Upcoming Events
Begun in 2013, the Christianity Seminar aims to rewrite the history of early Christianity. The scholars of the seminar have broken through to new understandings of many disparate movements in the first four centuries of the Common Era, and are working on their first major book.
NOW AVAILABLE
Read the Spring 2018 Report on Seminar Findings
The academic Seminar on God and the Human Future began its work in 2013. Inspired by the pioneering research and public notice of the Jesus Seminar, it has attracted over thirty participating Research Fellows who are exploring new ways for thinking about God in a post-theistic context.
NOW AVAILABLE
Read the Spring 2018 Report on Coloniality
Welcome to Westar Institute
Westar Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, public-benefit research and educational organization that is dedicated to fostering and communicating the results of cutting-edge scholarship on the history and evolution of the Christian tradition, thereby raising the level of public discourse about questions that matter in society and culture.
Theologian, author, and social critic Diana Butler Bass spoke at our Spring Meeting on the subject of her new book, Grateful. But she started off by talking about religious affiliation in the US today, showing a chart that indicated that while the US has become more pluralistic in the past few decades it has also [...]
Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness
Using insights from the brain science of emotions, Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness narrates two millennia of lost-and-found stories about love beyond belief as the access point to the heart and soul of spiritual life.
To uncover the origins of the tension between justice and mercy, we need to go back to the time when Israel split in two after Solomon’s death. Each of the kingdoms positioned itself as the most authoritative when it came to tradition and religious practice, which led to the writing of two significant documents. As a result, Jews of the first century CE could choose from their scripture and traditions two very different understandings of how to obtain God’s forgiveness.
In the spring of 2016 the Christianity Seminar focused its efforts on a renewed discussion of “origins” within the early Christian movement. The roots of this enterprise have been extensively researched in recent decades, yet the light of such work has yielded promising suggestions about the early Jesus movement that demand further consideration and exploration. As such, it seemed appropriate here to solicit additional comments and research data on this important [...]
Volume I of Roman Family Empires
Household, Empire, Resistance
In this first of two volumes of Roman Family Empires: Household, Empire, Resistance, Dr. Elliott examines the Roman household form as it was changing during the Augustan era.