Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Ascetic Impulse In Ancient Christianity, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

"It is important to understand ... that the difference between the non-elites (the weak) and the elites in Corinth is not that between a world-rejecting ethic (the 'weak') on the one hand and a world-embracing ethic (the pneumatic elites) on the other. Clearly, both groups shared the imperative to renounce the world; the fact of membership in this new social group, the Jesus movement at Corinth, suggests as much,"

In spite of the long and impressive legacy of scholarship in New Testament and Christian origins and the exacting critical attention to the texts of the earliest Christians, it remains unclear …

Joseph Smith In The Current Age, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

What is the place of Joseph Smith's teachings in our time? What do his writings have to say in a world so much different from the one he himself lived in? If Joseph Smith were alive today, he would be 186 years old. Most of his writings have been in circulation for over 150 years. During that century and a half, vast changes in government, the economy, philosophical outlook, and popular values have transformed society. After all this, what do Joseph Smith's teachings have to say about the problems of the late twentieth-century society? We do not expect his writings …

The Ascetic Impulse In Early Christianity: Some Current Methodological Challenges, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

As a student of New Testament and Christian Origins, thus, of the earliest period in the history of early Christianity, I come to the study of asceticism very much in the middle, forced from the beginning to address methodological issues. Very little attention has been paid to asceticism by those scholars who deal with the earliest texts and periods; it is as though the phenomenon did non exist in the first three centuries of the common era. The bulk of the literature on asceticism comes from those scholars whose expertise is in the fourth centuries and beyond. Such literature rarely …

Reading Texts Through Worlds, Worlds Through Texts, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The history of African Americans' interpretation of the Bible offers a fascinating case study in the cultivation of the reading of religious texts as the "reading" of "worlds." There are in such readings implications not only for general theory regarding the determinacy of interpretations of texts, but also in the understandings of "text" and "Book" themselves.

Foreword To Old Ship Of Zion, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Walter F. Pitts died July 20, 1991. I did not know him personally; I came to know only a part of him through the manuscript-obviously an important part of his life-that has been transformed into the book now before the reader. If that which is created is in the image of its creator, I suspect that had I met Walter Pitts I probably would have liked him very much; I know I would have been impressed by him, and would have learned a great deal from him.

At first, when I was asked by Oxford University Press to review Pitts's …

African American Traditions And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Introduction: Reading the Bible = Reading the Self and the World. African Americans' engagement of the Bible is complex and dynamic. It is a fascinating historical drama, beginning with the Africans' involuntary arrival in the New World. But as sign of the creativity and adaptability of the Africans and of the evocative power of the Bible, the drama continues to the present day, notwithstanding the complexity and controversies of intervening periods. Thus, there is in African Americans' engagement of the Bible potential not only for an interpretive history of their readings as a history of their collective self understandings, visions, …