Envisioning God in the Humanities: Essays on Christianity Judaism and Ancient Religion in Honor of Melissa Harl Sellew (Westar Seminar on God and the Human Future)

The humanities offer insights into the highest (and lowest) capabilities of our own natures and at their best they function as prophetic champions of human dignity and as inspired celebrants of beauty. Envisioning God in the Humanities pays tribute to the career of Melissa Harl Sellew a scholar and teacher who embodies the ideals of these academic disciplines. The collaboration of these essays attests to the potentialities for transcendence that emerge from rigorous and collective reflection on the texts images and ideas produced in ancient societies. Taking its cue from Professor Sellews own distinguished scholarship this collection of studies begins with analyses of the New Testament Gospels then moves more broadly toward the religious life of the ancient world as attested both in literature and materiality among Jews and Christians Greeks and Romans. Just as Sellew has done throughout her career so this volume invites us into to the joy of exploring distant societies and in so doing into the fuller discovery of ones own self.