Minding Scripture

Guest Professor Stephen Barr delves into particle physics, cosmology, and creation science in this new episode discussing the relationship between science and scripture.

While you might be aware of Islamic tradition regarding the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammed by the angel Gabriel, have you ever wondered how it was recorded and transmitted? Did Muhammed write down this divine message, or did transmission take place via another method? In this episode, our hosts Gabriel Reynolds, Francesca Murphy, and Mun’im Sirry are joined by Professor Shady H. Nasser, an associate professor of Arabic Studies at Harvard who provides his understanding of the variant rea...

This week, our hosts discuss one of the most critical, and potentially divisive, figures in their religious traditions: Abraham. How do Jews, Muslims, and Christians view this influential figure? Is it right to emphasize his role as the progenitor of the three “Abrahamic” religions? Abraham's calling is the beginning of the story of election, and he is considered the first monotheist. Yet how did he arrive at belief in God? Was it by reason or by faith? And does God's command to Abraham to sa...

Fr. Olivier-Thomas Venard, Dominican priest and professor at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, joins Francesca Murphy and Gabriel Reynolds for this episode of Minding Scripture. Fr. Venard bridges intellectual worlds—modern French literature, the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, biblical archaeology and historical-critical study of the Bible, literary theory and linguistics—and finds their convergence in the words of Scripture. Fr. Venard discusses his trilogy on Thomas Aquinas as we...

Under the conditions of globalization, more religious people than ever find themselves in close contact with members of other religious traditions. Our hosts convene in this episode for a scriptural conversation on religious pluralism. How is the religious “other” discussed in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? How do each of these traditions interpret the fact of multiple religions? Is the multiplicity of religions positively willed by God—or just permitted by God as a resul...

This episode we welcome a distinguished New Testament scholar, Amy Jill Levine, who is the world expert on the Jewishness of the New Testament. She engages questions like, Why are anti-Jewish readings of the New Testament just bad readings of the text? What are some of Jesus’ parables that are clarified by reading them as Jewish parables? What does it mean for Jews to study the New Testament, either academically or as part of their self-understanding as Jews? Was there such a thing as “normat...

What importance do developments in critical scholarship on the Qur’an have for the life of faith? How have Muslims traditionally understood the Qur’an? What were the nineteenth- and twentieth-century beginnings of Western critical scholarship on the Qur’an, and what are its motivating questions today? Where do Western critical scholarship and traditional reading of the Qur’an converge? Do the findings of Western critical scholarship fundamentally challenge traditional Muslim understandings of...

In light of the global Coronavirus pandemic, this month’s episode of Minding Scripture reflects on sickness, healing, and isolation in the Bible and in the Qur’an. What sources of hope do we find in the Abrahamic traditions for a time of sickness and quarantine? How might these three traditions interpret the pandemic and the quarantine religiously?

This month, Minding Scripture, which brings together the life of the mind and the life of faith, asks guest speaker Nathan Eubank and one of our hosts, Tzvi Novick, how historical-critical scholarship in both the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament has developed over the last two centuries and what its current place in our understanding of the Bible should be. What is historical criticism and how did it begin? What is the enduring value of historical criticism, both intellectually and...

Life after death is a central concept in all three Abrahamic religions. What happens to a person after death? How do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam envision heaven and hell? And what can the faithful expect at the resurrection?