Our current book
After Jesus Before Christianity
By Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, Hal Taussig
From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative and eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding of the religion and its early dissemination.
Christianity has endured for more than two millennia and is practiced by billions worldwide today. Yet that longevity has created difficulties for scholars tracing the religion’s roots, distorting much of the historical investigation into the first two centuries of the Jesus movement. But what if Christianity died in the fourth or fifth centuries after it began? How would that change how historians see and understand its first two hundred years?
Considering these questions, three Bible scholars from the Westar Institute summarize the work of the Christianity Seminar and its efforts to offer a new way of thinking about Christianity and its roots. Synthesizing the institute’s most recent scholarship—bringing together the many archaeological and textual discoveries over the last twenty years—they have found:
There were multiple Jesus movements, not a singular one, before the fourth century
There was nothing called Christianity until the third century
There was much more flexibility and diversity within Jesus’s movement before it became centralized in Rome, not only regarding the Bible and religious doctrine, but also understandings of gender, sexuality and morality.
Exciting and revolutionary, After Jesus Before Christianity provides fresh insights into the real history behind how the Jesus movement became Christianity.
After Jesus Before Christianity includes more than a dozen black-and-white images throughout
Our study to date
Ecological Spirituality (Ecology & Justice Series)
By: Diarmuid O’Murchu
In his welcoming style O’Murchu reintroduces readers to the long history of humanity’s relationship with the creative Spirit of God, including and transcending religious traditions in a growing horizon of faith. As we rediscover the sacred here on Earth, we are called to connect spirit with Spirit, discerning and living an ecologically-focused spirituality for the well-being of creatures and ecosystems around the planet.
Every Bush Aflame
John Feehan
Every Bush Aflame explores the origins of biodiversity in Christian theology, its roots in our growing scientific understanding of the true nature and scale of life’s complexity and diversity, and the implications of all this for the kind of Christian response called for in Laudato Si’.
Particular emphasis is laid on the importance of the personal encounter with the natural world through which we read the ‘other book’ of revelation in which God reveals God to us: that ‘magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of God’s infinite beauty and goodness’