Reading Justice and Equality in the Letters of Paul: A Community-Based Approach
Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/15/2014
9:00 am - 1:45 pm
Location
Northway Christian Church
Categories
Reading Justice and Equality in the Letters of Paul: A Community-Based Approach
November 15, 9:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Northway Christian Church, Dallas
There is a longstanding debate among scholars about whether the letters of Paul promote social justice and human equality or undermine them by spiritualizing and individualizing Christian transformation or projecting it into the afterlife. This workshop explores the letters as communal conversations about power, difference, and identity in the context of the theological and political ideas and imagery of the Roman Empire. We will discuss how this community-based approach to reading Paul’s letters brings out more perspectives on this question and opens a space for a more complicated answer than Paul as a hero or an obstacle to social change.
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Drew University Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre is a popular speaker and writer. She explores the politics and ethics of both the ancient Christian communities and our contemporary interpretations of them. Her scholarship combines feminist hermeneutics with the study of history and archaeology in order to cultivate a critical and alternative imagination of the past while also taking seriously that, as it is said, “the past is a foreign country.” Her books include Jesus Among Her Children: Q, Eschatology, and Christian Origins (Harvard, 2006) and Mary Magdalene Understood, with Jane Schaberg (Continuum, 2006).