the written word.”

—LAURA KRUGER

“What a rereading of this fascinating scripture!“

—DAVID F. FORD

ISBN 978-1-4813-2091-7

$44.99 | Paper

432 pages

6 x 9

March 15, 2024

1 b&w illus., 1 map, 30 b&w photos

REVISED EDITION Associations in the Greco-Roman World

A Sourcebook

Richard S. Ascough, Philip A. Harland, and John S. Kloppenborg

Associations in the Greco-Roman World provides students and scholars with a clear and readable resource for greater understanding of the social, cultural, and religious life across the ancient Mediterranean. The authors provide new translations of inscriptions and papyri from hundreds of associations, alongside descriptions of more than two dozen archaeological remains of building sites. Complemented by a substantial annotated bibliography and accompanying images, this sourcebook fills many gaps and allows for future exploration in studies of the Greco-Roman religious world, particularly the nature of Judean and Christian groups at that time.

RICHARD S. ASCOUGH is Professor of Religion at the School of Religion, Queen’s University.

PHILIP A. HARLAND is Professor of Humanities and History at York University, Toronto.

JOHN S. KLOPPENBORG is Professor of Religion and University Professor at the University of Toronto.

“All engaged in research on the Greco-Roman world will find this collection valuable.”

RICHARD I. PERVO, Review of Biblical Literature

“A book that will open doors into further work and stimulate reflection and engagement with the social settings of earliest Christianity.”

STEVE WALTON, Review of Biblical Literature

“The volume is far more than merely informative, and it offers a rich and reliable basis for comparative work across disciplines.”

MICHAEL W. HOLMES, Religious Studies Review

ALSO AVAILABLE:

CHRIST GROUPS AND ASSOCIATIONS

Foundational Essays

Paperback | $49.99 | Hardback | $59.99

GRECO-ROMAN ASSOCIATIONS, DEITIES, AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Paperback | $59.99

“Indispensable. A splendid resource for students at several levels, not merely in religious studies, but for anyone exploring the society and culture of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.”

WAYNE A. MEEKS (1932–2023), Woolsey Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Yale University

MARKUS ÖHLER is Professor for New Testament Studies at the Faculty for Protestant Theology, University of Vienna, Austria.

CONTENTS

Preface

1 Basic Questions of a History of Early Christianity

2 Rule, Society, Religion

3 Religion and Culture of the Judeans: Judaism in the Early Imperial Period

4 Chronology of Early Christianity

5 Jesus of Nazareth

Excursus: Peter

6 The New Beginning: Easter and Pentecost

Excursus: Mary Magdalene

7 The First Communities in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria

8 The Spread of Faith in Christ to Syria

9 The Early Days of Paul

10 The Ongoing Dispute over Law and Judean Identity

Excursus: Barnabas

11 The Spread of the Gospel in Asia Minor and Greece by Paul

12 The Pauline Communities

Excursus: Timothy

13 The Continuation and Recording of Judean Identity in Early Christianity from 47 to 135 CE

Excursus: James, the Brother of Jesus

14 Early Christianity in Greco-Roman Society between 60 and 135 CE

15 Internal Crises in Early Christianity between 60 and 135 CE

16 Internal Transformations in Early Christianity between 60 and 135 CE

History of Early Christianity

Religion, Culture, Identity

Markus Öhler

translated by Jason Valdez

This comprehensive textbook presents the history of early Christianity from its beginnings to the time of the Second Judean Revolt against the backdrop of the social and historical developments of the early imperial period. Markus Öhler offers a thorough overview of the historical, social, and religious contexts of the Jesus movement in Judea and the various forms of Christian communities and traditions in the Greco-Roman world. From this foundation Öhler reconstructs the origins and trajectory of the Jesus movement, beginning with the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and the events immediately after his death. Attention is given to the different forms of early Christianity in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria as well as the developments in Syrian Antioch. Special emphasis is placed on the presentation of the ministry of Paul of Tarsus and the social structure of the assemblies of Christ-believers founded by him. An item of central importance for the reconstruction of further developments is the ongoing debate about the significance of the Torah for Christian identity formation. The increasing confrontations with forms of state power are dealt with as well as the further processes of change within early Christianity up to 135 CE. Thus, a coherent overall picture emerges, which is suitable both as an introduction to the history of early Christianity and as a stimulus for further research.

“Markus Öhler’s History of Early Christianity is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the fascinating beginning of one of the world’s most influential religions. It escorts readers on an illuminating journey through the cultural, social, and religious landscapes of the ancient world, examining key figures, events, and ideas that shaped the development of Christian history. Drawing upon the latest research and scholarship, Öhler explores in detail the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the writings of the apostles, and the rise of early Christian communities. With this volume, students, scholars, or simply those interested in Christian origins will gain a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives and theological debates that characterized the early Christian movement and the complex relationships between Christianity and the political and social structures of the ancient world.”

CLARE K. ROTHSCHILD, Professor of Scripture Studies, Lewis University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1395-7

$49.99 | Paperback

370 pages

6 x 9

April 15, 2024

“Markus Öhler’s History of Early Christianity portrays the history of the origins of the early Christian movement in a balanced, multifaceted-yet-focused manner. Based on the most recent research, it presents the actors and settings as well as the socioreligious milieus and contexts of Christ-believers around the Mediterranean area. By offering historical lines of events up to 135 CE, Öhler has outstandingly succeeded in composing an account that will have an effect on New Testament studies far beyond the classroom.”

EVE-MARIE BECKER, Professor of New Testament, University of Münster

ISBN 978-1-4813-1938-6

$39.99 | Hardback

160 pages

5.5 x 8.5

April 15, 2024

Ideal Disciples

A Commentary on Matthew’s Beatitudes Daniel Daley

Happiness and human flourishing were common topics among philosophers in the ancient world, from Aristotle to Seneca and beyond. Although Bible readers often think about Jesus’ primary role as the savior of his people, he also taught a unique vision for a thriving and fulfilled life, a vision that continues to guide and challenge followers of Jesus as they navigate a complex, morally fraught world.

In Ideal Disciples, Daniel Daley argues that Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount serves as an ideal starting point for understanding Jesus’ vision for discipleship. Matthew’s beatitudes might be the topic of more reflection, discussion, teaching, and writing than any other passage in the Bible. Often seen as a summation of the heart of Jesus, the beatitudes are a richly textured, layered, and penetrating passport into Christ-oriented dispositions, requiring consideration by readers of the Gospel and constant reappraisal by careful interpreters. Ideal Disciples argues that Jesus’ beatitudes demonstrate a faithful but innovative engagement with antecedent traditions and a stirring, universal call to discipleship for those willing to commit to Jesus’ unique vision. Matthew’s writer takes linguistic cues from both Judaism and the Greco-Roman world, and the message of the beatitudes can be situated squarely within Jewish wisdom and apocalyptic traditions.

By serving as instruction for Jesus’ ideal disciples, the beatitudes speak not only to Matthew’s goals for the first Gospel’s first readers, but also into the lives of readers throughout the centuries and into the present day. The beatitudes are a counterintuitive and countercultural introduction to Christlikeness, and readers of the beatitudes are asked to consider what they reveal about Jesus’ vision of a fully flourishing life for his followers.

DANIEL DALEY is Fellow in the Department of Biblical Studies at Australian Catholic University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is also the author of God’s Will and Testament: Inheritance in the Gospel of Matthew and Jewish Tradition

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Understanding the Matthean Beatitudes

1 Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew’s Structure

2 The Character of Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew

3 Translating μακάριος

4 Reading Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew Part Two: Commentary on Jesus’ Beatitudes

1 Matthew 5:3

2 Matthew 5:4

3 Matthew 5:5

4 Matthew 5:6

5 Matthew 5:7

6 Matthew 5:8

7 Matthew 5:9

8 Matthew 5:10

9 Matthew 5:11-12

Conclusion

JOY L. VAUGHAN is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Asbury University.

CONTENTS

Foreword - Ben Witherington III

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Reading through Multicultural and Genre-Specific Lenses

1 Demythologizing the Demythologizers: The Need to Hear Multicultural Voices

2 When Two Worlds Meet: The Hope of a Multicultural Approach

3 History or Hysteria?: Reading the Gospels and Acts with Genre Criticism

Part Two: Characteristics of Spirit Possession in Biblical and Multicultural Perspectives

4 Spirits Make Me Sick!: Spirit Possession and Illness

5 Spirits Make Me Violent and Strong!: Spirit Possession, Violent Acts, and Extraordinary Strength

6 Spirits Make Me Speak!: Spirit Possession, Vocalic Alterations, Demonic Speech, and Oracular Activity

7 A Vision of Transcultural Phenomena: Summary, Implications, and Conclusions

Phenomenal Phenomena

Biblical and Multicultural Accounts of Spirits and Exorcism

Joy L. Vaughan

Today, the conception of spirits and demons has been mostly consigned to pop culture in films and novels. Any notion of supernatural possession is often derided as outdated belief or legend. The Western world has essentially “cast out” stories of exorcisms that persist throughout much of the world today. Consequently, Western Christians have a limited framework to interpret the exorcism accounts scattered throughout the Synoptic Gospels and Acts in their depictions of the ministry of Jesus and his followers.

With Phenomenal Phenomena, Joy L. Vaughan maps the hermeneutical problem readers of biblical spirit possession and exorcism stories might face. Vaughan communicates how the intersection of Western and global perspectives is a fruitful frame through which to compare modern stories of spirit phenomena to ancient accounts. She surveys interreligious and global perspectives through three relationships: spirit possession and illness; spirit possession and violence or extraordinary strength; and spirit possession and vocalic activity/alteration, demonic speech, and oracular activity. These global perspectives challenge reductionist readings that pervade Western scholarship and allow the actuality of spirits to contribute to our collective interpretive task.

Considering the complexity of global experiences of spiritual and demonic activity, a variety of interpretive options are needed to understand the transcultural occurrences of these phenomena. Vaughan demonstrates that listening to global voices opens up a wide horizon of modern spirit possession and exorcism stories that have comparable characteristics to New Testament accounts. A fresh opportunity arises to read both sets of data as eyewitness testimony to extraordinary events.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1836-5

$69.99 | Hardback

275 pages

6 x 9

September 1, 2023

“Phenomenal Phenomena is an excellent compendium of scholarship and an interdisciplinary study of spirit possession in the Gospels and Acts. No other book offers such a cogent, concise, and compelling treatment of exorcism in modern biblical studies with global perspectives.”

“What do we do with the possession and exorcism stories in the New Testament? From David Strauss to John Pilch to Todd Klutz to Richard Horsley, the call has been for a multicultural approach to understanding the stories. In this richly informed text, Vaughan engages with material from the ancient world, and with modern analogies from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Western world to argue that, however these stories are interpreted, they are to be taken as part of the eyewitness testimony to the activities of Jesus and his followers.”

GRAHAM H. TWELFTREE, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, London School of Theology

“How plausible is it historically that Jesus exorcised the possessed? To discuss this issue, Joy L. Vaughan utilizes multicultural reading involving interdisciplinary voices to consider the phenomenology of possession and exorcism throughout much of history. While, especially for Western people, possession implies beliefs of a strange and alien tradition, copious modern accounts of spirit possession experiences heard through the voices of those who have testified to their experience challenge this view. This excellent overview allows readers to reconsider their suppositions about the existence and function of evil.”

MARIUS NEL, Research Professor, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

DANIEL K. DARKO, Dean for Global Engagement and Professor of Biblical Studies, Taylor University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1869-3

$59.99 | Hardback

279 pages

6 x 9

Now Available 1 image

After Paul

The Apostle’s Legacy in Early Christianity

James W. Aageson

After Paul: The Apostle’s Legacy in Early Christianity focuses on the many ways Pauline thought and tradition were reinterpreted, reused, reframed, and reconstructed in the first centuries of Christianity. James W. Aageson contends that it is insufficient simply to focus on Paul or on his legacy in the Greco-Roman world; what is needed is a bifocal look at Paul with the reference points being both how Paul transformed his own thinking and later how Paul and his thought were transformed by others in the church.

To speak of Paul’s legacy implies more than the reception of his texts, his ideas, or his theology. It also implies more than the interpretive techniques or the references to Paul by early post-Paul writers. It refers to the apostle’s wider impact, influence, and sway in the first centuries of the church as well. The questions he addressed, his impulse toward theological reflection and argumentation, and his approach to pastoral and ethical concerns undoubtedly influenced the future course of the Christ movement. Aageson’s investigation takes up the issues of memory and metamorphosis, conflict and opposition, authority and control, legacy and empire, the church and the Jews, women and marriage, Paul in place, and church unity to pinpoint interrelationships and interactions among important strands in Paul’s thought, persona, and authority as together they interfaced with the changing culture and social life of early Christianity.

JAMES W. AAGESON is Professor of Religion, Emeritus at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota.

CONTENTS

Preface

Credits

Abbreviations

Introduction: An Overview of Paul’s Legacy

1 Memory, Metamorphosis, and Christian Development: Paul and the Formation of a Legacy

2 Meaning, Method, and Conflict: Paul’s Place in Early Church Tradition

3 Authority and Control in Pauline Tradition: The Building of a Legacy

4 Life in the Empire: Paul’s Legacy, the Church, and Rome

5 Self-Definition and Contention: Israel, the Jews, and the Church

6 Sexuality, Marriage, and Asceticism: Paul’s Ethical Legacy

“No one is more qualified to write a book about the Pauline legacy than James Aageson. Developing previous research, he focuses on eight specific and important Pauline topics to explore the Pauline legacy. Aageson is attuned to the latest approaches to New Testament textual study, and so considers memory, place, and social factors, among others, along with a variety of important textual traditions.”

STANLEY E. PORTER, President, Dean, and Professor of New Testament, McMaster Divinity College, Canada

After Paul is not intended to be a history of the first centuries of Pauline Christianity nor an exhaustive account of everything that pertains to the early development of Paul’s legacy. Rather, Aageson endeavors to plot connections, identify patterns, and develop a theoretical context for understanding Paul’s legacy in early Christianity. The picture that emerges is one of continuity and discontinuity between Paul and Pauline tradition as the historical Paul became a figure of memory and remembrance, framed and reframed. This specific investigation offers a fresh entry point to understanding the larger question of how the Christian tradition came into its own as a social body and religious movement that could endure even after Paul.

“Paul’s legacy allows us to understand the creativity, innovation, and richness of perspective of the Pauline texts and to trace how Paul’s interpretation of the world, with its main topics and themes, was gradually transformed through a chain of interpretive steps into the Christian theology of Tertullian and Irenaeus. An excellent introduction to the history of theology in emerging Christianity.”

ODA WISCHMEYER, Professor Emerita of Ancient Judaism and New Testament, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

7 Paul’s Legacy in Place: Philippi, Rome, and Corinth

8 E Pluribus Unum or Vice Versa: Mapping Unity and Diversity in Early Christian and Pauline Tradition

Conclusion “This engaging study provides a sure guide to thinking about the influence of Paul’s legacy (not simplistically of Paul) without overestimating it or denying its power. Everyone interested in the development of the church in its early centuries will find this book a vital contribution.”

JERRY L. SUMNEY, Professor of Biblical Studies, Lexington Theological Seminary

Baylor Handbooks

on the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Greek New Testament provide a foundational analysis of the scriptural texts. The analyses are distinguished by the detailed yet comprehensive attention paid to the texts. The authors’ expositions are convenient pedagogical and reference tools that explain the form and syntax of the biblical texts, offer guidance for deciding between competing semantic analyses, engage important text-critical debates, and address questions relating to the original-language texts that are frequently overlooked by standard commentaries. Beyond serving as succinct and accessible analytic keys, these handbooks also reflect the most up-to-date advances in scholarship on grammar and linguistics and prove themselves indispensable tools for anyone committed to a deep reading of the biblical texts.

Romans

A Handbook on the Greek Text

BAYLOR HANDBOOK ON THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Stanley E. Porter and David I. Yoon

STANLEY E. PORTER is President and Dean, Professor of New Testament, and Roy A. Hope Chair in Christian Worldview at McMaster Divinity College. DAVID I. YOON is Associate to the Academic Dean and Instructor of Biblical Studies at Emmanuel Bible College and Research Fellow at McMaster Divinity College.

“This volume on Paul’s letter to the Romans by Porter and Yoon is a worthy addition to the Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament series. The grammatical and syntactical comments will help students with one year of Greek to analyze and interpret Paul’s summary of his gospel preaching responsibly and with renewed enthusiasm.”

ECKHARD J. SCHNABEL, Mary F. Rockefeller Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“For anyone wanting to study carefully through the Greek text of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Yoon’s and Porter’s contribution to the Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament series is an essential volume.”

ROBERT L. PLUMMER, Collin and Evelyn Aikman Professor of Biblical Studies, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

ISBN 978-1-932792-61-4 / $49.99 / Paperback / 416 pages / 5.25 x 8 / September 1, 2023

Psalms 89–105

A Handbook on the Greek Text

BAYLOR HANDBOOK ON THE SEPTUAGINT

Jennifer Brown Jones

JENNIFER BROWN JONES is an Instructor in Old Testament at the Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1691-0 / $49.99 / Paperback / 310 pages / 5.25 x 8 / April 1, 2024

ISBN 978-1-4813-1366-7

$49.99 | Paperback

ISBN 978-1-4813-1961-4

$59.99 | Hardback

525 pages

6 x 9

November 15, 2023

b&w graphs, charts, tables

“In this groundbreaking collection, renowned scholars embark on an unparalleled exploration of the profound questions at the core of spirituality. Each thought-provoking article underscores the vital role of religious institutions in guiding us through life’s most critical choices. Addressing questions such as, ’How will I act?’ ’What will I do and refrain from doing?’ and ’How will I navigate my brief existence on Earth?’ these experts deliver remarkable insights through exceptional writing and profound thinking. Delve into the depths of spirituality with this extraordinary and transformative work.”

JON CLIFTON, Chief Executive Officer, Gallup

Objective Religion (Volume 3)

Freedom, Politics, Secularization

edited by Byron R. Johnson

Though many scholars and commentators have predicted the death of religion, the world is more religious today than ever before. And yet, despite the persistence of religion, it remains a woefully understudied phenomenon. With Objective Religion, Baylor University Press and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion have combined forces to gather select articles from the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion that not only highlight the journal’s wide-ranging and diverse scope, but also advance the field through a careful arrangement of topics with ongoing relevance, all treated with scientific objectivity and the respect warranted by matters of faith. This multivolume project seeks to advance our understanding of religion and spirituality in general as well as particular religious beliefs and practices. These volumes thereby serve as a catalyst for future studies of religion from diverse disciplines and fields of inquiry including sociology, psychology, political science, demography, economics, philosophy, ethics, history, medicine, population health, epidemiology, and theology. The articles in this volume, Freedom, Politics, Secularization, use rigorous methodologies to scrutinize profoundly important topics that are so often misunderstood. In this way Objective Religion helps us rethink the conventional beliefs and stereotypes that occupy so much of popular discourse on religion.

BYRON R. JOHNSON is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and the founding director of the Institute for Studies of Religion.

CONTRIBUTORS

Elyse Bailey

Jeri M. Beggs

Hulda G. Black

Feler Bose

Matt Bradshaw

Ryan P. Burge

Greg Clark

James E. Cox, Jr.

Jesus Crespo Cuaresma

Marie A. Eisenstein

Hannah Embler

Roger Finke

Jonathan Fox

Brian J. Grim

Benjamin Thomas Gurrentz

Emily Harvey

Byron R. Johnson

Eric Kaufmann

Timothy M. Komarek

“While it has become conventional wisdom to note that ’politics is downstream from culture,’ the influence on both by religion has received relatively little attention from the social sciences...until now. In this remarkably wide-ranging and readable compendium of research studies, Byron Johnson has provided a primer on the best quantitative analysis on the impact of religion on society in America and around the world. In reading this creatively assembled book naturally one will be prompted to consider further topics to research. Objective Religion, then, not only sets a foundation to better understand current social science research on religion, it also builds a launchpad for future study.”

PETE PETERSON, Braun Family Dean’s Chair, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy

Jeff Levin

Dane R. Mataic

Darin M. Mather

Jennifer M. McClure

Kevin Neuhouser

Tia Noelle Pratt

Robert J. Priest

Cortney Hughes Rinker

Jesse Roof

Linda S. Showers

Vince E. Showers

Vegard Skirbekk

Robert Edward Snyder

George Yancey

TODD C. REAM is Professor of Humanities in the John Wesley Honors College and Executive Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Indiana Wesleyan University, and is Senior Fellow for Programming for the Lumen Research Institute. He also serves as the Senior Fellow for Public Engagement for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and as the Publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review.

JERRY PATTENGALE is University Professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, cofounder of the Lumen Research Institute, and founding scholar of the Museum of the Bible (DC). He has dozens of books, an award-winning TV series, distinguished fellowships, and board appointments, including Christianity Today, the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, and the National Press Club’s membership committee.

The Anxious Middle

Planning for the Future of the Christian College

Todd C. Ream and Jerry Pattengale

foreword by Mark A. Noll

In the 1990s, Christian colleges and universities experienced a record boom in students and employees. However, less than twenty years later Christian institutions experienced new challenges spurred on by four major changes: first, the “Great Recession” of 2008 and widespread debt; second, declining birthrates in certain regions of the United States; third, the passing of the Affordable Care Act, which raised the question of whether Christian institutions were required to cover contraceptives; and fourth, the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, which brought issues of employment to the forefront at certain Evangelical institutions. Yet despite mounting challenges, most Christian colleges and universities are still stronger now than at any point in their respective histories by almost any measure.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1850-1

$39.99 | Hardback

CONTENTS

Foreword: Mark A. Noll

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Life in the Anxious Middle (Again)

1 Aspiration

2 Imagination

3 Collaboration

4 Illumination

Postscript 1: Jon S. Kulaga

Postscript 2: Linda A. Livingstone

Postscript 3: Beck A. Taylor

With The Anxious Middle, Todd C. Ream and Jerry Pattengale engage the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a model for navigating our tumultuous times. The authors argue that if the present age is defined by what Bonhoeffer calls in Creation and Fall the “anxious middle”—somewhere between Eden and the Apocalypse—the challenges faced by Christian higher education must be recognized as both existential and practical. To confront them while still embracing any opportunities afforded by occasional cross breezes, Christian colleges and universities would be wise to employ a fourfold approach to planning informed by Bonhoeffer’s work as well as historic and contemporary examples: institutions should be articulate about their missions, imaginative in advancing them, collaborative in deploying them, and strategic in sharing them.

Trustees, administrators, faculty members, and others concerned with the future of Christian colleges and universities will find in The Anxious Middle a planning process applicable to organizational levels ranging from the campus-wide to the departmental or the programmatic. The result is an understanding of Christian higher education not merely focused on surviving but thriving between Eden and the Apocalypse.

178 pages

5.5 x 8.5

September 15, 2023

“This book is free of both hand-wringing gloom and fist-pumping boosterism. Some of the most respected leaders in Christian higher education see with clarity the obstacles facing Christian colleges and universities, but see just as clearly the path forward. If we pay attention to the vision behind this book, the future of Christian higher education will be better than we’ve ever dared to hope.”

RUSSELL MOORE, Editor-in-Chief, Christianity Today

“The Anxious Middle is the one new book you must read if you are connected to Christian higher education in any way. Ream and Pattengale make a bold and correct claim that the future of Christian higher education lies in understanding the ’why’ it should exist. And that ’why’ is the discipleship of the student into a firm belief that God is the creator of all things and therefore God is at the center of all things.”

SHIRLEY HOOGSTRA, President, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities

The West African Revival

Senghor’s Eucharist

Faith

Tabernacle Congregation

on the Guinea Coast, 1918–1929

STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

Adam Mohr

In eleven short years, from 1918 to 1929, Faith Tabernacle Congregation, a small divine healing church in Philadelphia, spread over the Guinea Coast, garnering over 250 branches and nearly 11,000 members without ever sending missionaries from the United States. In The West African Revival, Adam Mohr compiles historical documents from Faith Tabernacle’s archive in Philadelphia as well as several other churches that branched from Faith Tabernacle in West Africa (mainly Ghana and Nigeria) and the United States such as the First-Century Gospel Church, the Apostolic Church, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of Pentecost. Writing for an audience of scholars from the fields of African Christianity, Global Christianity, and African Studies, Mohr engages literature from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, African Traditional Religion (predominantly anti-witchcraft cults), the relationship of capitalism to Christianity, political and social conflict, and early Pentecostalism in West Africa.

“In a remarkably timely work, Adam Mohr recasts the early twentieth-century history of African religious revivals with a compelling narration of the Faith Tabernacle Congregation. “

BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE, Professor of African History, University of Arizona

Negritude and African Political Theology

David Tonghou Ngong

ISBN 978-1-4813-1865-5 / $64.99 / Hardback / 244 pages / 6 x 9 / August 15, 2023

5 maps, 21 b&w photos

In his collection of poems Black Hosts, Leopold Senghor, a leading figure in the Negritude movement and the first president of Senegal, offers the suffering and death of Africans, rather than that of Christ, as a site for the healing of a fractured and antagonistic world. Drawing from literature, history, political science, anthropology, and theology, David Tonghou Ngong’s Senghor’s Eucharist investigates the possibilities and perils of Senghor’s offer. Ngong argues that, while Senghor might be accused of cheapening African suffering by offering an easy pardon to colonizers and others who have harmed Africans, his work should be situated within the Negritude movement and its intention to revalorize the lives of Africans in a world that often treats African lives as disposable. Indeed, by connecting the suffering of Africans to the central figure of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ, Senghor suggests that at the heart of Western Christianity lies a disturbing betrayal—the refusal of communion, to eat together, as dramatized in the Eucharist.

“David Ngong offers a nuanced appreciation and critique of Senegalese Catholic poet and statesman Leopold Senghor’s Eucharistic imagining of a world in which the suffering of Africa at the hands of the West can be reconciled and overcome. Ngong’s book is interdisciplinary, critical, profound, and inspiring.”

WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH, Professor of Catholic Studies, DePaul University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1779-5 / $59.99 / Paperback / 176 pages / 6 x 9 / August 15, 2023

“The Kaleidoscopic City illuminates the colorfully intertwined histories of Hong Kong, modern China, and Pentecostalism in transnational spaces. Alex Mayfield’s impressive research and engaging narrative brings previously overlooked perspectives to the fore, enriching our understandings of Chinese Christianity’s local and global development—and the lives of women and men who played crucial roles in it. This book expands the field with its groundbreaking explorations of Pentecostal networks, communities, and experiences in conversation with twentieth century China.”

JOSEPH W. HO, Associate Professor of History, Albion College

The Kaleidoscopic City

Hong Kong, Mission, and the Evolution of Global Pentecostalism

Alex R. Mayfield

The Kaleidoscopic City explores the development of Pentecostalism in Hong Kong between 1907 and 1942. Focusing primarily on Pentecostal missionaries and the Chinese leaders who worked alongside them, Alex R. Mayfield analyzes how changes within the social structures and ideological frameworks of global Pentecostalism dramatically impacted the movement within the colony. As such, Mayfield helps us to better understand both the spread of Pentecostalism in China and the evolution of global Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Throughout the book, Mayfield delves into specific facets of Pentecostalism’s development in the colony. First, he explores how Pentecostals’ changing relationship to the space of Hong Kong reflected both historical happenstance and deep-rooted evangelical narratives. Second, Mayfield traces how the move from faith mission models to denominational models in Hong Kong marked a dramatic shift in Pentecostal aims, identities, and approaches. Third, he examines the ways Pentecostal evangelistic practices remained, for the most part, “un-Pentecostal” in their conformity to evangelical missionary norms. Fourth, Mayfield considers how Pentecostal spirituality gradually evolved to better respond to the competitive religious marketplace of Hong Kong. Finally, he studies the important roles of Chinese and Western Pentecostal women in Hong Kong and how their perceptions and enactments of gender changed as they fulfilled those roles.

ISBN 978-1-4813-1897-6

$59.99 | Hardcover

284 pages

6 x 9

November 1, 2023

33 b&w illustrations

“Clear, compelling, and wide-ranging, this book offers a powerful new interpretation of Senghor’s life and legacy. Ngong offers a model of excellence in theological scholarship, inviting readers to think in important new ways about Christian faith.“

VINCENT LLOYD, Professor and Director, Center for Political Theology, Villanova University

With each turn of the kaleidoscope a different vision comes into view. In some places, Pentecostalism looked like standard evangelicalism; in others, it was a radical, ecstatic departure. It was urban one moment and rural the next; it was liberating for women but also not; it was a move of the Spirit and it was careful planning. This unique volume marks a step forward in the attempt to make sense of the paradoxical early Pentecostal movement in China concentrated in the vibrant colonial city of Hong Kong.

“This text offers an important vantage point for re-understanding the history of Pentecostal missions—its theology, institutions, and gender dynamics among other aspects—both locally and globally. A must-read for historians of Christianity in Hong Kong and global Pentecostalism.”

NAOMI THURSTON, Assistant Professor, Divinity School of Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

“This groundbreaking and innovative study pushes the history of Pentecostalism in new, fresh, and compelling directions. By combining qualitative and quantitative data, focus on the spatial, network theory, and close reading of historical texts, Alex Mayfield maps the chronology of Pentecostalism as a transnational movement in the first half of the twentieth century.”

DANA L. ROBERT, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, Boston University

ALEX R. MAYFIELD is Assistant Professor of History in the department of Social Science and History at Asbury University.

Los Bautistas a través de los siglos (Segunda Edición)

La historia de un pueblo global

David W. Bebbington

translated by Javier Elizondo

Los Bautistas a través de los siglos ofrece una clara introducción a la historia y la teología de este pueblo influyente e internacional. David W. Bebbington, un destacado historiador bautista, analiza los principales desarrollos en la vida y el pensamiento bautistas desde el siglo XVII hasta el presente. La segunda edición de este probado libro de texto amplía el alcance con capítulos sobre tres partes del mundo donde los Bautistas se han vuelto particularmente numerosos: América Latina, Nigeria, y las colinas de Naga en la India. Cada capítulo también destaca temas regionales que han presentado nuevos desafíos y oportunidades para los Bautistas: la misión holística en América Latina, la experiencia de renovación carismática y el encuentro con el Islam en Nigeria, y las demandas de pacificación en las colinas de Naga. A través de esta nueva edición, Bebbington orienta a los lectores y amplía su conocimiento de la comunidad bautista a medida que continúa floreciendo en todo el mundo.

The Gospel and Religious Freedom

Historical Studies in Evangelicalism and Political Engagement

edited by David W. Bebbington

In The Gospel and Religious Freedom, the complex relationship in theory and practice between evangelicals and religious freedom is explored, covering periods from the eighteenth century to the present. The volume includes studies of the intellectual lineage of asserting the free exercise of religion, of evangelicals in the United States who endorsed religious liberty in the early twentieth century, and of recent American evangelical political pressure on behalf of freedom of religion at home and abroad. Other contributions address the evangelical defense of the cause in British territories in the age of William Wilberforce, the apparent threat to religious liberty by Roman Catholics throughout the world, an evangelical attempt to restrain Muslim laws in Nigeria, and the persecution of believers by Communists in Eastern Europe and China.

“While this volume’s contributors take varied positions on the highly contested relationship between evangelicalism and religious freedom, they transcend the political tribalism of our moment. The result is a meaningful dialogue, which also tells a tale wide-ranging in historical period, denominational tradition, and, most significantly, its global reach.”

ISBN 978-1-4813-2088-7 / $34.99 / Paperback / 384 páginas / 6 x 9 / Ahora disponible

ISBN 978-1-4813-1886-0 / $49.99 / Paperback / 240 pages / 6 x 9 / Now Available

ISBN 978-1-4813-1930-0 / $59.99 / Hardback

ELIZABETH FLOWERS, Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, Baylor University

CONTRIBUTORS

Rolando D. Aguirre

Cynthia Aulds

Levi Bedilu

Debra F. Bell

Michael Bell

Kimlyn J. Bender

Eric Black

Froswa’ Booker-Drew

Ricardo Brambila

Kan’Dace Brock

Anyra Cano

Os Chrisman

Scott Collins

Ali Corona

Roy J. Cotton

Barry Creamer

Kristin Houlé Cuellar

Randy Dale

Jimmy Dorrell

Samuel James Doyle

R. E.

Michael Evans Sr.

Jeremy K. Everett

Jonathan Fechner

Ferrell Foster

Ed Francis

Jack Goodyear

Nell Green

Bobby Hall

Latisha Waters Hearne

Michelle L. Henry

Jessie Higgins

Jean Surratt Humphreys

Mariah Humphries

Charles Foster Johnson

Wes Keyes

Brenda Kirk

Marv Knox

Patty Lane

Justin Lawrence

Nora O. Lozano

Suzii Paynter March

Michael Mills

Tony Miranda

Bethany Rivera Molinar

Bee Moorhead

Christine Abel Nix

John D. Ogletree Jr.

Joseph C. Parker Jr.

Timothy Pierce

Joe Rangel

Stephen Reeves

Stephen Reid

Albert L. Reyes

Gus Reyes

Jesse Rincones

Cokiesha Bailey Robinson

Alyssa Ross

Diego Silva

Jon Singletary

Nataly Mora Sorenson

Felisi Sorgwe

Kirk Stowers

Garrett Vickrey

Myles Werntz

Mary Whitehurst

Patricia Wilson

Gaynor Yancey

Jorge Zayasbazan

Justice Looks Like . . .

Reflections on Living the Gospel in an Unjust World edited by Eric Black

Our world is crying out for justice—the doing of right and the righting of wrongs. George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 amplified this cry. In response, the Baptist Standard published a sixty-nine-week series of articles which now form the pages of this volume, Justice Looks Like . . . : Reflections on Living the Gospel in an Unjust World. Sixty-eight writers present honest, heartfelt accounts of what justice looks like to them.

Written by men and women of various ethnic backgrounds and various professions—all of them decisively Texas Baptists—these reflections offer up personal memories, passion, lament, anger, hope, exhortation, and perspectives on justice that are perhaps new, unsettling, enlivening, and empowering. Each entry is short and pithy and encourages readers to pursue further conversation and action. Taken together they present a vision of God, Scripture, and the Christian life saturated with justice The hope is that those who encounter these reflections will not stop with this book but will continue to listen to others, learn from others, and live justly alongside others.

“’Fannie Lou Hamer’s timeless words carried me through [referring to the global pandemic and political uprisings]. I found hope and inspiration in her story and the fortitude to keep pushing for social change.’ Keisha Blain penned these words in her widely acclaimed book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message To America. Just as Dr. Blain and so many of us have found hope, courage, and strength in the life of Fannie Lou Hamer and many others who fought and continue to fight for freedom, so have I found hope, courage, and strength in the Word of God and in the rich and poignant readings of each author and champion of change who contributed to Justice Looks Like . . . edited by Eric Black. Justice Looks Like . . . is written with intentionality to diversity of thought and experiences and is central in its message of hope and action that promotes change. Read it and be changed and motivated to make a real difference. Justice matters to Jesus and should matter to us. Follow him and bring him glory with your prayers and your feet.”

COKIESHA BAILEY ROBINSON, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Grace College

ISBN 978-1-4813-1924-9

$24.99 | Paperback

248 pages

5.5 x 8.5

Now Available

“The gospel of Jesus Christ is the ultimate demonstration of God’s righteousness and justice in the world. Now more than ever those who hold to the gospel must reflect upon and live it out as such. This book is an excellent reflection upon what it looks like to live out the gospel of Jesus while upholding justice in the world. It will encourage all of us to lift up God’s cause, which is the cause of justice.”

RALPH WEST, Founder and Senior Pastor, Church Without Walls

ERIC BLACK is Executive Director, Publisher, and Editor of the Baptist Standard

Minor Prophets for Living

Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance

Mark Lanier

Tommy Bowman

Answering the Call Chad S. Conine

A trial lawyer by trade, a Christian by heart—author Mark Lanier has trained in biblical languages and devoted his life to studying and living the Bible. Living daily with the tension between the demands of his career and the desire for a godly life, Lanier recognizes the importance and challenge of finding daily time to spend in God’s Word. He has discovered in the Minor Prophets a storehouse of wisdom and inspiration essential for his continued growth in faith, obedience, and understanding.

In Minor Prophets for Living, Lanier takes us to a portion of the Bible often overlooked in devotional and inspirational literature, showing how the prophets of Israel and Judah have much to teach us today. For each day of the year, Lanier reflects on the words of these ancient prophets, relates their messages to the struggles facing Christians today, and concludes with a prayer connected to the day’s insights. His engagement with the Minor Prophets offers fellow Christians the opportunity to receive the gifts of grace and guidance that come from daily immersion in Scripture.

MARK LANIER is a nationally renowned trial lawyer; founder of the Lanier

Theological Library and the Christian Trial Lawyers Association; and author of Psalms for Living: Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance, Torah for Living: Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance, Jesus for Living: Daily Prayers, Wisdom, and Guidance, and Christianity on Trial: A Lawyer Examines the Christian Faith. He and his wife, Becky, have five children and live near Houston, Texas.

The call came for Tommy Bowman unexpectedly, and yet he followed with conviction. It happened at a time when revolution was coming to Southwest Conference football and basketball during the 1966-67 school year. In Tommy Bowman, Chad Conine, a Waco sportswriter, tells the story of Tommy Bowman’s impact on not only Baylor basketball, but Baylor as a whole. Tommy Bowman quietly arrived at Baylor in 1966 for the fall semester. He found himself, almost by surprise, integrating the Baylor basketball team. Bowman had been recruited by Baylor basketball assistant coach Carroll Dawson to be a pioneer for the Bears—Baylor’s first Black scholarship athlete. It was a case of a young man being thrust into a game-changing role. Now, more than fifty years later, Bowman’s achievements have gained their rightful acclaim.

CHAD S. CONINE is the author of The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game, and Texas Sports: Unforgettable Stories for Every Day of the Year. As a freelance sportswriter and staff member at the Waco Tribune-Herald, he has covered a variety of sports over the last twenty-five years.

“Tommy Bowman is not only an integral part of our program’s history, but the qualities he possesses are the same ones we look for in our players today. Driven by faith, Bowman displayed hard work and tenacity to not only become Baylor’s first African American scholarship athlete but to excel on and off the floor, weaving himself into the fabric of our basketball program. At Baylor, we talk about Preparing Champions for Life, and I don’t think anybody exemplifies a champion in life quite like Tommy.”

SCOTT DREW, Head Coach, Baylor University Men’s Basketball

ISBN 978-1-4813-2098-6 / $39.99 / Hardback / 380 pages / 6 x 9 / December 1, 2023

ISBN 978-1-4813-2099-3 / $19.99 / Paperback

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credits: (front cover) Shutterstock/Alenarbuz | (p. 1) The Pala d’Oro, detail of Empress Irene Comnenus (gold & enamel inlaid with precious stones), Basilica di San Marco, Venice, Italy. Photograph by Cameraphoto Arte Venezia / Bridgeman Images | (p. 3) Wendy Michelle Davis, wendymichelledavis.com | (p. 20) Wilson, Robert Arthur (1884–1979), Red, 1919 (pencil & w/c on paper). Private collection. © Liss Fine Art / Bridgeman Images. | (pp. 22–23) Debra Band, dbandart.com | (p. 26) Angelico, Fra (Guido di Pietro/Giovanni da Fiesole) (c.1387–1455) / Italian, The Sermon on the Mount, 1442 (fresco), Photo © Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Bridgeman Images

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