Cassandra Farrin is the Editor of Polebridge Press. Her writing appears in Cirque, The Wild Word, the Ploughshares blog, Progressive Christianity's Progressing Spirit newsletter, and elsewhere. Her poetic retelling of “On the Origin of the World” is forthcoming in Gender Violence, Rape Culture, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan).
On October 31, 1517, in the little hamlet of Wittenberg, the world was set on fire when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to a church door. The timing was perfect to instigate a change even though Luther was just a lone monk who, through his own personal struggles and experiences, came to a new understanding [...]
In his presentation “Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy,” at the Westar Institute’s Spring 2017 national meeting, Robert J. Miller of Juniata College gave an entertaining explanation of how ancient Hebrews and Greeks thought of prophecy in order to show how New Testament authors came to treat scripture as a malleable source of authority on Jesus.
Celene Lillie of the Tanho Center in Boulder, Colorado, and author of The Rape of Eve: The Transformation of Roman Ideology in Three Early Christian Retellings of Genesis presented “The Rape of Eve” at the Westar Institute’s Spring 2017 national meeting in Santa Rosa, California, on Thursday, March 23rd. Lillie began and ended by telling [...]
As I'm putting the finishing touches on numerous Spring 2017 national meeting reports, I thought I'd share with you my article "Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, Kinder," which was published today on Bishop John Shelby Spong's website, and share a few words about why I wrote it. Ever since the rise of words like "alt-fact" and "post-truth," [...]
Surely we’ve all had that awkward experience of being cornered by someone with an urgent cure or insight that simply must be imparted for our benefit—no, for our very existence, our ultimate well-being! You might be entertained to learn that this was a rampant problem in the Roman Empire, too. Yes, it’s true: scamming, swindling, [...]
Westar Institute fosters collaborative, cumulative research in religious studies and communicates the results of the scholarship to a broad, non-specialist public.
