LoginFeatured Researcher
Dr. Mary Ann Beavis
Department of Religion and Culture
My general areas of research are the New Testament, Christian Origins, and Religion and Popular Culture. I teach courses in biblical studies, early Christian literature, women and religion, and religion and culture. My recent publications have been in the areas of parable studies, the historical Jesus, and feminist theology in a Canadian context. My current research includes a commentary on the Gospel of Mark for Baker Academic Press. I have recently submitted a draft, which I expect to be revising in the coming months. Although it’s difficult to be too original in a commentary on a Gospel, themes that I highlight throughout the book are the Gospel’s relationship to first-century Judaism, the very “human” christology of Mark, and the dramatic quality of the Gospel. One spinoff of this project is an article that will be appearing in the January 2010 issue of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, entitled “The Resurrection of Jephthah’s Daughter: Judges 11:34-40 and Mark 5:21-24, 35-43.”
My next big writing project will be a commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews in the Wisdom Commentary series, the first multi-volume feminist commentary on the Bible ever to be published (Liturgical Press). It will be a challenge to bring a feminist perspective to a book of the bible that rarely mentions women, and whose outlook is anything but feminist, but I hope to be able to apply feminist, liberationist, postcolonial and other lenses to bear on this fascinating but somewhat neglected New Testament writing. One exciting aspect of these commentaries is that lead authors have the latitude to invite scholars with different kinds of experience and expertise to participate in the project, thus enabling a variety of voices to be heard in the final product. Two young Filipina scholars have agreed to serve as “contributing voices” for this commentary, and I expect to be inviting others as the work develops.
Another aspect of my research involves a series of interviews with women who integrate Christianity and goddess spirituality into their religious lives, the results of which I hope to publish in future articles, and possibly a book. At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2010, I will be presenting a paper on the recent phenomenon of Mary Magdalene being considered as a goddess in some emergent forms of Christianity.
Another big project that is looming ahead of me is the co-editing of a Dictionary of the Bible and Western Culture (together with Michael Gilmour of Providence College in Manitoba), a student-oriented reference work that grew out of my frustration over the lack of one-volume works that contain basic information both on biblical topics and themes and on how these have been interpreted throughout history. I have written several of the articles for the Dictionary myself (“Mary Magdalene,” “Jezebel” and “Rechabites”), but most of them are written by scholars from all over the world, so there will be a lot of editing for us to do in the next couple of months!
A final, ongoing project of mine is the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, an online, peer-reviewed, academic journal that I founded in 2002 with support from the University of Saskatchewan, and currently funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is hosted by the Department of Religion and Culture.
 Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed.”— St. Thomas More |
