Contrary to the enduring image of Israelite priests as enveloped in an aura of serene sanctity, there is a darker side of the priesthood––one which associates its members and their ancestors with disturbing acts of interpersonal violence. The motif of priestly violence is a significant, albeit overlooked literary trope in the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical Jewish literature. This article identifies this motif and episodes in its reception, demonstrating how it relates to human sacrifice and the slaughter of animals in the sacrificial cult, and illuminating these connections with contemporary theories of religious and workplace violence. Finally, this study makes clear that certain negative portrayals of the priesthood are part-and-parcel of the Jewish interpretive tradition and should not be reflexively dismissed as reflective of anti-clericalism or anti-ritualism.

The story of Mary and Martha is a “text of terror” for women and the mentally disabled, elevating Martha as emblematic of the spiritual failure of the anxious woman. While scholarship has focused upon the precise nature of Martha’s work, this article argues that whether Martha was in the kitchen or doing ministry, she was doing servile labor and incurring the “slavish” worry associated with such work. Attention to the socio-economic context of Martha’s worry recenters the labor dispute that is at the heart of this short passage. Rather than naturalizing ancient norms about worry or continuing to use the disabled body as something to “think with,” this article contextualizes Martha’s “worry and distraction,” demonstrating the ties between the female body, worry, anxiety, and enslaved labor in antiquity. Martha’s worry is a disability that is manufactured by unjust labor structures that purposefully assign worry to some bodies and not others.

The original beliefs of Uyghurs, who were known for their conversions to Manichaeism and Buddhism, have not been examined in detail until now. Uyghur inscriptions as well as Chinese and Islamic sources provide some information regarding these beliefs. Historical sources indicate that they believed in a variety of celestial and natural cults, the most prominent being Täŋri, the god of sky. Cults devoted to other natural and celestial beings included earth, mountains, trees, sun, moon, and fire. The words Täŋri and Täŋrikän were also used for other beings, reflecting flexibility in their beliefs. Although some scholars thought that Buddhism was practiced prior to the official conversion to Manichaeism in the 760s, this article demonstrates that this is hardly the case and shows how these ancient cults survived even after their conversions to major religions.

Dorotheos of Gaza (6th cent.) was a monastic leader whose works, along with the correspondence of his mentors, Barsanuphios (d. after 543) and John of Gaza (d. 543), provide insight into the Second Origenist Controversy and the tenor of theological investigation at a key juncture in late antiquity. The evidence of Dorotheos, who several times cites Evagrios by name, has been noted but its significance not yet fully appreciated. This essay reassesses Dorotheos’s theology and Gazan monastic culture through study of his eschatology in Instruction 12, in context of which the Evagrian passages appear, and which he develops from Origen’s On First Principles. Analysis of Dorotheos’s modifications and developing ideas suggests a more vigorous—indeed, “Origenist”—theological life in Gazan monasticism than has been recognized and calls for a new perspective on the effects of the Second Origenist Controversy as well as Dorotheos’s own position relative to it.

This article reconsiders the sixteenth-century Idealist Neo-Confucian philosophy of Wang Yangming (1472–1529) in light of the development of twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. After defining liberation theology, this study identifies the crucial contributions made to it by Emmanuel Levinas’s assertion of the primacy of ethics over ontology and critique of the egocentric nature of Western philosophy. It then delineates the epistemological and deontological criticisms made of Roman Catholic orthodoxy—and institutionalized Christianity in general—by Latin American liberation theologians, particularly Enrique Dussel and José Porfirio Miranda. These are compared with Wang’s critique of the Rationalist Neo-Confucianism that had been official orthodoxy and the legitimating philosophy for imperial China for three centuries. The study finds that Wang’s Idealist philosophy incorporates epistemological, spiritual, and ethical perspectives with powerful democratic and liberationist elements that prefigure the development of late-twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. Thus, contrary to the conventional view of Confucianism as a conservative philosophy, these elements in Wang’s Neo-Confucianism render it a theology (or philosophy) of liberation.

The present article seeks to further the distinctive participatory picture of Calvin through an engagement with the prelapsarian contours of his anthropology and their oft-overlooked importance for the theme of participation that is uniquely found in his thought. The interpretive argument that emerges is that Calvin’s prelapsarian understanding of participation not only necessitated mediation by Christ in a (perhaps unexpectedly) dynamic way but was also synergistic in shape (especially when considered “preceptively” as opposed to “decretively”). Calvin’s postlapsarian understanding of participation will be shown to have adaptively retained its originally dynamic mediatorial aspects through a pivotal shift towards monergism that was brought about by humanity’s fall into sin. Taken together, it will be concluded that Calvin’s prelapsarian assumptions surrounding participation not only undergirded and bolstered the monergistic postlapsarian participatory account of salvation that he is more typically known for but also provides a previously unconsidered angle deserving of conversation.

Mark Noll recognized that “the most comprehensive defense of female activity in public life came from Sarah Grimké.” Claudia Setzer lauded Grimké’s Letters, as “the first sustained analysis of women’s rights stemming from biblical and theological argument to be written by an American.” Scholars have studied her use of the Bible, including her critique of translations, but none has detailed Grimké’s use of the influential whole-volume commentaries of Matthew Henry, Thomas Scott, and Adam Clarke. This article documents her citations, critiques, and editing of those commentaries through selection, interruption, omission, and paraphrase. It focuses upon her thirteenth and fourteenth letters, in which Grimké interpreted Acts 2:1–4, 1 Cor 11:4–5 and 14:34–35, and 1 Tim 2:8–12. By studying her critical engagement with commentaries, we demonstrate the veracity of Grimké’s contention that women “shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.”

The intersections of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are well known, but scholars tend to treat each as largely independent from the others, at least after some initial point of origin. We seek rather to emphasize their ongoing inter-dependence and demonstrate the implications for both historical and theological work. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have continuously formed, re-formed, and transformed themselves by interacting with or thinking about one another. That co-production, in all the ambivalence it entails, has shaped not only the rituals and teachings of these traditions but also some of our most enduring forms of prejudice as well as the conceptual tools with which we undertake the study of these religions. After first offering a definition of religious co-production, we then give an example, in the monk Sergius-Baḥīrā, of what historical and theological insights a methodology of co-production can yield. Finally, we offer an exploration of the critical and constructive potentials of that insight, gesturing toward the possibility of both a history and a theology of co-production.