Do You Need a Literary Agent?

Last updated on: December 8, 2014 at 12:54 pm By Thomas Kidd

I routinely get asked about using a literary agent in securing book contracts. Is this something that authors, academic or non-academic, should consider? It depends on what type of publishing you wish to do. For most academic publishing, you don’t need a literary agent, because academic publishers are not generally engaged in “trade” publishing, meaning the kinds of books that end up on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Strictly academic publishing is largely directed toward an academic audience of... Read more

Working Women and the “Exalted Work of Creation”

Last updated on: December 7, 2014 at 2:57 pm By Agnes Howard

This week the Supreme Court heard a case, Young v. United Parcel Service, weighing treatment of a female UPS driver, Peggy Young, denied a shift to light duty when expecting a baby. Putatively at issue are discrimination and prospects of regulation for “pregnant workers.” As a report from the National Women’s Law Center argues, “It is long past time to make room for pregnancy on the job, and afford pregnant women the equal opportunity they deserve.” Ms. Young reported initial... Read more

The Jesus Identity!

Last updated on: December 7, 2014 at 2:16 pm By Philip Jenkins

Like many readers, I have been stunned by the revelations in the new book by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson, The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene. Their bold detective work exposes the hidden narrative of Jesus found in a text called Joseph and Aseneth, which timid scholars have known for centuries, but long dismissed as an early Jewish romance, almost a romantic novel. However, this new study has a special relevance... Read more

Christians in Babylon

Last updated on: December 3, 2014 at 9:28 am By Philip Jenkins

In the early Christian era, Mesopotamia/Iraq was a thriving center of rabbinic Judaism, and throughout the first millennium it was the intellectual capital of that faith. Given the Jewish background, naturally we find very early Christian settlements in Iraq. Within the Persian empire, the greatest seat of church power was of course at the capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The city’s bishop – later the patriarch – ruled from there until the move to Baghdad in early Islamic times. In northern Iraq, Nisibis,... Read more

Henrietta Mears, Evangelical Optimist

Last updated on: November 25, 2014 at 12:20 pm By johnturner

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about the life of Henrietta Mears, the Sunday School superintendent, developer of curricula, and youth evangelist. “Teacher,” as her disciples called her, served at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood for several decades, from 1928 until her death in 1963. Hollywood Presbyterian was a central hub in the booming post-WWII evangelical network in southern California. Especially prior to the mid-1950s divorce of the “new evangelicals” from their more “fundamentalist” brethren, Mears was part of... Read more

More than Ferguson

Last updated on: January 17, 2015 at 12:23 pm By Miles Mullin

After the St. Louis County (MO) Grand Jury in Ferguson declined to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, chaos ensued. Certainly, chaos ensued in the streets of Ferguson as protests turned into riots throughout the city. At the same time, chaos of a different sort emerged among evangelicals. In the aggregate, evangelicals (and here I really mean white evangelicals) were uncertain how to respond to the developments in Ferguson. On the one hand, many felt a natural inclination... Read more

“More a Doctrine than a Person”: Evangelicals and the Holy Spirit

Last updated on: December 1, 2014 at 10:38 am By Thomas Kidd

I suspect many a Christian, including many evangelicals, can identify with frustrations J.D. Greear expressed in his recent Christianity Today interview about the Christian life and the Holy Spirit: it “seemed like people in the Bible had a fundamentally different relationship with God than my own. There was a hollowness in my spiritual life. God was more a doctrine than a person.” The solution to this malaise, according to Greear, was developing an active, empowering relationship with the Holy Spirit, the Christian’s guide... Read more

By the Rivers of Babylon

Last updated on: December 1, 2014 at 8:50 am By Philip Jenkins

In 1973, Geza Vermes reminded us, indelibly, that Jesus was a Jew, and subsequent generations of scholars have thoroughly absorbed that lesson. Less effective, though, have been statements that early Christianity also operated in a thoroughly Jewish matrix, and that the separation between the two movements was slow, uneven and patchy. Long after the first century, Christians tended to be found in regions and centers where Jews already existed, and relations between the two groups varied enormously in warmth and... Read more

The Enoch Code

Last updated on: July 12, 2019 at 2:10 pm By Philip Jenkins

This is puzzling. On multiple occasions, I have written about the ancient text known as 1 Enoch, which the early church regarded as almost canonical. From the early Middle Ages, though, the book was mostly lost to the West, and was only rediscovered in the eighteenth century in Ethiopian translations. Although this lengthy book deals with many subjects, one long section (chapters 72-87) is an astronomical and calendrical treatise, concerning the stars. Now here’s the problem. In 1616, Sir Walter... Read more

Revolution in the Making

Last updated on: November 25, 2014 at 8:27 pm By Philip Jenkins

Something strange happened to the Jewish world in the third century BC. Although the land was usually part of the Ptolemaic Empire, local authorities carried on ruling much as before, largely undisturbed in their power. If we read our main source for the period – the twelfth book of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, roughly covering the years 320-160BC – there is little sign of seething discontent or intellectual ferment, at least before the 170s or so. Yet as I have noted,... Read more