Seasonal, but is it really relevant?

"Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say"

by

Laurie Goodstein

April 10th, 2014

The New York Times

A faded fragment of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which caused an uproar when unveiled by a Harvard Divinity School historian in 2012, has been tested by scientists who conclude in a journal published on Thursday that the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.

Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple,” a clause that inflamed the debate in some churches over whether women should be allowed to be priests.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake, the scholars agree. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who gave the papyrus its name and fame, has said all along that it should not be regarded as evidence that Jesus married, only that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

“I took very seriously the comments of such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,” Dr. King said in an interview this week. She said she is now very confident it is genuine.

“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where 100 percent is a common thing,” Dr. King said.

The new information may not convince those scholars and bloggers who say the text is the work of a rather sloppy forger keen to influence contemporary debates. The Harvard Theological Review, which is publishing Dr. King’s long-delayed, peer-reviewed paper online on Thursday, is also publishing a rebuttal by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, who declares the fragment so patently fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.”

Dr. King presented the fragment with fanfare at a conference in Rome in September 2012, but was besieged by criticism because the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested.

An editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper also declared it a fake. New Testament scholars claimed the text referred to the “bride of Christ,” which is the church — an interpretation Dr. King said was entirely possible.

It is very unusual to test the ink and papyrus of a fragment so small — this one is 4 by 8 centimeters — because it can damage the item, papyrologists say. The authenticity and dates of other famous fragments were determined by paleographers examining the handwriting.

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

At M.I.T.’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Timothy M. Swager, a chemistry professor, and two students used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether the ink showed any variations or inconsistencies.

“The main thing was to see, did somebody doctor this up?” Dr. Swager said in an interview. “And there is absolutely no evidence for that. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

However, Dr. Depuydt, the Egyptologist at Brown University, said that testing the fragment was irrelevant and that he saw “no need to inspect it.” He said he decided based on the first newspaper photograph that the fragment was forged because it contained “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.

A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.”
But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. And Dr. King said that her “big disappointment” is that so far, the story of the fragment has focused on forgery, not on history.

Science, religion, aliens...new book review

"Science, religion and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence"

by

David Wilkinson

February 6th, 2014

Chemistry World

Imagine we woke up tomorrow to news that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. What would be the implications? And just how likely is it that such life might exist outside of our Earth? As I read this brilliant book, which presents the arguments for and against very readably, I found myself oscillating between believing that humans are unique in the universe and feeling that there must be many other planets containing intelligent life.

On the one hand, there is Enrico Fermi’s paradox: at lunch one day in 1950, the famous physicist asked aloud, ‘Where is everybody?’, referring to alien visitors. Fermi argued that if the Earth is not special in having intelligent life, then civilisations should already have evolved many times in our galaxy, since there are billions of stars older than the Sun. If any one of these civilisations had wanted to colonise the galaxy, they could have done so by now. Since there is no compelling evidence that any aliens have visited the Earth, we must conclude that we are alone.

On the other hand, one of the pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Frank Drake, estimated that there were probably between 1000 and 100 million advanced civilisations in our galaxy. But the problem with such estimates is that one is multiplying the very large number of planets in our galaxy with the very small probability of the conditions on a particular planet being ‘just right’ for intelligent life to emerge. 

The author of this excellent book has PhDs in both astrophysics and systematic theology and he provides a detailed discussion of the issues involved: physical, biological and theological. As Arnold Wolfendale, a previous Astronomer Royal, says in the book’s foreword: ‘For atheists and believers alike, there is much food for thought.’ This book would be ideal for anyone interested in the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere else in the universe. I will be buying it for someone myself.

Science, Religion and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

ISBN-10: 0199680205
ISBN-13: 978-0199680207

Deceased--Ian Barbour

Ian Barbour

October 5th, 1923 to December 24th, 2013

"Ian Barbour dies at 90; academic who bridged science-religion divide"

Barbour sparked debates on issues such as the origins of the universe and the ethical implications of technology. He won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

by

Elaine Woo

January 1st, 2014

Los Angeles Times

For Ian Barbour, the deadly possibilities of the Atomic Age raised questions that science couldn't answer — a perplexing situation for a young physicist after World War II.

He responded to the challenge in an unusual way: After completing his doctorate in physics he enrolled in divinity school and forged a career devoted to bridging the chasm between science and religion.

Barbour, whose work opened a new academic field and brought him the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion died at a hospital in Minneapolis on Christmas Eve, five days after a stroke, said his son, John Barbour. He was 90.

A professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., for more than three decades, Barbour wrote 16 books, including "Issues in Science and Religion," a 1966 volume that helped spark the ongoing debate between scientists and theologians on issues such as the origins of the universe, evolution and the ethical implications of technology.

He "gave birth almost single-handedly to the contemporary dialogue between science and religion," said Robert John Russell, the founder-director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, a nonprofit teaching and research institute affiliated with UC Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. "He made a convincing and lasting case that science and religion are more alike and analogous than unlike and conflictive."

In the 1950s, when Barbour began to promote discourse between the two fields, scientists had little tolerance for religion, and theologians had little interest in science. His was a lonely voice for rapprochement.

"I always felt we needed to move beyond the hostility," Barbour told The Times in 1999. "Scientists say they believe in evolution, not God. Religious scholars say they believe in God, but not evolution. Well, I say we don't have to choose a side. We can meet somewhere in the middle."
He received the Templeton Prize in 1999 for a lifetime of work that judges said helped expand the field of theology. He gave most of the $1.24-million award to the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

His views about the commonalities between religion and science were criticized by such prominent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould. But Barbour's advocacy made inroads at such leading organizations as the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, which in the mid-1990s launched a program to improve communication between religious and scientific communities on matters such as environmental stewardship and life beyond Earth.

"Scientists particularly have appreciated the humble and insightful ways he has considered how we imagine and model the unknowns in each realm," said Jennifer Wiseman, director of the association's Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.

Born in Beijing on Oct. 5, 1923, Ian Graeme Barbour was one of three sons of his American Episcopalian mother and his Scottish Presbyterian father, both of whom taught at Yenching University. (His father, George, was a distinguished geologist involved with the group that discovered the early human remains known as Peking Man.) The family left China in 1931 and spent a few years in England before settling in the United States.

Barbour earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College in 1943. Exposed to Quaker thought during college, he became a conscientious objector who spent World War II fighting forest fires in Oregon and working with mental patients in North Carolina.

After obtaining a master's degree in physics from Duke University in 1946, he went for his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he was a teaching assistant for Enrico Fermi, the Manhattan Project scientist responsible for the world's first atomic chain reaction.

He earned his doctorate in 1949 and joined the physics faculty at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he found himself increasingly drawn to the ethical and theological implications of scientific discoveries. With a Ford Foundation fellowship, he studied theology, ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School and earned a divinity degree in 1956.

Before completing his divinity studies, he accepted an offer from Carleton College to teach physics and religion. In 1960 he founded its religion department and began to write about issues of concern to both scientists and religious thinkers.

"What had started as an attempt to fit together two halves of my own life had become a wider intellectual inquiry in which I found that many other people were interested," he wrote in an autobiographical essay.

In 1989 and 1990 he gave Scotland's prestigious Gifford Lectures, an annual series of talks on natural theology whose presenters have included Albert Schweitzer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Barbour's lectures were turned into two books, "Religion in an Age of Science" (1990) and "Ethics in an Age of Technology" (1993).

In his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize, Barbour spoke of the urgent need to break down barriers, offering cloning as an example of the ability of science to tell society what is possible and of religion to reflect on what is desirable.

He also challenged people to reconsider the biblical view of death as a punishment for human sin.

"Now we know that death was present long before human beings were around, and that it was a necessary feature of an evolutionary process in which new forms of life could appear," he said. "We can take the Bible seriously without taking it literally."
Barbour's wife of 64 years, Deane Kern, died in 2011. He is survived by four children, a brother, three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
 

Ian Barbour [Wikipedia]

 

Religion and Science

by

Ian G. Barbour

ISBN-10: 0060609389
ISBN-13: 978-0060609382

Related interest...

Einstein: Spiritual and the scientific

Theodocy and cold science

Deceased--William Hamilton

Deceased--Gabriel Vahanian

Shift in value definitions--F. Nietzsche

“God remains dead. And we have killed him.”...things change

"Star of Bethlehem"...literary device

"Star of Bethlehem a literary creation, says Ohio State physics scholar"

by

JoAnne Viviano

 December 20th, 2013

The Columbus Dispatch

Aaron Adair received his first taste of the Star of Bethlehem mystery when he worked as a planetarium-show presenter while an undergraduate student at Michigan State University.

A decade later, after exploring dozens of star theories dating back centuries, he’s a skeptic.

In the newly published The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View, the Ohio State University scholar says the star was most likely the literary creation of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, meant to convey a message of salvation.

None of the other hypotheses he has encountered can explain it, Adair said, and at least one — that the star was a “fantastic” conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in either 3 or 2 B.C. — would have to change history to fit the story.

“I found out that pretty much all the hypotheses failed to really conform to what the Gospel actually said,” noted Adair, who has a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in physics education at Ohio State.

The story, told only in Matthew, says the star appeared upon Jesus’ birth and guided wise men, or magi, from the East to worship him.

“A lot of the literature of the time is ultimately not to say what happened but is ultimately some sort of symbolic tale,” Adair said. “It’s supposed to be an important legend or myth that ... tries to explain points of theology in the way of storytelling.”

The so-called star, from early on, was thought to have been something other than a star as we now define it, said the Rev. Scott Carl, an assistant professor of Scripture at St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Various theories have been presented, from a super nova to a comet to some sort of planetary motion, said Carl, a Catholic priest who said he has not read Adair’s book.

“There are also some who will say, given its nature, perhaps it wasn’t a star as such or even something with a naturalistic explanation,” he said. “Perhaps it was an angel or perhaps a coordination that started as a natural formation, then an angel assisted.”

Some scholars, he said, are reconsidering the date of death for Herod the Great, who ruled over the Jews at the time of Jesus’ birth. He is widely believed to have died in 4 B.C., but there is some research into whether he died three years earlier, a change that also would change the year of Jesus’ birth and give more credence to planetary explanations for the star.

Carl said he’s inclined to believe that something unusual attracted the magi, and he believes theologians and other researchers should “at least keep the question open.”

“To say it’s something that’s solved, that would be too neat,” he said. “We should be careful not to make absolute opinions in matters that we don’t have as much data as we’d like to make such judgments.”
Brett Ellman, an associate professor of physics and planetarium director at Kent State University, said the fact that the star in Matthew is not referenced in any of the other Gospels leaves researchers ill-equipped.

“Since there is very little ‘evidence’ to go by ... there seems to me to be no reliable way to ever really account for either its cause or, indeed, its reality,” he said.

“Of course, matters of religion are often outside the purview of science — if one chooses to believe in something based on faith, they generally do not require a real-world explanation.”

Ellman said he is not familiar with Adair’s work but that the so-called star certainly could have been an allegory used as a teaching or mnemonic tool for early adherents to Christianity.

“Just as it might have been many other things,” he added. “There is nothing like a lack of evidence to generate a plethora of theories.”

Although Adair said his theory might upset some believers, others came to the same conclusion years ago, and he’s simply trying to encourage the scientific community to catch up. He’s not a believer himself, but it is not his goal to undercut religion with his book, he said. “Saying one particular story is false hardly proves the non-existence of any God.

“It’s a way of reimagining the faith and getting back to something a little more original, re-understanding the intent of the author rather than imposing what many moderns want — that they want every i dotted and t crossed about what really happened, and if anything is false to throw the thing away,” he said.

Regardless of the explanation, Carl said, the Gospel story of the magi following a star to find the newborn Christ gives the sense that Jesus, being adored by non-Israelites, is a universal king “ for all people,” not just the Jews.

“I hope our ongoing pondering of the star helps people to receive the invitation to see this newborn king and his importance in their lives,” he said.

 The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View

by

Aaron Adair

ISBN-10: 0956694861
ISBN-13: 978-0956694867

Interview...

"Star of Bethlehem"...astronomical data

Chinese "wise men"?

Satanic monument on Oklahoma Capitol grounds

"Oklahoma Legislature Opens Door to Satanic Monument on Capitol Grounds"

by

Greg Newkirk

December 15th, 2013

io9

You know that phrase "slippery slope" that politicians are always throwing around? The Oklahoma legislature just hit the Slip 'N Slide. In fact, they've provided a perfect demonstration of the phrase's meaning by opening up the door for a giant monument to Satan on the grounds of the capitol building.

Last year, Oklahoma's highly conservative government greenlit the building of a religious monument on the steps of the capitol, with the stipulation being that it was financed by private cash. Numerous legal experts criticized the decision and warned that it might be unconstitutional. They went ahead and built it anyway, but in the act of doing so, they've attracted the attention of a few people they didn't plan on: Satanists.

In a letter to state officials, Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves lauded Rep. Mike Ritze, who headed the campaign and helped pay for the Ten Commandments replica, saying that they plan on submitting their own monument designs within a month or so.

"He's helping a satanic agenda grow more than any of us possibly could," Greaves said. "You don't walk around and see too many satanic temples around, but when you open the door to public spaces for us, that's when you're going to see us."

The Satanic Temple has gone so far as to create a crowdfunding page for their campaign to raise the $20,ooo needed to build the monument. As of this writing, they're well on their way with nearly four grand pledged.

Rep. Bobby Cleveland said that monuments like the Ten Commandments are needed to celebrate America's "Judeo-Christian heritage", citing that many Christians feel persecuted by political correctness. Then he said that Satanists aren't allowed to feel the same way because "they're nuts".

But Brady Henderson, the legal director for the Oklahoma Chapter of the ACLU, says that the local government is in for a surprise.

"We would prefer to see Oklahoma's government officials work to faithfully serve our communities and improve the lives of Oklahomans instead of erecting granite monuments to show us all how righteous they are," Henderson said. "But if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint."

As the campaign to raise the funds for the Satanic monument continues, and the ACLU gears up for what is sure to be a fight, Lucien Greaves remains confident that their own demonstration of faith will be a success.

"We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards," Greaves wrote. "Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines."
Just days after the the Satanists announced their plans, The Universal Society of Hinduism followed suit with their own plans to build a monkey god statue. 

Perhaps, this should be their anthem... 

Sympathy For The Devil
   
Rolling Stones

Songwriters: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a mans soul and faith
And I was round when jesus christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around st. petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a generals rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me
Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached bombay
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's confusing you
Is just the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me lucifer
Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste, um yeah
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, um yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, um mean it, get down
Woo, who
Oh yeah, get on down
Oh yeah
Oh yeah!
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell me honey, can ya guess my name
Tell me baby, what's my name
I tell you one time, you're to blame
Ooo, who
Ooo, who
Ooo, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Oh, yeah
What's my name
Tell me, baby, what's my name
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Oh, yeah

Politics, ethics, state rights, demographics...Satanism at Oklahoma State House?

Politics, ethics, state rights, demographics...Satanism at Oklahoma State House?

Satan Cast Down from Heaven 

 

Gustave Dore

"Satanists plan statue to stand alongside Ten Commandments in Oklahoma"

A decision to erect a Christian monument outside the statehouse could backfire as satanists demand religious parity

December 8th, 2013

theguardian.com

In their zeal to tout their faith in the public square, conservatives in Oklahoma may have unwittingly opened the door to a wide range of religious groups, including Satanists who are seeking to put their own statue next to a Ten Commandments monument outside the statehouse.

The Republican-controlled legislature in the state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt authorised the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009. It was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts, who questioned its constitutionality. The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking its removal.

But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity. It notified the state's Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument and plans to submit one of several possible designs this month, said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the temple.

"We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards," Greaves wrote in letter to state officials. "Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines."

Greaves said one potential design involves a pentagram, a satanic symbol, while another is meant to be an interactive display for children. He said he expects the monument, if approved by Oklahoma officials, would cost about $20,000.

The Republican state representative Mike Ritze, who spearheaded the push for the Ten Commandments monument and whose family helped pay the $10,000 for its construction, declined to comment on the Satanic Temple's effort, but Greaves credited Ritze for opening the door to his group's proposal.

"He's helping a satanic agenda grow more than any of us possibly could," Greaves said. "You don't walk around and see too many satanic temples around, but when you open the door to public spaces for us, that's when you're going to see us."

The Oklahoma legislature has taken other steps that many believe blur the line that divides church and state. The House speaker said he wants to build a chapel inside the Capitol to celebrate Oklahoma's "Judeo-Christian heritage". Several lawmakers have said they want to allow nativity scenes and other religious-themed symbols in public schools.

The Republican representative Bobby Cleveland, who plans to introduce one such bill next year, said many Christians feel they are under attack as a result of political correctness. He dismissed the notion of Satanists erecting a monument at the Capitol.

"I think these Satanists are a different group," Cleveland said. "You put them under the nut category."

Brady Henderson, the legal director for ACLU Oklahoma, said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms of expression, although he said a better solution might be to allow none at all on state property.

"We would prefer to see Oklahoma's government officials work to faithfully serve our communities and improve the lives of Oklahomans instead of erecting granite monuments to show us all how righteous they are," Henderson said. "But if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint."

Value of theology

"Study Theology, Even If You Don't Believe in God"

This lost liberal art encourages scholars to understand history from the inside out.

by

Tara Isabella Burton

October 30th, 2013

The Atlantic

When I first told my mother—a liberal, secular New Yorker—that I wanted to cross an ocean to study for a bachelor’s degree in theology, she was equal parts aghast and concerned. Was I going to become a nun, she asked in horror, or else one of “those” wingnuts who picketed outside abortion clinics? Was I going to spend hours in the Bodleian Library agonizing over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin? Theology, she insisted, was a subject by the devout, for the devout; it had no place in a typical liberal arts education.

Her view of the study of theology is far from uncommon. While elite universities like Harvard and Yale offer vocational courses at their divinity schools, and nearly all universities offer undergraduate majors in the comparative study of religions, few schools (with the exceptions of historically Catholic institutions like Georgetown and Boston College) offer theology as a major, let alone mandate courses in theology alongside other “core” liberal arts subjects like English or history. Indeed, the study of theology has often run afoul of the legal separation of church and state. Thirty-seven U.S. states have laws limiting the spending of public funds on religious training. In 2006, the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible College.

Even in the United Kingdom, where secular bachelor's programs in theology are more common, prominent New Atheists like Richard Dawkins have questioned their validity in the university sphere. In a 2007 letter to the editor of The Independent, Dawkins argues for the abolishment of theology in academia, insisting that “a positive case now needs to be made that [theology] has any real content at all, or that it has any place whatsoever in today's university culture.”

Such a shift, of course, is relatively recent in the history of secondary education. Several of the great Medieval universities, among them Oxford, Bologna, and Paris, developed in large part as training grounds for men of the Church. Theology, far from being anathema to the academic life, was indeed its central purpose: It was the “Queen of the Sciences” the field of inquiry which gave meaning to all others. So, too, several of the great American universities. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alike were founded with the express purpose of teaching theology—one early anonymous account of Harvard's founding speaks of John Harvard's “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches”, and his dream of creating an institution to train future clergymen to “read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.”

Universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton no longer exist, in part or in whole, to train future clergymen. Their purpose now is far broader. But the dwindling role of theology among the liberal arts is a paradigmatic example of dispensing with the baby along with the bathwater.

Richard Dawkins would do well to look at the skills imparted by the Theology department of his own alma mater, Oxford (also my own). The BA I did at Oxford was a completely secular program, attracting students from all over the religious spectrum. My classmates included a would-be priest who ended up an atheist, as well as a militant atheist now considering the priesthood. During my time there, I investigated Ancient Near Eastern building patterns to theorize about the age of a settlement; compared passages of the gospels (in the original Greek) to analogous passages in the Jewish wisdom literature of the 1st century BC; examined the structure of a 14th-century Byzantine liturgy; and read The Brothers Karamazov as part of a unit on Christian existentialism. As Oxford's Dr. William Wood, a University Lecturer in Philosophical Theology and my former tutor, puts it: “theology is the closest thing we have at the moment to the kind of general study of all aspects of human culture that was once very common, but is now quite rare.” A good theologian, he says, “has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.” In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, “Queen of the Sciences,” but at least, as Wood terms it, “Queen of the Humanities.”

Yet, for me, the value of theology lies not merely in the breadth of skills it taught, but in the opportunity it presented to explore a given historical mindset in greater depth. I learned to read the Bible in both Greek and Hebrew, to analyze the minutiae of language that allows us to distinguish “person” from “nature,” “substance” from “essence.” I read “orthodox” and “heretical” accounts alike of the nature of the Godhead, and learned about the convoluted and often arbitrary historical processes that delineated the two.

Such precision may seem—to the religious person and agnostic alike—no more useful than counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. But for me, it allowed me access into the fundamental building blocks of the mentality, say, of a 12th-century French monk, or a mystic from besieged Byzantium. While the study of history taught me the story of humanity on a broader scale, the study of theology allowed me insight into the minds and hearts, fears and concerns, of those in circumstances were so wildly different from my own. The difference between whether—as was the case in the Arian controversy of the fourth-century AD—the Godhead should be thought of as powerful first, and loving second, or loving first and powerful second, might seem utterly pedantic in a world where plenty of people see no need to think about God at all. But when scores of people were willing to kill or die to defend such beliefs—hardly a merely historical phenomenon—it's worth investigating how and why such beliefs infused all aspects of the world of their believers. How does that 12th-century French monk's view of the nature of God affect the way he sees himself, his relationship with others, his relationship with the natural world, his relationship with his own mortality? How does that Byzantine mystic conceive of space and time in a world he envisions as imbued with the sacred? To find such questions integral to any study of the past is not restricted to those who agree with the answers. To study theology well requires not faith, but empathy.

If history and comparative religion alike offer us perspective on world events from the “outside,” the study of theology offers us a chance to study those same events “from within”: an opportunity to get inside the heads of those whose beliefs and choices shaped so much of our history, and who—in the world outside the ivory tower—still shape plenty of the world today. That such avenues of inquiry have virtually vanished from many of the institutions where they were once best explored is hardly a triumph of progress or of secularism. Instead, the absence of theology in our universities is an unfortunate example of blindness—willful or no—to the fact that engagement with the past requires more than mere objective or comparative analysis. It requires a willingness to look outside our own perspectives in order engage with the great questions—and questioners—of history on their own terms. Even Dawkins might well agree with that.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the Devil, and C. S. Lewis

"The Devil You Know"

by

Casey N. Cep

October 17th, 2013

The New Yorker

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brought the Devil out of the darkness and into the limelight. In an expansive  interview with New York magazine, after talking about Heaven and Hell, he said, “I even believe in the Devil.”

“You do?” said the interviewer, Jennifer Senior.

“Yeah, he’s a real person,” Scalia explained, but “it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.”

Near the end of his excursus on evil, Scalia said, “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird.” He continued, “Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.” When all other explanations seemed to fail, he asked the interviewer, “Have you read The Screwtape Letters?”

Now, there are many literary devils, and Justice Scalia could easily have invoked Dante or Blake, John Milton or Thomas Mann, but instead he named a work by one of the celebrities of Christian apologetics. C. S. Lewis has been dead for nearly fifty years, but talk about Christianity long enough and you’ll likely hear his name. Evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics all lay claim to him. Children read his “Chronicles of Narnia” series and grow into reading his more formal works of memoir and theology: “Mere Christianity,” “The Problem of Pain,” “Miracles,” “Surprised by Joy,” and “The Four Loves.”

“The Screwtape Letters,” though, remains one of his most popular works. Continuously in print since Lewis published it in 1942, the novel has been adapted into plays, made into a comic book, and recorded as an audio drama by John Cleese. Fox owns the film rights, and Ralph Winter, best known for blockbusters like “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four,” has said he will produce it. Three years ago, I saw one of the stage adaptations in New York, where it was shockingly difficult to get a ticket. I remember wondering then, as I have been again since Justice Scalia’s interview, why the novel is still so popular.

Its appeal, I think, comes from Lewis’s success in writing a theodicy of the everyday. Unlike Dante and Milton, he eschewed a grand theology of the cosmos, focussing instead on quotidian temptations of the common man. An epistolary novel, “The Screwtape Letters” features a senior demon called Screwtape writing thirty-one letters of advice and encouragement to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, who is trying to win the soul of a nameless young man. “The patient” is an unremarkable man who fights with his mother, falls in love, and then dies in an air raid during the Second World War.

“My dear Wormwood,” the letters begin, and we meet the first-person voice of the spine-tinglingly charming Screwtape, who signs off, “Your affectionate uncle.” Screwtape likes philosophy, admires history, and disdains science; he is so cultured that in one letter he talks about reading in the British Museum, so hip that in another he says how helpful it will be to make use of “the ‘Life Force,’ the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis.”

He wants nothing but the best for his nephew, an erring neophyte unversed in the finer methods of temptation. Screwtape is more than just a masterful theologian—he is a careful anthropologist. “When two humans have lived together for many years,” he tells his nephew, “it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that.” Adultery seems excessive when furrowed eyebrows and dismissive tones can do the work of ruining relationships slowly: “Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.”

In another letter addressing prayer, Screwtape writes, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” These demons aren’t digging pits of fire or offering bargains of absolute power, they are embedding themselves in the daily lives of their patients. Nowhere is this clearer than when Wormwood is excited by the outbreak of the Second World War, and Screwtape advises caution: wars bring souls as easily to God, “the Enemy,” as to the Devil, “Our Father Below.”

The bureaucracy of tempters is roughly sketched when Screwtape tells Wormwood to collaborate with other, adjacent demons: Glubose, who is assigned to the patient’s mother, and Slumtrimpet, who is assigned to the woman he loves. Somewhat surprisingly, he tells his nephew, “One of our great allies at present is the Church itself.” Organized religion is full of misguided liturgies, bad preachers, and off-key singing: the sort of minor but menacing distractions that can slowly undermine the patient’s faith. “Indeed,” Screwtape later says, “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Opportunities for sin are what fill a human lifetime. Screwtape tells Wormwood that God “cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice,” and letter by letter he reveals these temptations. “You are much more likely,” he says, “to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy.” Alcohol is not the only instrument of vice, and Screwtape insists that the most ordinary of instruments are the best.

The patient’s mother, for instance, is a supreme glutton, but not the excessive kind. She is the sort of person who is always sending plates of food back to the kitchen because they are too large or refusing tea because it is too strong, offending servants and friends alike with her self-concern. As Screwtape observes, “At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance.” So often, sin is accomplished by manipulating the pursuit of virtue. Wormwood is advised, “Catch [the patient] at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.” With little effort, gluttony can be disguised as temperance and pride can be hidden by humility.

The greatest of these vice-for-virtue deceptions was achieved, Screwtape says, by “the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy’s positive Charity.” Couples are ideal for getting patients to resent the very individuals they most desired to show charity:

    In discussing any joint action, it becomes obligatory that A should argue in favour of B’s supposed wishes and against his own, while B does the opposite. It is often impossible to find out either party’s real wishes; with luck, they end by doing something that neither wants, while each feels a glow of self-righteousness and harbours a secret claim to preferential treatment for the unselfishness shown and a secret grudge against the other for the ease with which the sacrifice has been accepted.

Another way of framing such failed virtues is to say that true temptation distracts from the present and directs to the future. Instead of appreciating your boyfriend’s preference for one television show over another or your wife’s desire to go for a walk instead of staying at home, you worry unsustainably about being the most unselfish of partners or scoring more points than your wife on the balance sheet of the relationship. “Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present,” Screwtape tells Wormwood, but “fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.” It’s perfect satire.

Five years after publishing “The Screwtape Letters,” Lewis appeared on the cover of Time with a devil on his shoulder. The novel was already one of his most popular works. Despite decades of expounding the same themes in lectures, radio addresses, sermons, and theological treatises, Lewis (like Milton) was never livelier than when he wrote of demons. No matter how many other ways he tried to write of faith, we still like hearing from the Devil best.

For believers, the letters are theology in reverse, teaching the love of God through the wiles of the Devil, but for all readers, regardless of belief, the letters frame human experience as a familiar sequence of trials, from how you take your tea and what parties you attend to the sort of person you choose for a partner and the sort of politics you espouse. As Justice Scalia said when he invoked “The Screwtape Letters,” “That’s a great book. It really is, just as a study of human nature.” The novel remains wildly popular because whether or not you agree with Lewis and Scalia that the Devil is real, the evils promoted by Screwtape—greed, gluttony, pride, envy, and violence—most certainly are.

Deceased--Géza Vermes

Géza Vermes
June 22nd, 1924 to May 8th, 2013

"Geza Vermes obituary"

Expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity

by

Philip Alexander
   
May 14th, 2013

The Guardian

Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was one of the world's leading authorities on the origins of Christianity. In the early 1950s he completed the first-ever doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls – a risky topic to choose. In 1947, an Arab shepherd had chanced upon the first scrolls – texts written in ancient Hebrew and its sister language Aramaic – in a cave in the cliffs along the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. These were published rapidly, but reports kept circulating that more caves containing more manuscripts were being found. No scholarly consensus had yet emerged as to when the scrolls were written, or by whom. Wildly fluctuating dates were assigned to them, some even claiming that they had been copied in the middle ages.

From careful analysis of the published material, Vermes argued that the Jewish sect behind the scrolls originated at the time of the Maccabean crisis in the middle of the second century BCE. It was a brilliant hypothesis which gained many adherents and became academic orthodoxy. Vermes himself never saw grounds for modifying it throughout his career.

He was born in Makó, Hungary, to assimilated Jewish parents. His mother, Terézia, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Erno, a journalist and poet who associated with leading Hungarian intellectuals. When the family moved to Gyula, Vermes was enrolled in a Catholic primary school, and the family converted to Catholicism – "to give me a better chance", as he wrote in his autobiography. That may have been his father's intention, but his mother took the conversion seriously and became a devout Catholic. Vermes also seems to have taken it seriously enough to consider becoming a priest, when he graduated from the Catholic gymnasium. It was 1942 and life was becoming increasingly difficult for Hungarian Jews. The family's baptismal certificates proved useless to protect them. Vermes was desperate to further his education but saw little chance, as a Jew, of gaining a place at university. Entering the priesthood offered a way forward.

Turned down by the Jesuits, he was accepted by the diocese of Nagyvárad, and began life as a seminarian. The move was providential and saved his life, when, in March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary, setting up a puppet government, which, under Adolf Eichmann, rapidly began to implement against the Jews the Nazis' "final solution". Vermes's parents perished – exactly when, where and how he never discovered. With the aid of the church Vermes managed to remain hidden, and was liberated by the Red Army in Budapest in December 1944.

He resumed his studies for the priesthood, but as ordination approached, the thought of parish ministry appealed to him less and less. He was desperate to continue studying. An attempt to join the Dominicans was rebuffed, but he was admitted to the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, and after a hair-raising journey across war-ravaged Europe he entered their house in Louvain, Belgium, in 1948. The nearby Catholic University of Louvain gave him the chance to become a licencié in theology and philosophy, and he completed his doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

His superiors then moved him to the Paris house of the Fathers of Sion. There he engaged with Paul Démann in a campaign, fought through the pages of the order's journal, Cahiers Sioniens, to challenge the anti-Judaism then rampant in the Catholic church. He broadened his education, meeting leading scholars such as André Dupont-Sommer and attending the classes of Georges Vajda. Renée Bloch introduced him to Jewish Bible commentary (midrash) – a field in which he later excelled.

On a visit to Britain, he was introduced by a mutual friend to Pamela, and, in late 1955, they fell in love. The situation was complicated and stressful. Pam was married with two young daughters. Vermes was a Catholic priest. It was resolved (reasonably amicably) by Pam separating from her husband, joining and subsequently marrying Vermes, and Vermes leaving the Fathers of Sion, and the Catholic priesthood.

Desperate for a job that would allow him to remain in Britain, he gladly accepted in 1957 a temporary lectureship in divinity in King's College (then a constituent college of the University of Durham, but now the University of Newcastle). There he cemented his international reputation with Scripture and Tradition (1961), a seminal study of early Jewish bible commentary, and with an English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1962. The latter, steadily augmented as new scrolls were published, has not been out of print since.

When he was offered the position of reader in Jewish studies at Oxford in 1965 (promoted to full professor in 1989), some in the Jewish community decried the appointment, but buoyed by the support of Oxford luminaries such as David Daube, he dug himself into Oxford life. It was there I first met him, in 1967, when I joined a class he was teaching on the early Jewish law-code the Mishnah. Subsequently I did a doctorate with him on the Aramaic translations of the Bible.

His achievements at Oxford were immense. He took on the editorship of the Journal of Jewish Studies, turning it into one of the foremost in its field, and collaborated with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman on a major revision of Emil Schürer's multi-volume classic The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. In Vermes's own truly epoch-making Jesus the Jew (1973), one of the earliest of his many studies of Jesus and the origins of Christianity, he helped launch the new quest for the historical Jesus.

He continued work on the scrolls, but felt he was treading water because the publication of the numerous texts had virtually ground to a halt. Worse still, the small editorial team to whom they had been assigned were barring access to the manuscripts to others willing and able to do it for them. Vermes was at the forefront of the battle to rectify this situation, and it was in part due to his well-fought campaign that in 1991 the unpublished scrolls were finally "liberated" (as he put it), and access granted to any scholar who wanted it. Vermes was invited to become an editor, and, together with myself, published the Cave 4 fragments of the Dead Sea Sect's rule-book, the so-called Community Rule.

Vermes helped build up Jewish studies as an academic discipline, acting as first president both of the British Association for Jewish Studies and of the European Association for Jewish Studies. He attracted a group of talented students to work with him, many of whom became scholars of distinction. Recognition followed thick and fast, including a fellowship of the British Academy, honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield and the Central European University, Budapest, and a vote of congratulation by the US House of Representatives "for inspiring and educating the world".

When Pam died in 1993, he was devastated. But in 1995 he married Margaret, a younger friend, whom he and Pam had known for years. With Margaret came her son Ian from her former marriage. Vermes found himself, to his surprise and delight, playing in his 70s the role of paterfamilias. He was rejuvenated. His intellect and memory remained undimmed to the end, and only weeks before he died he was discussing a new book he planned to write.

"Professor Geza Vermes"

Professor Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was from 1965 to 1991 first Reader, then Professor, of Jewish Studies at Oxford and the foremost world authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls — early manuscripts of some Old Testament scriptures, the first of which were discovered accidentally in 1947 by a young Arab shepherd in a cave near the Dead Sea.

May 12th, 2013

The Telegraph

 Vermes led a long and sometimes bitter battle with the Israeli archaeological authorities to secure publication of all the manuscripts and fragments, copies of which were eventually lodged in the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 1992. His own The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, first published in 1962, had four editions, the latest in 1997, and sold 300,000 copies. He was the first to identify the Scrolls as belonging to the middle of the 2nd century BC.

That Vermes was able to achieve anything in this area and in other important fields of Jewish history and religion owed everything to the fact that during the darkest days of the Second World War he was, in his native Hungary, a Roman Catholic priest and, although of Jewish family background, just managed to escape deportation to a German death camp. Both his parents, who had converted to Catholicism in the 1930s, were less fortunate: he never saw them again after their arrest in 1944.

Vermes remained a priest until 1957, when marriage required his resignation and, having also renounced Catholicism, he returned to his roots and became a non-practising Jew. Eventually, however, he became a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London and a member of the academic committee of Leo Baeck College, though he declared himself to be uninterested in “organised religion of any description”.

Geza Vermes was born at Mako, southern Hungary, on June 22 1924. When he was four the family moved to Gyula, where his father was the owner and editor of the town’s weekly newspaper until it was closed down by anti-Jewish laws in 1938. Geza was sent to a Roman Catholic school where in 1942 he obtained top marks in every subject and qualified easily for university entry. He decided, however, that because of his Jewish origins he would never secure a university place, so he opted instead for the Catholic priesthood.

He was in the second year of a theological seminary when the Germans invaded Hungary and rounded up all Jews and those of Jewish origin.

Although not yet ordained, he was carrying out the functions of a deacon under the certification of the local bishop, enabling him to escape arrest. The remainder of the war was spent in hiding, protected by the Salesian and Dominican Orders in Budapest.

Although refused admission to the Dominican Order because of his Jewish background, Vermes was accepted by the Fathers of Sion — a community dedicated to prayer for the Jews. By this time he had recognised his calling to be a scholar and was at the community’s house in Louvain, Belgium, from 1946 to 1952 before moving to its central house in Paris, where he remained until 1957.

Having decided to specialise in Old Testament studies, he became particularly interested in the discovery of what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from 1950 he began translating and interpreting the new texts. He took a doctorate, with the highest honours, in their historic framework at the Institut Orientaliste in Louvain. The doctorate was published as Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert (1953).

Following his move to Paris, Vermes became assistant editor of Cahiers — a journal devoted to the furthering of Catholic-Jewish relations — and began campaigning for an end to anti-Semitism in the Church. This was influential in the reconciling statements of Vatican II. Although still a young priest, he was becoming widely recognised as a scholar of distinction, and it was after attending an international conference in Oxford in 1954 that he went to stay with a friend at Ottery St Mary in Devon.

There he made the acquaintance of an Exeter University professor and his wife Pam . Vermes and Pam fell in love, and her marriage broke down soon afterwards. After much soul-searching, she and Vermes married in 1958 — a union that brought great happiness and fulfilment to both until Pam’s death in 1993.

On leaving the priesthood, Vermes secured an appointment as a lecturer in Divinity at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne — then part of Durham University . The teaching duties were light, and over the next eight years he devoted a good deal of time to research and writing. Besides work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he became interested in the ways in which the Old Testament was interpreted at different points in Jewish history and how this affected the New Testament — discussed in his Scripture and Tradition (1961).

In 1961 he responded to an advertisement for a Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford, and such was his reputation that he was appointed without interview. He also became a Fellow of the newly-founded Wolfson College .

A major undertaking was the co-editing of a revised edition of The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ — a classic three-volume 19th-century work by a German scholar. This occupied him, on and off, for several years and encouraged him to embark on a trilogy devoted to the Jewish background of the life and work of Jesus — Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983) and The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1996).

These portrayed Jesus as a typical 1st-century Jewish holy man — a preacher, healer and exorcist — who was executed because it was feared that his words and deeds might lead to insurrection: “He died on the cross for having done the wrong thing (causing a commotion) in the wrong place (the Temple) at the wrong time (just before the Passover). Here lies the real tragedy of Jesus the Jew.”

The trilogy was followed in 2000 by The Changing Faces of Jesus, a survey of the various representations of Jesus in the New Testament; and, in 2003, a companion volume, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus .

Although Vermes did not share the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, he acknowledged him to be “second to none” among the Jewish teachers and prophets, and the trilogy was found illuminating by many Christian scholars.

Notwithstanding his high reputation worldwide and his popularity in Oxford, Vermes — a distinguished-looking, bearded figure — always craved further recognition, and this came almost at the end of his academic career when he was elected to the British Academy in 1985 and awarded an Oxford DLitt in 1989 — in the same year he was appointed to the chair of Jewish Studies.

In 1998 he published an autobiography, Providential Accidents, and he continued to write and lecture until he was well into his eighties. In 2012 he published Christian Beginnings from Nazareth to Nicaea AD30–325.

He married secondly, in 1996, Margaret Unarska, a Polish scientist, who survives him with a stepson and two stepdaughters. 
 
The Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a lecture presented by Professor Geza Vermes at Louisiana State University's Hill Memorial Library on September 29, 2009...

Géza Vermes [Wikipedia]

Dead Sea Scrolls [Wikipedia]

The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

Prison padres' philosophy suspect

"New Study Suggests Religion May Help Criminals Justify Their Crimes"

by

Justin Peters

March 8th, 2013

Slate

In 1996, noted criminologist Jewel asked a question that has long haunted those hoodlums prone to pondering the existential consequences of their actions: “Who will save your souls after those lies that you told, boy?” For generations of American crooks, the answer has been “religious do-gooders.” As a 2006 Federal Bureau of Prisons report put it, “faith groups have become involved in offering formal programs within prison to bring about not only the spiritual salvation of the inmates but their rehabilitation in the profane world as well.” The idea is that spiritual rebirth may help tame the criminal impulse, and set wild hearts on the straight and narrow.

Maybe not. A new study in the academic journal Theoretical Criminology (hat tip to the Vancouver Sun) suggests that, far from causing offenders to repent of their sins, religious instruction might actually encourage crime. The authors surveyed 48 “hardcore street offenders” in and around Atlanta, in hopes of determining what effect, if any, religion has on their behavior. While the vast majority of those surveyed (45 out of 48 people) claimed to be religious, the authors found that the interviewees “seemed to go out of their way to reconcile their belief in God with their serious predatory offending. They frequently employed elaborate and creative rationalizations in the process and actively exploit religious doctrine to justify their crimes.”

First of all, many interviewees had only a vague notion of the central tenets of their faiths. Take, for example, an 18-year-old robber whose “street name” was Que:

    Que: I believe in God and the Bible and stuff. I believe in Christmas, and uh, you know the commitments and what not.

    Int: You mean the Commandments?

    Que: Yeah that. I believe in that.

    Int: Can you name any of them?

    Que: Ahhh … well, I don’t know … like don’t steal, and uh, don’t cheat and shit like that. Uhmm … I can’t remember the rest.

Often, the authors found, these knowledge gaps were self-serving. “God has to forgive everyone, even if they don’t believe in him,” insisted one 33-year-old enforcer for a drug gang, with a vested interest in avoiding damnation for the murders he had committed. A 23-year-old robber called Young Stunna suggested that the circumstances of his upbringing would absolve him of his crimes: “Jesus knows I ain’t have no choice, you know? He know I got a decent heart. He know I’m stuck in the hood and just doing what I gotta do to survive.”

Indeed, many of those surveyed used their understandings of faith to justify their own criminal behavior. A 25-year-old drug dealer called Cool suggested that God doesn’t mind when you do bad things to bad people:

    Also another thing is this; if you doing some wrong to another bad person, like if I go rob a dope dealer or a molester or something, then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus. That’s God’s will. Oh you molested some kids? Well now I’m [God] sending Cool over your house to get your ass.

In the end, the authors found, “there is reason to believe that these rationalizations and justifications may play a criminogenic role in their decision making.”

A couple points. First, this is a really small sample size, and it’s possible that if the authors had surveyed more people over a broader geographical area, their results would have been different. Second, as the authors themselves acknowledge, criminals certainly aren’t the only ones who tend to misunderstand religious teachings, or to contort them for their own benefit. Granted, there aren’t usually violent consequences when your Aunt Sue misunderstands something in the Bible; the worst that happens is that she’s just a little more unbearable at Thanksgiving dinner. But, still, the Theoretical Criminology study shouldn’t be interpreted as conclusive evidence that faith-based outreach and rehabilitation programs are worthless.

But the point is, neither is there conclusive evidence that religion on its own actually helps rehabilitate criminals. This becomes a policy question when we’re talking about prisons. As that Bureau of Prisons report put it, while “religious programs in the correctional setting have been the single most common form of institutional programming for inmates,” nobody really knows whether those programs are effective. There’s not much good data. People tend to use tautological arguments to support religion-based rehabilitation programs. That’s not good enough. If we’re going to talk about whether religion helps rehabilitate criminals, we need to insist on data. Don’t just take it on faith.