The Roundup – 5.24.26

“And this time the words invoke Bishop Bagger, who once preached how angels pulled double duty as God’s protectors, flanking God in a space called the Mercy Seat, a site of unfathomable terror, where only the truest hearts dared plead for mercy, a higher-stakes gamble than anything proffered aboard a riverboat, but what bothered Bagger as a child was the notion hidden inside the story, the notion that God needed protecting, which, by extension, posited that God could be hurt, even killed” – Daniel Kraus, Angel Down: A Novel (Atria Books, 2025), ch. 38.

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• New Testament scholar Matthew Novenson recently joined the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary and you can watch his inaugural lecture online.

• Robyn Walsh announced that she will be a Professional Research Fellow at the Universität Wien. Congrats, Dr. Walsh!
• Dan McClellan responds to a video that critiques Alex O’Connor. (Why are so many would-be apologists for Christianity so terrible at defending their beliefs?)

• James McGrath talks about a recent meeting of the Enoch Seminar he attended as well as a conference he is helping to organize on Christology in early June.
• Free book alert! You can download the PDF of The Power of Parables: Essays on the Comparative Study of Jewish and Christian Parables (Brill, 2023) for free!
• Free book alert! Again! You can download You can download The Fables of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke -A New Foundation for the Study of Parables (Brill, 2021) for free!
• Shirley Paulson interviewed Bridget Mary Meehan, a Roman Catholic Womanpriest, on gnosis.

• I’m thinking I might be able to double my reading goal if I continue at my current pace. We’ll see.