Let’s look at the rape trial of Saifullah Khan — As he’s big news in the legal world, I’m catching up on the life of Saifullah Khan. His family is from Afghanistan. In 1992 they were exiled amid a Taliban takeover. ‘Saif’, as he’s called (pronounced ‘syph’), was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1993. He was seen to be very bright, and was sent to America. He got a full scholarship to Yale University.

The strange tale of ‘P.Oxy. 87.5575' — In 1896, two British archaeologists were digging in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and came upon garbage dumped from the 3rd through 7th centuries. It included biblical manuscripts that had been thrown out by some local Christians. Thousands of boxes of ancient trash were taken back to England, to be sorted out over the next centuries. This would become known as the ‘Oxyrhynchus Papyri’.

A startling moment in Bible scholarship — In the late 1990s, a literature student was taking a graduate class in the Bible. Thinking about one of its most bizarre passages, he had an extraordinary idea. All the confusion over Romans 7:5–25, Austin Busch suspected, was because Christian readers had assumed the speaker was a man. The speaker, he thought, was a woman. Indeed, the references seemed clear. The speaker was Eve herself.

Evangelicals don’t know much about their favorite writers. Even Sarah Young, author of the #1 all-time bestselling Christian book, was mostly a blank. Last year I wrote the first biographical profile of her, “The #1 Christian Writer is a Woman Never Seen Publicly.” It was a strange story of a Wellesley College philosophy major who became a reclusive right-wing Christian star by writing a devotional, Jesus Calling, in the voice of ‘Jesus’.

A new memoir is a backstage pass to a religious movement — In the 1990s, the Evangelical world made a big push to eliminate all premarital sex and dating. It was the era of the “Purity Culture.” That lasted two decades, as horror stories were reported—like about the movement’s leader. In 2018, Joshua Harris, author of the 1997 bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, got a divorce, then left Evangelicalism.

An Evangelical story comes into focus — In 2009, the world loved a movie about a 16-year-old Black youth taken in by some rich white Southern Baptists. They wanted him to play football. The Blind Side might not seem like such a heartwarming tale, but the white people kept saying they did it for Jesus. Then a nice white woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy, was motherly to him. So it felt good? I’m thinking about the Evangelical story of Michael Oher, the football player…

A feminist made her way by beauty and insults — In 1969, a literature scholar from Australia wanted to sell the world on a major change to the gendered behavior of men and women. A tall order. She didn’t want to be some dry academic commentator. She’d make her way in the popular media. And so the world met Germaine Greer, the feminist shock artist who became a global force. For me, she is a study in how to be interesting.

Let’s dismantle a religious “doctrine” — When you grow up Christian, you’re told that God loves men, and women are second class. But then you might go learning facts from scholars? I have to laugh when Christian men study up, and realize their gender is not specially beloved. In Nijay K. Gupta’s new book, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, he thinks back on his Christian youth:

The strange story of the “Letter to Diognetus” — In 1436, an Italian Catholic man was visiting Constantinople, trying to convert Muslims. He noticed a fish merchant using pages of an old book to wrap his product. Thomas D’Arezzo examined the book, and found a collection of early Christian texts—with one he’d never seen. It was a guide on how to “do” Christianity from the early days of the faith. But what the text described was unrecognizable.