It can’t have been comfortable to be John the Baptist. Camel’s hair clothes and locusts aside, it’s never pleasant to be the
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Emphasizing his lament with poetic reprisal, Joel echoes the at times inarticulate cries of Jeremiah’s lamentations. The devastation is widespread. Where one travesty ended, another began, and so on and so forth. The land, the nation, is ravaged. In quick succession, Joel begins to lay out the horrors. Crying out,
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Throughout the book of Ezekiel, he finds himself, along with others, trying to figure their way through the exile after the Babylonians had attacked Jerusalem. The prophet Ezekiel is known to have some fantastical and vivid visions of the God’s presence in the midst of their exilic experience. These visions
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Recently freed from the grip of the Assyrian empire, consumed by giddy nationalism, Judah whipsawed between two competing visions of what it meant to be God’s people. The Mosaic covenant established at Sinai was clear: if the people wanted to thrive, they had to follow God’s commandments. But Judah also
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The biggest challenge for this series was taking a very patriarchal and overtly heteronormative list of male prophets - and thinking of how I could even crack open the binaristic world of “us” and “them” that is typical of the prophecies about Israel. Isaiah gave me a gentler start as
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I wasn’t sure if I should say yes to doing this series of illustrations. The prophets of the Bible I grew up with are known for being xenophobic, nationalist, sometimes violent and often judgemental. Queering them would mean trying to look through and beyond verse upon verse of inflicting death
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There are two things happening with this final piece of Mark’s good news. First, we’ve got some revisionist history happening. Scholars agree that Mark was probably the very first of the gospels written. It’s the shortest and it’s missing some key pieces that the others have (the virgin birth isn’t
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Mark’s most horrific chapter opens with Jesus’ second interrogation. The anonymous Markan author tells of Jesus being given into the hands of Pilate who would’ve been historical Jesus’ most formidable opponent, although the author chose not to frame it according to this historical likelihood. What the author may have expressed
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