Although women often play a crucial role in the most significant events in the Bible, they are typically cast as secondary characters who are less important than the male lead. Or they are are presented as bit players who aren’t even named. Yet these are strong women and we do an injustice to the biblical narrative and a disservice to ourselves if we gloss over them. This guide takes an intriguing look at some of the women in the New Testament (a second volume is planned), including Mary the mother of Jesus, Anna and Elizabeth, Mary and Martha, Thecla and Junia, the female disciples (including Mary Magdalene), and women who are healed or set free from their burdens – women who helped shape and were shaped by Jesus and the early Christian community. Outside of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey, an intriguing discovery was made in 1906. It was of a cave, and inside was found a painting of a man and a woman. There were two especially significant things about the painting. The first was the identity of the pair; they were Paul and Thecla, a woman of the ancient church and probable travelling companion of St. Paul, at least for part of his ministry. The other significant fact was that Thecla’s eyes had been scratched out, and her hand – raised in the traditional stance to suggest one speaking with authority – had been smudged out. It is a telling image on a number of fronts, not least of which is the desire of some early vandal to attempt to remove the woman’s ability to see or speak. There has always been in Christianity a concerted effort on the part of men to silence women, to obliterate them, to remove their ability to speak or to act with any kind of authority. Yet when we look at the New Testament we can also clearly see the presence of women with Jesus, that they were integral to his everyday life and ministry. If we look a little harder, we will see that women played significant roles at the centre of the early Christian community, including as preachers and teachers.

If you’ve ever suspected there’s nothing new to be discovered in the field of biblical studies, think again. In New Testament Women for Progressive Christians, Volume 2, Donald Schmidt uses the latest, up-to-the-minute, ground-shifting biblical research to explore the story of Jesus’ encounter with Mary and Martha in John 11 – except maybe Martha wasn’t part of the original story at all! And so it goes. Like most ancient texts, the stories in the Bible – including those from the New Testament – are told from a male perspective, often for purposes that have more to do with supporting traditional male roles than representing the radical inclusiveness Jesus and the earliest Christian communities modeled. In this six-session study, in addition to Mary Magdalene, Schmidt explores the stories of the women at the cross and tomb, in the early church (Acts), and in the letters of Paul, to reveal characters too often distorted by layers of tradition.

The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary ideals: environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress—an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination. Faith demands change because Jesus of Nazareth started a movement, not a tradition. He preached about a new world, the Kingdom of God, and invited his followers to work toward the divine vision of universal flourishing. This vision includes all and excludes none. Since we have not yet achieved the world that Jesus describes, we must continue to progress. The energizing impulse of this progress is the Trinity: Abba, Jesus, and Sophia, three persons united by love into one perfect community. God is fundamentally relational, and humankind, made in the image of God, is relational as a result. We are inextricably entwined with one another, sharing a common purpose and a common destiny. In this vision, we find abundant life by practicing agape, the universal, unconditional love that Abba extends, Jesus reveals, and Sophia inspires.

In the struggle for pride and political agency, the imperative to 'be a man' has been central to the lives of black males. Yet, what it means to be a black man-in terms of both racial and gender identity-has been subject to continual debate in public and academic spheres alike. Progressive Black Masculinities brings together leading black cultural critics including Michael Eric Dyson, Mark Anthony Neal, and Patricia Hill Collins to examine an alternatively demonized and mythologized black masculinity. Collectively, they offer a roadmap for new, progressive models of black masculinity that may chart the course for the future of black men.

This uniques collection of essays, originating in seminars held at SBL's Annual and International Meetings, explores the current ethos and discipline of graduate biblical education from different social locations and academic contexts. It includes international voices of well-established scholars who have urged change for some time alongside younger scholars with new perspectives. The individual contributions emerge from a variegated set of experiences in graduate biblical studies and a critical analysis of those experiences. The volume is divided into four areas of investigation. The first section discusses the ethos of biblical studies and social location, and the second explores different cultural-national formations of the discipline. The third section considers the experiences and visions of graduate biblical studies, while the last section explores how to transform the discipline. All the contributions offer ways to transform graduate biblical education so that it becomes a socializing power that, in turn, can transform the present academic ethos of biblical studies. (Back cover).

This convenient text utilizes material from the well-received Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics to introduce students to the use of the New Testament for moral formation. This handy and affordable book-by-book survey of the New Testament contains key articles written by leading scholars and targeted to the needs of the classroom. It will serve as an excellent supplementary text in New Testament courses. The stellar list of contributors includes Robert Brawley, Bruce Chilton, Charles Cosgrove, David deSilva, Victor Paul Furnish, and Glen Harold Stassen.

When Texas Prison Scams Religion exposes corruption in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, especially in the abuse of religion. In many ways, this book is a literature review of 1,800-plus works that defends freedom of conscience in prison while exposing the unconstitutionality of the seminary program that “buys faith with favor” from prisoners. The state veritably ordains the prisoner a “Field Minister” that represents the offices of the Governor, TDCJ Director, and wardens throughout the prison. Therein, TDCJ lies about neutrality in a program all about Christian missions and lies again in falsely certifying elementary Bible students as counselors. Why is the director sponsoring psychopaths counseling psychopaths? In fact, TDCJ pays $314 million a year to UTMB for psychiatric care and receives not a single report of the care given, and worse, for UTMB generates no reports itself. The underbelly TDCJ’s executive culture of cover up is exposed. TDCJ has hired the lowest qualified of the applicant pool many times in the last 25 years and regularly destroys statistics on violence. TDCJ Dir. Collier led the prison to model Louisiana Warden Burl Cain, the most scandal-ridden in penal history according to a host of published news stories for 20 years. Therein, Collier led TDCJ to favor the smallest segment of religious society within Evangelical Dominionism. Texas has no business endorsing the truth of any religion over another. We close with a proposal that utilizes the 400,000,000 hours of officer contact over ten years as a definitive influence in contrast to a commissioner that spends less than 10 minutes on each decision. Maness has been lobbying Austin for 15 years to definitively access staff for his “100,000 Mothers’ 1% Certainty Parole Texas Constitutional Amendment,” which would revolutionize prison culture and save Texans millions of the dollars.

Exegetically noteworthy and culturally-theologically relevant Violence in its wide range of horrifying expressions is real in people’s lives, and biblical interpreters must take violence in the world seriously to arrive at relevant ideas about the place of the Bible in the world. Each essay addresses people’s experiences of violence in the study of the Bible through the context of la violencia, the Spanish noun referring to the brutal, repressive, and murderous policies of state-sponsored violence practiced in many South and Central American and Caribbean countries during the twentieth century that external powers such as the USA often endorsed and fostered. The volume represents an important contribution to biblical studies and to the field of Latina/o studies. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Pablo Andiñach, Nancy Bedford, Lee Cuéllar, Steed V. Davidson, Serge Frolov, Renata Furst, Julia M. O’Brien, Todd Penner, José Enrique Ramírez, Ivoni Richter Reimer, and Susanne Scholz. Features: Twelve essays by scholars living and working on the American continent Articles reveal the complex historical, political, and cultural conditions on the American continent that have contributed to our understanding of violence in the Bible Focus on themes of racial, social, and cultural violence