Here now is the second post on Sting and the New Testament by my colleague Evyatar Marienberg.  To learn more about Evyatar and his book on Sting (Sting and Religion: The Catholic-Shaped Imagination of a Rock Icon, Cascade Books / Wipf & Stock, Oregon 2021) see yesterday's post. ****************************** Those who checked the Wikipedia’s page about Sting (and many other online sources), might have noticed that it is said his “real” name is “Gordon Matthew Thomas.” I did not mention “Thomas” in his name, following his birth certificate, and still the reality of Sting’s legal name. Some might have also noticed that a saying attributed to the New Testament’s figure of Thomas was mentioned above. Thomas, in fact, is some kind of a ghost around Sting. In his most recent album, The Bridge of 2021, the ninth track is called “The Bells of St. Thomas” (full disclosure: Sting shared with me an early demo of that song, and asked me for comments). In this song, the interlocutor wakes up in an unknown bed, in the [...]

One of my interesting and unusually wide-ranging colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC is Evyatar Marienberg, trained in orthodox circles in Haifa, PhD from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, expert in Rabbinic Judaism, author of a textbook on Roman Catholicism, and, most recently, a study of  Sting and Religion.  That's right, the English rock singer and song writer:  Sting and Religion: The Catholic-Shaped Imagination of a Rock Icon, Cascade Books / Wipf & Stock, Oregon 2021. I've asked Evyatar to write some posts for us.  Here's the first of two on Sting and the New Testament. ****************************** Professor Bart Ehrman, a colleague, a friend, and the person who was running the search committee that hired me for a position at his (and since 2009, also my) department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was asking me for some time now if I would like to write for this blog. Well, I, unfortunately, recently, said yes. Following his suggestions of topics, I might [...]

In this short thread I'm trying to explain the difference between a trade book for a general audience and an academic book for scholars, through example.  In my  previous post I gave the beginning couple of pages of my trade book with Simon and Schuster, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. The academic book coming out on April 5 is not covering the same material but is dealing with a related aspect of it, and at a much deeper level.  The book does not pursue the question of where the ideas of heaven and hell came from (the topic of the trade book), but rather explores narrated journeys to the realms of the dead in a range of ancient texts.   The book is called Journeys to Heaven and Hell in the Early Christian Tradition (Yale University Press). You can get some basic sense of the different levels of the two books by comparing the way they begin.  So, in contrast with the trade book from yesterday, here is the academic book. (Again: Please don't [...]