Christian Narrative Research Articles

The lived religion of grace: Exploring diverse Christian narratives.

The lived religion of grace: Exploring diverse Christian narratives.

Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline

Reviewed by: Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline Christopher R. Mooney Han-luen Kantzer Komline Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 Pp. xv + 469. $150.00. What does Augustine mean by the notoriously elusive term “the will”? Hanluen Kantzer Komline’s Augustine on the Will argues that Augustine did not invent the will, nor did he simply recast a philosophical category, as others have claimed. Rather, Augustine develops an inescapably theological account of the will, meaning that any account of human willing must be differentiated by its location in the Christian narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (10–12). While there are common features, how Augustine describes created willing, fallen willing, justified willing, and heavenly willing are each unique and distinctively Christian. Before the fall, the will is like a hinge that turns the soul and is capable of sinning or not; for all humans after the fall, willing is now stuck due to their evil desires, imposing a certain necessity despite the existence of free choice; but in Christ, God’s grace through the Holy Spirit empowers the will—even drives it—to the good; finally, by a further grace the will of the saints in heaven is liberated even from the ability and desire for sin. The result is a well-researched, admirably balanced, and largely comprehensive illumination of human willing in Augustine’s thought. In certain places, especially on prayer and the will (Chapter Four), Christ’s exemplary human will and efficacious grace (Chapter Six), and the Holy Spirit’s role in illuminating the meaning of human and trinitarian willing (Chapter Seven), the book truly shines as a representation of Augustine’s thinking and aims. In addition to its judicious interventions for specialists, its individual chapters are well structured as introductions for advanced students, even if the book as a whole may be too long to serve as a student introduction. The book consists of eight chapters, which are grouped around the four stages of human willing. Chapter One concerns the created will in Augustine’s earliest works, Chapter Two deals with the fallen will up to Ad Simplicianum, Chapters Three to Four cover the fallen will and transition to redeemed willing, Chapters Five through Seven concern the redeemed will, and Chapter Eight concludes with the will eschatologically perfected in heaven. Kantzer Komline’s book also maps these four stages of human willing onto Augustine’s development over time, so that, as the bishop ages, his thinking grows [End Page 107] and his focus also shifts. She argues, for example, that his earliest accounts of the will (c. 387–95) are best seen not as a false, juvenile description but as largely right—insofar as they describe the created will. His later works do not so much reject the early account of created willing as adapt the account to other circumstances: how do we describe the will now that it is fallen, or when it is redeemed? Kantzer Komline highlights how Augustine’s four-dimensional approach to human willing uniquely grounds its goodness in the trinitarian God. This explains how Augustine really does elevate the will to a higher position in the human person than any thinker before him, though only because his account is so theological. Kantzer Komline’s theologically differentiated approach enhances our understanding of Augustine on the will, and the book is at its most persuasive in demonstrating the impossibility of distilling from Augustine a one-dimensional, atheological account of the will or simply reducing it to philosophical antecedents. In particular, Kantzer Komline shows that a theologically differentiated account of the will is necessary to account for Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism, his engagement with scripture, his theological development, his distinctly Christian, trinitarian approach to willing, and his reluctance to offer philosophically universal definitions of the will. Still, perhaps some expressions of theological differentiation go too far, such as where “four different accounts” are affirmed and contrasted with “‘an’ account of will” (418). But opposing “four accounts” to “an account” seems to risk losing any intelligibility regarding “the will.” “How the will functions varies” (10), yes, but we can still ask what...

Towards a Realized Eschatology: Paul Farmer as Good Samaritan

Paul Farmer dedicated his life to making the fruits of modern medicine available to the poorest people in the world. Working untiringly for over four decades, his groundbreaking model and successful outcomes were widely recognized and respected. An often-asked question is what motivated Dr. Farmer’s unfailing commitment to the poor people he so lovingly served. This chapter explores the ways in which the Christian narrative and the Pascal mystery grounded Farmer’s religious and moral imagination and guided his life and work. Deeply influenced by the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Corporal Works of Mercy, this chapter describes Farmer’s eschatological vision and his deep desire to bring about the Kingdom of God in the here and now.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction

Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to the effects of multiple countercultural and spiritual tones that also underpin the “science of deduction.” Holmes’ methods were subliminally informed by theosophy, as Doyle gleaned much of his spiritual knowledge from first- or second-hand readings on Blavatsky. Thus, Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy find inadvertent—but not coincidental—traces in Holmes through theosophy. An intellectual offspring of the trinity of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, Holmes was also a child of Blavatsky’s occult philosophy. Adopting a decolonial praxis, this paper argues that comparisons between the materialistic principles of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, on the one hand, and Holmes on the other, are as useful as comparing the detective’s work to Blavatsky’s theosophy.

Trīs savienoti teoloģiski “lielumi”: radīšana, Jēzus, Svētais Gar

he aim of this article is to offer a unifying element of the Christian narrative that connects creation, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The study reveals that the traditional elements of the Christian narrative are not interconnected, specifically ignoring the role and function of the Holy Spirit. Traditionally, the Christian narrative has been constructed with a focus on sin and salvation. This Christocentric approach has significant limitations, namely, it does not provide a full and correct theological understanding of the Trinity and it does not give a logical connection between the beginning and the end of the Christian message, that is, between the creation, the coming of Christ and the giving of the Holy Spirit. This article offers a new perspective, where the holiness of God is used as an adequate unifying principle that connects creation, salvation and sanctification. The approach proposed in this article not only overcomes the traditionally Christomonic orientation, but also incorporates into the Christian narrative the history of the people of Israel, including the temple and the Sabbath – centre of their religious life, the life of Jesus, and the life of Jesus’ followers.

ЕВОЛЮЦІЯ ЗОБРАЖЕНЬ І СИМВОЛІЗМУ ХРЕСТА В ХРИСТИЯНСТВІ

The article examines the general formation aspects of the cross image and its place in the Christian mythology through the evolution of its attributes and symbolism from the point of view of various movements and denominations since the ancient times the Christianity up to the present day. The author tries to establish the relationship between the semiotic content of the cross' superficial elements and the doctrinal features of the denominations that these elements reflect. In particular, the article provides a historical analysis of the most common forms of the cross, in order to determine the most authentic form from the evangelical point of view. In addition to analyzing the evolution of the external attributes, the author considers the changes in the spiritual and symbolic content of the cross at the universal level, and emphasizes the difference between the concepts of the "cross" and the "crucifix" at the semantic level. The author shares the opinion that the crucifix is not a type of the cross, but it is rather one of its elements that does not depend on the cross' form or shape. It is rather one of the supplementary attributes, in addition to the shape, that indicate the belonging of the image to a particular denomination of the Christianity, and therefore have a deep symbolic content. The article also argues that the primary meaning of the cross, the embodiment of the spiritual redemption for all the humanity through the physical suffering of Jesus Christ, remains an invariant despite the attributive or conceptual changes of its various forms. At the same time, the author refers to the scientific articles of diverse foreign authors, as well as to the comprehensive works of a number of prominent Ukrainian and foreign researchers in this field, in particular, Lubsky V. I., Schaff P., Barroso P. and others. However, the most important role in building the author's argumentation was played by researching and analysing the primary sources, i. e. the New and the Old Testaments.

The Consolation of the Topics: Boethius, Dialectic, and a Christian Rhetorical Theory

In response to an era defined by narrative contention and polarized communication, an increasing number of scholars have called for renewed attention to a Christian rhetorical theory. Such a theory would have to enable the Christian rhetor to articulate the definitive goods and values promoted by a Christian narrative, to identify points of difference with competing narratives, and to ground argument within philosophical reasoning that engages universal and transcendent truths. Therefore, this article suggests that a vibrant Christian rhetorical theory must be complemented by dialectic. Through an analysis of the dialectical topics of Boethius in De topicis differentiis alongside his “masterpiece of rhetorical philosophy” (Verene 2020, 333), The Consolation of Philosophy, dialectic is revealed as a valuable aid to the Christian rhetor seeking to ground argument in philosophical reasoning while being responsive to context, contingency, and difference in the current historical moment.

Pagan Ecofeminism: A Study of Alice Munro’s “Princess Ida”

This paper attempts to explore Alice Munro’s short story, “Princess Ida” from an ecofeminist lens. “Princess Ida” is one of Munro’s stories from 1971 short story collection, Lives of Girls and Women. The paper uncovers the elements of paganism, one of the strands of ecofeminism, present in the story. It offers pagan ecofeminist study of the text by opposing monotheistic religion and embracing any religion that worships the earth, nature, or fertility deity, such as the various forms of goddess worship or matriarchal religion. It establishes a connection between earth-worship and the Gaia hypothesis. The present paper attempts to underline that Earth as a living organism, like any other living thing, invariably tries to exert constant or stable conditions for itself (homeostasis). And these exit groups and beliefs that come under the category of earth religion, such as paganism, a polytheistic, naturecentered religion; animism, a doctrine that all natural objects and the universe itself, have souls. Munro associates many female characters with primordial vitality, renders them with pagan and mythic qualities, constructs a narrative of female goddess figures, signifying pantheistic religions of the primitive world. The paper exhibits how Munro’s character withdraws herself from the masculine Christian mythology and is drawn towards pagan religious context of Astarte and Isis where both woman’s and earth’s life-giving powers are associated and respected.

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's Three Circles of Light beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's <i>Three Circles of Light</i> beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

Dualistic Rethinking of the Christian Myth by Philip Pullman

Referring to a part of the Canongate project Myth, Ph. Pullman’s book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), this article examines the correlation of myth and literature, specific to twenty-first-century culture, mediated by the influence of postmodernism and mass culture. Pullman’s book is considered within a more general framework of using myth as a tool of the author’s polemic with the influential ideological trends of our time (cf. The Penelopiad by M. Atwood and her polemic with feminism). Together with the author’s essays, the novel is not only perceived as an instance of apocryphal literature, so characteristic of twentieth-century authors when referring to Christianity, but also as a document of the main ideological stance — Pullman’s anti-clericalism and atheism. The ardent polemic message, bordering on blasphemy, finds its most original expression in the character reduplication (the person of Jesus Christ is split in two). This article aims to explore the ideological and socio-cultural roots of this device, the degree of its intellectual and artistic originality, its individual author’s premises. Pullman’s work with canonical and non-canonical gospels leads him to problematise their fictionality, genre nature, and narrative structure. Onomastic statistical analysis leads the writer to put forward an artistic hypothesis about the possible reduplication of a historical character, thus modelling a counterfactual situation, by means of which not only does he question religious dogma, but also makes each of his readers feel responsible for the shape that the history of the God-man has assumed. Using the methodology of historical-literary, comparative-typological, narratological and intermedial analysis, the author of the article concludes that the dualism of the image of Jesus Christ can be traced to the problematic nature of his anthroponym, and is undoubtedly associated with the state of postmodern knowledge, with the erosion of religious dogmas within intellectual and ethical pluralism, as well as with the influence of Gnosticism and mass culture (films, comics).

Practicing Motherhood and Forming Matrilineal Solidarity: A Counter-cultural Response to the Patrilineal Confucian Family in the Works of Park Wansuh (1931–2011)

This paper analyzes four fictional works by Park Wansuh (1931–2011) that thematize the issue of son preference and sex-selective abortion against the background of the recent decriminalization of abortion. Prior to 2021, although abortion was illegal in Korea it was widely practiced, providing the environment in which sex-selective abortion could also be accessed. However, in arguing for women's reproductive rights, feminists have largely relied on Western discourse without considering the implications of this local practice that allowed women the choice without the legal rights. As shown in Park's works, in reality, both abortion and sex-selective abortion served the modernization of the patrilineal Confucian family as it faced the normativization of the monogamous relationship. In penalizing unmarried pregnant women and sonless married women, the popular religious practice of Confucian patriarchy overrode the illegality of abortion and made it culturally acceptable. Against this practice, and also against feminist discourse, Park's works argue for women's right to choose to become mothers regardless of marital status or sex of the fetus. Park's argument is all the more informative for local practice as it does not rely on the Christian narrative of life but on the virtuous motherhood of Confucian practice and on her relationship with her mother-in-law, who was not Christian but whose death eventually led Park to becoming a Catholic.

Meghan R. Henning. Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature

Meghan R. Henning. <i>Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature</i>

Christ's Body Keeps the Score

Recent findings in neuroscience and psychology indicate that “the body keeps the score” of PTSD. Concurrently, trauma-informed theology to date has deployed pneumatology to explain how God experiences trauma in the Christian narrative of salvation. Yet, in Christian theology the divine person of the Holy Spirit has no assumed human body. This raises an important question as to whether a body is needed for God to keep the score of posttraumatic stress in a manner consistent with neuroscience and how this might shape one’s account of trauma in Christian soteriology. In this article, I take an analytic science-engaged approach to assess the viability of dominant proposals in trauma-informed theology which deploy trauma theory to assert God’s experience of trauma and explain this experience with exclusive reference to pneumatology. After reviewing clinical and scientific research on the neuroscience of PTSD which has been neglected in these approaches, I argue that Christology is a more obviously fitting locus for suggesting God’s experience of trauma within Christian soteriology than the person of the Holy Spirit. I conclude that since the body keeps the score of trauma from a scientific perspective, Christ’s body keeps the score of trauma from a science-engaged theology perspective.

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Review: Le Complotisme Protestant Contemporain: A propos d’une thèse sur la tribu de Dan (Contemporary Protestant Conspiracy Theories: Concerning a Thesis on the Tribe of Dan), by Christophe Colera

This book performs a rhetorical analysis of the website “Mystery, Babylon The Great: Catholic or Jewish?” (https://watch.pairsite.com/mystery-babylon.html) as part of a sociological investigation of the nature of conspiracy arguments. Christophe Colera positions his argument as a sociological one both by noting the political implications of such arguments—he credits them with a role in the election of President Donald Trump—and by situating it as an element of a social “field” in the sense that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed it. The introduction provides rationales for a sociologist following the lead of Max Weber to study an obscure website with spurious factual claims and undetermined authorship. There is no evidence apart from the website itself of either “Barbara Aho” or her husband, credited as its authors. They may simply be another fictive element among the imaginings that drive the website’s narrative.Colera is particularly interested in how a born-again Christian applies esoteric literature, such as the writings of Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, at face value to construct their conspiracy theory. As such, Colera sees the website not only as an opportunity to examine the “doxa” that underlies various YouTube videos that present current events as revealing the Devil’s handiwork, but also, and more tentatively, as a way of understanding the claims of esoteric literature by seeing what they look like when inverted from their original function as writings opposed to Christianity to tools for a born-again Christian to construct secular history as diabolical history.The bulk of the book is a detailed exegesis of the website, which presents an apocalyptic historical narrative that stretches from biblical Israel to the present, using the purported apostasy of the biblical tribe of Dan as an esoteric key to an unholy chronology that leads up to the current era as one that will usher in the Antichrist. Beginning with the apostasy of the Tribe of Dan, going through their absorption of Egyptian esotericism, to their later manifestations in Roman Catholicism, the Merovingians, the Knights Templar, and the Illuminati, Aho’s website presents a linear vision of history as a demonic corruption of God’s plan. Colera’s analysis of this particular Christian narrative often treats “Christianity” as a discernable whole, which he backs up with selective quoting of scripture. His purpose here is to draw the website’s argumentation into closer proximity to Christianity as a whole than most Christian practitioners would care to admit, but this strategy ignores the extent to which contemporary scholarship has dissolved “Christianity” into “Christianities.” At various points, Colera reflects the upside-down logic of the narrative back onto contemporary academic protocols, for example, by treating structuralism and Braudel’s idea of “long history,” as similar exercises in attempting to create meaning beyond the empirically immediate. However, he also maintains an implicit commitment to a secular perspective as, for example, his comparison of the patent ignorance of the website’s author(s) with that of the founders of Islam, Mormonism, and New Age spirituality.This book will be useful to scholars of esoteric religions, Evangelical Christianity, and the place of the Internet in contemporary society. Given that members of the Republican Party focused on questions concerning pedophilia during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination hearings—which the journalist Amanda Marcotte has taken as sign that the anonymous website QAnon is driving the political agenda of one of the two major American political parties—it remains timely in a political sense. Colera sees his contribution as primarily a disinterested study, although he acknowledges its political implications.My primary criticism of the book is that Colera’s purported objectivity leads him to insist that we must give the authors of the website credit for restricting their antisemitic logic to merely a portion of the Jewish people. He might well have investigated how such a “narrow” antisemitism depends on and legitimates the general antisemitic logic that has fueled violence for centuries. This serious objection aside, the book remains a useful entry into a mode of thinking that is far more pertinent than academic pursuers of reasoned discourse might wish to admit.

Jacob’s Dream: The Body and Its Image in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Narrative Spaces

Jacob’s Dream: The Body and Its Image in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Narrative Spaces

Iconic in the Thought of David Bentley Hart

The article examines the phenomenon of the iconic in its connection with everyday, social, and political practices. Based on the distinction between idol and icon, it was found out that violent practices are often disguised as Christian narratives, which should not really be related to violence in their speech about the disadvantaged or in the immediate reality of existence. With the help of the theory of David Bentley Hart, Jean-Luc Marion, and Rene Girard, models for the functioning of totalitarian consciousness were proposed, which under the Christian wrappage conceals the justification of injustice and aggression and legitimizes its own power.An analysis of the “wisdom of this world” as a truth that claims to broadcast non-contextual and nonhistorical “eternal truth” as a “cultural sublime” for its audience was carried out. Using the model of Heraclitus (Dionysian) and Parmenides (Apollonian), different types of violence are analyzed, which imitate their own opposition and rebellion. Due to this, it was found out that in a totalitarian state there are both types of violence, which make it possible to satisfy different categories of people to ensure their loyalty. It is concluded that the narratives of a cultural hero or a tragic hero who destroys the social order are incompatible with the Christian narrative of the Servant God.The phenomenon of metaphysical consciousness and its connection with idolatry and belief in the formless abyss as a deity is also analyzed. It is shown that in the theory of David Bentley Hart, an important place is occupied by the “resurrection” of the aesthetic premise as the only possible reason for the ethical in the modern world. Involving the theory of a sensitive society, an attempt was made to combine the theory of the iconic as a special perception of the world with the possibility of changing social and cultural attitudes for a better future.

Nationalism and the Politics of Nostalgia1

This article contributes to the analysis of the politics of nostalgia by focusing on its content, conditions, and mechanisms. Frame theory is used to understand the contested nature of nostalgia through the central framing of the past. We explore ways in which nostalgia relates to ethnic nationalism and populism and its close relationship to the rhetoric of the populist radical right. Components of nostalgia that stand out as particularly significant is the history of decline and loss. Whereas nostalgia is utilized by proponents of both civic and ethnic nationalism, we are particularly occupied with the ethnic substance of nationalist nostalgia. Nationalist nostalgia capitalizes on loss, idealization, and resentment and its contested nature may be brought out through diagnostic and anti‐migrant frames. A central mechanism is the juxtaposition and unfavorable comparison between an idealized glorious past, a decaying present, and the creation of a utopian future, that in many ways resemble Christian narratives of fall and redemption. We therefore expect an increasing appeal of nostalgia as an orienting mechanism during unsettling times, rapid changes, and uncertain conditions. We draw upon critical cases of the radical right in Europe, and case studies from the Balkans, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and the United States.

The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey

THE HOURS OF THE UNIVERSE: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey by Ilia Delio. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2021. 242 pages, index. Paperback; $25.00. ISBN: 9781626984035. *In this exquisitely constructed book, Delio reveals the current state of her reflections on the central concern of her life and work: the relationship of God, humanity, and the universe in the context of the evolutionary process. Her unscripted career leading to this publication, narrated in her memoir Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian, has exhibited the same sort of development and diversity that she finds woven into the fabric of the universe. A Franciscan sister who began her religious life as a cloistered member of the Carmelite order, Delio earned doctorates in pharmacology and historical theology and has taught at Trinity College, Washington Theological Union, Georgetown University, and Villanova University. Today, she is an award-winning author, best known for her Center for Christogenesis, which seeks to promote dialogue between faith and reason and stimulate a Christian spirituality fully infused with evolutionary consciousness. *Communicating the urgent need and prospects for that kind of spirituality is the burden of this, Delio's twentieth, book. A theology whose starting point is not evolution and the story of the universe, she insists, is a "useless fabrication" (p. xvi). Her work is rich in scriptural references, but the call to restore the book of nature to its primacy as the true first testament in Christianity's sacred canon is one of her signature themes. Though she displays no interest in apologetics or polemics, her basic assumption is the distinctively Catholic principle of the revelatory character of creation, a conviction at odds with the Protestant Reformers' suspicion of natural theology. A robust sacramental imagination permeates the entire book and provides its organizational design. Portraying the universe as the "new monastery" (p. xvii), Delio orders her reflections according to the liturgy of the hours that has structured daily prayer in Christian monastic communities for centuries: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Delio clusters her chapters--along with prologues of original poetry--around these times of contemplation and guides the reader through the prayers of one rotation of the earth and toward what she calls a new synthesis of faith and science. *Delio's thirty-two brief chapters, each a free-standing essay, cover a broad spectrum of topics from the cosmic to the autobiographical--from quantum physics, gravitational waves, and artificial intelligence to the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic and the death of her beloved cat Mango. Delio addresses a number of social issues such as racism, consumerism, and homophobia and sets the full scope of her reflections against the backdrop of the threat of climate change. Her main objective is the nurturing of a Christianity mature enough to match the achievements and insights of contemporary science. In this effort, her primary dialogue partners include interfaith scholar Beatrice Bruteau, Passionist priest and self-styled geologian Thomas Berry, Hindu-Catholic mystic Raimon Panikkar, and luminaries from her elected Franciscan tradition such as Saint Francis, Bonaventure, and the contemporary spiritual writer and retreat leader Richard Rohr. Pope Francis's unprecedented encyclical on creation care, Laudato Si', is a constant touchstone for Delio, but pride of place in her personal communion of saints is granted to the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose transposition of Catholic Christianity into an evolutionary key animates virtually every page of the book. *Delio's essays orbit this Teilhardian view of things like planets in an intellectual galaxy characterized by both order and chaos. The overall effect is a prophetic warning regarding the irrelevance and near-obsolescence of any Christian system fixated on the categories of Aristotelian or Newtonian worldviews. Like her monastic and mendicant forebears, Delio calls for church reform and creative thinking. The dominant mood of the book, though, is a blend of hope and awe, even audacity. Delio's conclusion equates the rise of a "new species with a new God consciousness" (p. 240) with the second coming of Christ. *Delio's engaging book is limited by its scant attention to the menacing side of science and technology, its failure to reckon seriously with the dramatic rise of nonreligion that calls her privileging of Christian myth into question, its overestimation of the general reader's science literacy, and its tendency to align scholarly and homiletic modes of communication too closely and too uncritically. Readers seeking linear arguments for theistic evolution or Christian pantheism will have to look elsewhere. Clergy, advanced students, and believing specialists in theology and the natural sciences will find a provocative and prayerful statement of a unique Christian cosmology that informs and inspires. *Reviewed by Peter A. Huff, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Benedictine Values, Benedictine University, Lisle, IL 60532.

Love Between Women in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca

Love Between Women in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca Christy Cobb (bio) I first encountered Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women as a master's degree student at Wake Forest University. It was, perhaps, the first time an academic book spoke to me personally. It showed me the power of academia to impact people. I devoured the book. I read it, reread it, marked it up, and wrote in the margins. My copy of this book is beloved. Brooten provided me with the language, the texts, the proof, that women had been loving women since antiquity. I am certain I am not alone in my appreciation of Love Between Women. I imagine others read this book at some point in the last twenty-five years and felt similarly. For these reasons, it is an honor to add to the conversation about the impact of Love Between Women. For my contribution, I consider the ethos of ancient sexuality, which in recent years has been scrutinized by scholars. In my view, Brooten's project anticipated this conversation and also set the groundwork for current and future work on sexuality in the ancient world. Thus, I begin with an overview of the dominant scholarly view of sex in the Greco-Roman world and then provide examples of two scholars—Joseph Marchal and Maia Kotrosits—who offer alternative options to this prevalent view. I subsequently propose some possibilities for expanding upon the theorizing of sexuality begun in Love Between Women. I do this through a reading of the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca, an early Christian narrative, that focuses on the eroticism and pleasure present in the text, specifically as they surface in the relationships between women. Brooten begins Love Between Women with a discussion of the view dominant in the Greco-Roman world concerning sexuality, that is, the hierarchical binary of active and passive sexual roles. The typical description of this view goes something like this: in antiquity, sex was understood to be primarily about penetration. One partner was active and penetrated the other partner, who passively received this penetration. The active partner was male while the passive partner [End Page 161] could be female or male, but in either case was feminized. As long as the partners remained in their stratified roles as active and passive, sex was viewed as "natural." This phallocentric view of sex in antiquity was (and is) a dominant one within scholarship. As Brooten notes, though, "social reality was, however, more complex than the ideology."1 In fact, female homoeroticism complicates this view, as not all sex between women involves penetration, and even when women were depicted through this paradigm, the woman receiving penetration was not always passive. Brooten also notes that women who refused to be penetrated by a man or who were "erotically oriented toward women" stood outside these socially accepted roles. Sexual relationships that did not fit within the active/passive paradigm were viewed as unnatural and therefore condemned; this includes, of course, female homoeroticism. In recent years, several scholars in our field have challenged this hierarchical view of sex in the ancient world as active/passive. For example, in his essay in Bodies on the Verge, Joseph Marchal rethinks this paradigm through a consideration of those on the bottom, or the persons who were depicted as the receptive participant in sex.2 In addition to examples from ancient texts, material culture further complicates the phallocentric view of sex within antiquity. Graffiti in Pompeii, for instance, suggests that both men and women experienced active pleasure while receiving penetration.3 Marchal writes, "Penetration and, or as, domination is not the whole story, even if that equation reflects the social order or at least the perspective of those at the pyramidal apex of power."4 Maia Kotrosits also challenges the penetration paradigm through a reading that focuses on pleasure instead of penetration.5 Offering a new model to counter the focus on active/passive sex roles, Kotrosits turns to the Acts of Paul and Thecla in order to "attend to some places in ancient literature that register an erotic relationality that does not fit comfortably with figurations of penetration."6 In doing so, she...