September 16, 2021
Peter Burke— In Rome, unlike Greece, we find not only the praises of outstanding intellectual all-rounders but also recommendations to students of particular disciplines to acquire a wide knowledge, perhaps… READ MORE
August 11, 2021
Jennifer A. Quigley— People today don’t usually think of going to the bank, buying groceries, and signing a lease as religious acts, but in the ancient world, they very often… READ MORE
April 16, 2021
Leon R. Kass— Exodus, the second of the Five Books of Moses (The Torah), contains some of the most famous stories in Western literature: the enslavement of the Children of… READ MORE
August 11, 2020
Paul A. Rahe— It is much easier to initiate a great war than to end one. Even when an attempt to do the latter seems, to the unsuspecting glance, to… READ MORE
August 6, 2020
Ramsay MacMullen— At Nicaea in AD 325 some 200 bishops assembled. The total is not certain: perhaps a little below that figure, probably a little above it. Not all who… READ MORE
August 5, 2020
Edward L. Greenstein— Determining the time and place of the book’s composition is bound up with the nature of the book’s language. The Hebrew prose of the frame tale, notwithstanding… READ MORE
July 3, 2020
Matt Jackson-McCabe— One of the more intriguing questions in the history of religion is how the Jewish apostles of a first-century Jewish messiah came to be considered the authoritative embodiment… READ MORE
May 12, 2020
Terry Eagleton— Walter Benjamin’s theory of tragedy in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama has some affinities with the Christian view of Calvary. Tragedy for Benjamin is essentially sacrifice,… READ MORE
April 30, 2020
John Carey— The oldest surviving literary work is The Epic of Gilgamesh. It was composed nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (roughly equivalent to where Iraq and eastern Syria… READ MORE
April 23, 2020
Christopher Stroup— The cities of the Roman Empire were filled with gods and the citizens who honored them with festivals, processions, buildings, and benefactions. The followers of Jesus—later called Christians—lived… READ MORE
The Challenge of Casanova