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Interesting Books about Texas

I’m pondering the possibility of offering a summer school class titled “Religion in San Antonio” next year. So, I’ve decided that I want to learn a bit about my, eh, adopted (?) state. Here’s a list of books I want to read soon-ish.

Potentially, I might add Lone Star: A History of Texas And The Texans by T.R. Fehrenbach.

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The “Key Idea” for “The Hebrew Scriptures”

A couple of days ago, I shared my current “course description” for my fall 2021 class, “The Hebrew Scriptures”. Another addition to the syllabus is the “Key Idea” or what I’ve called “The Enduring Understanding” in past versions. In short, it’s the one thing I hope my students can articulate and upon which they could expound, to some degree, if I ran into them in ten or twenty years. Here’s my current draft.

This matches the three ways I invite my students to read these texts: as historians; a literary critics; as philosophers. I don’t limit them to these approaches though I do hope that they’ll push my students to engage the Bible in a new way—a way that’s different from the liturgical usage with which they’re probably familiar.

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Course Description: “The Hebrew Scriptures”

If things remain the same, this fall semester I’ll teach two blocks of The Hebrew Scriptures and three of Religion in Global Context. I’ve begun doing a little bit of prep work (don’t worry, I’m taking my summer break seriously by getting lots of rest and working on other writing projects) which includes putting together my syllabi. Each syllabus for each class includes a “course description”. Each year, I rework the description as more experience helps me develop a more precise focus. For those who are interested, here is the current draft for The Hebrew Scriptures:

“The Hebrew Scriptures is an examination of the corpus of ancient literature known as the ‘Tanakh’ to Jews and the ‘Old Testament‘ to Christians. Students are taught methods of reading that are appropriate for an academic setting yet sensitive to the place of these collections within living communities. This means approaching these texts from the perspective taken by historians, literary critics, and philosophers—to name a few disciplines—while asking what these texts have meant and mean. The aim is to develop ‘biblical literacy’ so that students can become familiar with and accustomed to interpreting texts that have been influential on a global scale. Similarly, the course functions to put these ancient texts in dialogue with modern concerns (e.g. metaphysical claims; ethical and moral thinking; ethnic and religious identity; imperialism and empire-building; human sexuality).” 

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QAnon and religious affiliation

QAnon is the focus of a report from PRRI titled “Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption”. Among the religious, white evangelical Protestants and Hispanic Protestants appear to be the most likely to agree with the basic tenents of this conspiracy theory (see Figure 3 in the above linked article). If you’d like to read a journalistic reflection on the results of this survey, see Giovanni Russonello’s NYT article “QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests”.

Related: A month ago, Vice News did a short segment on the intersection between Evangelicals and QAnon: “Why So Many QAnon Believers are Evangelical Christians”.

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The meanings of Pentecost/the end is near

I’ve been thinking about a couple of core doctrines of Christianity:

  1. Christians receive the Holy Spirit of God as a transforming power that prepares them to become the type of people that the Creator intended humans to be (especially so they’ll be prepared for the Day of Judgment).
  2. These Spirit-filled Christians are to wait for the return/reappearing of Jesus Christ which can happen at any moment (according to some).

Today is Pentecost Sunday. On this day, these two ideas converge. And since they’ve been on my mind, I thought I’d ramble a bit about them. Be warned: I don’t arrive at a satisfying solution to my dilemma though I’ve heard many people try to offer one.

This spring, I found myself thinking more about the Christian doctrine of the Parousia (appearance of Christ)than usual, even though I was teaching topics I’ve covered for the past few years. As I mentioned in my last post, I covered many “apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies: John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, John the Seer, broader Jewish apocalyptic thought and literature, the Latter-day Saints, the Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pentecostals, Scientologists, The Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate.” While teaching one class about John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, etc., the other class was learning about Joseph Smith, William Miller, Charles Taze Russell, Charles Parham, William J. Seymour, L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. As I often tell my students: be careful when you hear people predict the end of the world. So far, they’ve been correct 0.00% of the time. That said, modern threats like AI and climate change give scientific supports to modern apocalypticisms that ancient apocalypticisms didn’t/couldn’t enjoy. Nevertheless, the end hasn’t happened and doesn’t have to happen soon.

But early Christians like John the Baptist and Paul expected the end of the world as we know it and they seem to have expected it to happen soon—likely within there lifetimes. Same for all the names mentioned from William Miller to David Koresh. But it didn’t happen.

As someone who was raised in the Pentecostal tradition, I was used to apocalyptic fever. Yes, go to school. Yes, get a good job. But Jesus could/should/will return any moment, probably. I heard people participate in what Pentecostals and Charismatics call “tongues and interpretation” (see this article by the Charismatic Chuck Smith for more details) where one person speaks in tongues and the other interprets “in a known tongue” the “meaning” of the outburst. Many times—more than I can count— an eery dread accompanied the message as the “interpreter” claimed to be the conduit through which Jesus himself told us his return was very soon. Now, I know if I were to talk to old friends who remained Pentecostal, and if I were to question the accuracy of these “interpretations,” they’d probably appeal to an argument as old as the reason given for the delayed return of Christ found in the Second Epistle of Peter (2:8): for God “a thousand years is as a day and a day as a thousand years”. Fine, can’t argue with that logic…but then what are we who live a day as a day and a thousand years as a thousand years to do with divine messages that say “soon”?

As I near age forty, and as decades have passed since those claims were made when I was a pre-adolescent and an adolescent, I’ve often wondered to myself what to do with the Christian doctrine of the Second Advent. The doctrine of the Second Coming isn’t just a fringe Protestant doctrine; it’s part of the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory/to judge the living and the dead/and his kingdom will have no end.” Does Christianity demand a belief in the possible physical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century or can one adhere to Christianity while rethinking this teaching? (I know the answer from a religious studies perspective: if someone believes it, and claims to be a Christian, then obviously Christians can hold to the view…but what’s the sociological impact of fudging the tradition this way, for that’s the real purpose of the creeds, no?)

I say all this to address something that has been interconnected for me since my youth but that has proven more and more problematic as I age: Christianity, in its early decades, seems to have had many people who made a connection between the age post-Pentecost when the followers of Jesus would be differentiated by their infilling of the Holy Spirit and that this infilling prepared participants to be ready for the end of the world (as we know it). Christians would stand out from the crowd because the Spirit was regenerating them. The Book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles can be read as suggesting (1) followers of Jesus will be different because the Spirit is changing them and (2) this difference demarcates them as the people ready for the return of Christ.

Yet, let’s be honest. Many Christians are no different from non-Christians. Sometimes, Christians can be much worse than their neighbors. The stages of my life when I sought a dogmatic home also happen to be the stages of my life where the version of myself I see in the rearview mirror was the least kind, tolerant, loving version of myself I know. Now, I know the old C.S. Lewis argument: imagine the Christian you think is terrible and then try to understand they could be much, much worse without the Spirit’s work in their lives. Fair enough. It’s impossible to combat because it’s impossible to prove without peering into a multiverse. But it seems to me that the Evangelists and Paul were under the impression that the work of the Spirit would be quite obvious, or should be, though their own writing aims seem to suggest that they were wrestling with the reality that “Spirit-filled” humans seem to share many of the same struggles as, well, everyone else. So, on Pentecost, what’s to celebrate if we’re looking for Christians who are markedly more spiritually mature because of a divine work than their non-Christian neighbors? I’m not sure.

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Resource: Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements

Two of my spring class—Religion in the United States and The Christian Scriptures—deal a lot with apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies: John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, John the Seer, broader Jewish apocalyptic thought and literature, the Latter-day Saints, the Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pentecostals, Scientologists, The Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate. Now there’s a new(er) “independent, scholarly, open-access” resource with entries I can assign for reading when we cover those topics: Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. In the list above, those that are linked already have articles on the topic but there’s more and it seems to be evolving.

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Digital resources for studying the Bible and archaeology

A YouTube page, a YouTube series, and a podcast have all emerged recently dealing with topics related to the Bible and archaeology. For those interested:

  • Dr. Robert Cargill, Associate Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa has a YouTube page, XKV8R, where he’s already discussed topics such as The Shapira Strips and the Tel Dan Inscription.
  • Dr. Andrew Henry, creator of the famous Religion For Breakfast YouTube page, has been working on a series in partnership with Patheos titled “Excavating the History of the Bible”. He’s covered several topics already including the origins of the Israelites, the identities of the Canaanites and Philistines, and personalities like King Ahab, King Josiah, and King Herod.
  • The podcasting collective known as OnScript has released a spin-off podcast called OnScript: Biblical World. Their first episode looked at King Hezekiah and his reforms.