Dr. Margaret MacDonald

 

Welcome to the first episode of the third season of What Matters Most, featuring Dr. Margaret MacDonald. Margaret MacDonald is Professor of Religion at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Margaret MacDonald is a prominent and preeminent scholar in the fields of New Testament and early Christianity. We discuss Margaret’s excellent book The Power of Children: The Construction of Christian Families in the Greco-Roman World, but much more, as you will soon hear, including her forthcoming lecture at the Promise of Christian Education conference in Vancouver in May 2025 on ancient Christian learning circles, which forms part of her forthcoming book on Christian education in antiquity. In the course of doing that, we talk about household codes, house churches, families, girls, boys, enslaved children, Dead Sea Scrolls, Pauline letters, the Pastoral epistles, Deutero-Pauline epistles, Paul and Thecla, and a lot more. 

She offers an integrated picture of early Christian families, fathers, mothers, children, and enslaved people and their roles in the family, in the Church, and the broader world in this book and in her other, extensive research.  In addition to numerous essays and journal articles, her publications include four other books: Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald (with Janet Tulloch), A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (2006); Colossians and Ephesians (Sacra Pagina; 2000); Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman (1996); The Pauline Churches: A socio-historical study of institutionalization in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Writings (1988).

Enjoy this deep dive into the world and lives of ancient children!

 

What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.

Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Send me questions, send me ideas for guests, send me comments. Please follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter @biblejunkies, or on Facebook, at Biblejunkies, or on Instagram @biblejunkies. Or email me at [email protected]. Let me know what you think.

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John W. Martens