Panelists from the 2018 Religious World of Late Antiquity SBL section panel on “Fragments” offer close readings of a range of secondary or technical sources outside the field in order to investigate provocative problems, ideas, and disciplinary techniques for scholars who study the late ancient world.
Read MoreOn Taxonomy and Classification: A Response
Stylized map of the world with Jerusalem at its center by Heinrich Bünting (1545-1696), woodcut, (Wikimedia Commons)
Stylized map of the world with Jerusalem at its center by Heinrich Bünting (1545-1696), woodcut, (Wikimedia Commons)
Throughout Classifying Christians, I proposed that Christian polemical ethnographers were operating both like physicists and anthropologists. In getting closer to the heretics—whether through personal or textual experience—the heresiologists actually made the terms of Christian culture both more and less clear.
Read MoreIdentity, a Way Forward (Perhaps)
Friedrich Adolf Hornemann Lesender, Mönch, public domain.
Friedrich Adolf Hornemann Lesender, Mönch, public domain.
Dr. Todd Berzon tackles the ambiguity of identity and suggests "the use of identity operates to conceal analysis rather than illuminate it. The term is not simply under-explained (and under-theorized), but its imprecision hints at a more fundamental problem: identity usually means something else entirely."
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