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Three Great Themes of the Bible: 3. Justice

Jun 24, 2019

Sarah Ruden
Free and open to the public!

7:30pm - 9:00pm in The Barn.

Registration required. This lecture will NOT be live streamed, but will be recorded for future viewing via our website.

Call Us for More Information!

610-566-4507, ext. 137

In the Bible, the idea of justice differs from the modern Western one, in which individual rights are central. However, the recognition of shared humanity, the urgency of social inclusion, and the authority of the law are common to both traditions. The entire Bible sees justice in dramatic terms and stresses God’s vindication of relatively powerless people (women, foreigners, the poor, the disabled, the dependent) when they have been wronged and abused. But in the Bible, justice is a moving target: power, no matter how justly acquired, is hard for humans to handle, making a self-critical attitude toward wrongdoing necessary. This moral cogency and psychological plausibility lend moving drama to the teachings.

To watch videos of the first two parts of Sarah’s 3-part Bible series, click on the links below.

Three Great Themes of the Bible: 1. Compassion
Monday, February 18, 2019

Three Great Themes of the Bible: 2. Peace/Nonviolence
Monday, April 22, 2019

Leader(s)

Sarah RudenSarah Ruden, a Quaker by “convincement,” is a poet, translator, essayist, and popularizer of Biblical linguistics. Trained at Harvard as a classical philologist, Sarah has won high praise for her book-length translations of Greek and Roman classics, including Vergil’s Aeneid, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction award. She has been a frequent lecturer at churches, colleges, and universities, and a contributor to a variety of journals, among them The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Books & Culture, and Commonweal.

During the past decade, Sarah has turned her attention to Biblical literature. After doing the initial research and writing at Pendle Hill, she published Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (2010), which provides a fresh look at Paul by detailing the brutal Roman Imperial world against which the evangelist’s message of love stood so strikingly. Rod Dreher of Beliefnet called Paul “[t]he most exciting book of historical analysis I’ve read in ages – indeed the most exciting book period…. What makes reading Ruden such a pleasure, aside from the quality of her thinking and her prose, is her willingness to question settled truths, and to do it with such a lightness of spirit.”

More recently, she published The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. She is currently working on a new translation of the Gospels, seeking to express more authentically in English the idioms, images, emotions, and ideas of the original text.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill. Click to view the flyer.