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Fall 2014 Westar Seminars: Critical Issues in the Study of Religion

Every year in the spring and fall, Westar hosts academic seminars on ongoing critical issues in the study of religion. These seminars are conducted in full public view, and reports on their research are disseminated to the public via online project pages and Westar’s print magazine The Fourth R and academic journal Forum. There are […]

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Posted in: Educational Events about Religion, Press Releases

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Sex and Gender in Early Christianity

I had the privilege this weekend of hearing Westar Fellows Pamela Eisenbaum and Stephen Patterson speak about sex and gender in early Christianity at a Jesus Seminar on the Road jointly sponsored with the University Congregational UCC Lecture Series in Seattle, Washington. Pamela Eisenbaum, author of Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a […]

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Posted in: Educational Events about Religion, Resources for Studying Religion

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The Ancient Rhetoric of Exclusion and Its Modern Bedfellows (Gnosticism series)

“Ancient philosophical discourse identified truth with origin, purity and essence. … True knowledge was knowledge of the beginning, and above all, knowledge of the Divine. History was generally plotted as a story of decline from the moment of pure origin.” —Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? It’s pretty well established by now that historians have […]

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Posted in: Resources for Studying Religion

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New Blog Series on Karen King’s What Is Gnosticism?

“Why is it so hard to define Gnosticism? The problem, I argue, is that a rhetorical term has been confused with a historical entity.” —Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? Many provocative and wonderful—and some admittedly bizarre—texts never made it into the New Testament. Some that were excluded told wild stories about the young Jesus; in others, […]

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Posted in: Resources for Studying Religion

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Christianity’s Struggle for Self-Definition (EHJ series)

“The historical Jesus was a person like us who struggled in life to realize, through his own personality and situation in the world, the Christ of himself.” —David Galston, Embracing the Human Jesus, 214 We can be really short-sighted, historically speaking. We struggle to keep more than one human generation’s beliefs and ideas in our heads […]

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Posted in: Polebridge Press Books and Media, Resources for Studying Religion

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