Candler Faculty Publish New Books in 2015
EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication of this article, it has been discovered that two faculty members with publications in 2015 were mistakenly omitted: Joel M. LeMon served as co-editor of Image, Text, Exegesis: Iconographic Interpretation and the Hebrew Bible (Bloomsbury). Brent A. Strawn served as editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law (Oxford UP) and co-editor of Iconographic Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: An Introduction to Its Method and Practice (Vandenhoeck & Reprecht) and What Kind of God? Collected Essays of Terence E. Fretheim (Eisenbrauns).
Five members of Candler’s faculty had new books published in 2015, ranging in subject matter from explorations in theology to texts geared toward students.
Elizabeth Corrie, associate professor in the practice of youth education and peacebuilding and director of the Youth Theological Initiative (YTI), served as general editor of the Common English Bible Student Bible (Common English Bible). The project brought together a varied group of scholars and youth ministers from over a dozen different denominations to craft more than 400 articles, discussion questions and activities designed to help students age thirteen and older engage with the text. Candler faculty, students, alumni, and past YTI participants contributed commentary.
In A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (Oxford University Press), Associate Professor of New Testament Susan E. Hylen explored the roles and authority of women in the early church. Using the example of Thecla—the woman depicted in the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, as well as the canonical First Letter of Paul to Timothy—Hylen challenges the common narrative that suggests that women were excluded from active leadership in the early church. Instead, she argues that women continued to serve as leaders in their own Greco-Roman cultural contexts.
Professor of Christian Ethics Timothy P. Jackson’s book Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy (Eerdmans) addresses the question of whether agape, love of God and neighbor, is the missing ingredient in today’s civil society. In the book, Jackson considers political agape applied to issues such as the death penalty and same-sex marriage, arguing that the virtue is too often neglected when structuring political principles and policies.
Divinity and the human body is the subject of R.W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins Luke Timothy Johnson’s latest book, The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art (Eerdmans). In order to sense God’s presence through the body, Johnson contends, theologians must be willing to engage in actual human experiences rather than abstract conceptualizations. Through Scripture and personal experience, the book explores the divine presence and power in such experiences as play, pain, pleasure, work and aging, all from Johnson’s perspective that theology can respond faithfully to the living God only by paying due attention to human bodily experience.
2015 saw the publication of the first young adult novel by Candler’s Scholar-in-Residence Marie Marquardt, who was inspired by her work with Mexican immigrants in Georgia. Dream Things True (Macmillan) centers on the love story between an undocumented teenage girl and the white nephew of a senator, whose romance faces the ultimate test when Immigration and Customs Enforcement descends on their Georgia town. Marquardt’s fiction takes on the realities of undocumented life and the wide impact of the immigration debate on people of all ages.