Amy-Jill Levine – “Mary Ellen Borges Memorial Lecturer”

University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University

Levine posterHearing Jesus’s Parables Through Jewish Ears

Thursday, April 25, 2013
Allison United Methodist Church, 7:00 p.m.
(99 Mooreland Ave., Carlisle, Pa)

Understanding Jesus’s parables requires understanding Jesus’s Jewish context. How would the parables have been heard by Jesus’s original Jewish listeners, and how might those original messages still speak to Jews and Christians today?

This event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church on the Square and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Levine PhotoBiography (provided by the speaker)

Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies, and professor of Jewish studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Science in Nashville, TN; she is also affiliated professor, Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge UK. Holding the B.A. from Smith College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, she has honorary doctorates from the University of Richmond, the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, the University of South Carolina-Upstate, Drury University, and Christian Theological Seminary. Her recent publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus and The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us, co-authored with Douglas Knight.  With Marc Brettler she also edited the Jewish Annotated New Testament. A self-described Yankee Jewish feminist, Professor Levine is a member of Congregation Sherith Israel, an Orthodox Synagogue, although she is often quite unorthodox.

Mary Ellen Borges Memorial Lecture
The purpose of this Memorial Lecture is to honor the life and ministry of Mary Ellen Borges by establishing an annual event which will feature a person well qualified to address topics of importance relating to spiritual or social issues.

Such presentations may address a wide range of topics and issues which might have contemporary application or interest, or historical importance. These topics would not be limited to theological, biblical, or ecclesiastical issues, but also could include ethical, societal, psychological, philosophical, and scientific topics.

As a joint venture of St. John’s Episcopal Church, on the Square, Carlisle and the Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, this annual lecture is intended to bring the area religious community and the college community together as topics of importance and presenters of recognized accomplishment and authority are invited to address both constituent sponsoring groups.