Antiquitopia

 Another open-access piece I wrote is a peer-reviewed blog post (yes, you read that correctly) on the Feminist Studies in Religion blog in January 2025.  It is my first (and only) officially published film analysis, focusing on the character of Weird Barbie in the Barbie Movie , with, naturally, references to biblical (and other) resonances in " Becoming Weird, Becoming Woman ."

 I have created a sidebar of open-access peer-reviewed work I have published since I was last active on this blog.  The first is a side-quest from my second book.  This article is "From Ignorant to Inspired: Moses in Gnostic Literature," Gnosis 6 (2021): 1-30.   Here is the abstract  One expects that ancient Gnostic sources would be hostile towards Moses as the igno- rant prophet of the deficient demiurge. While some ancient Gnostic sources uphold this perspective, others indicate greater ambivalence, as they both rely upon and resist Moses’s authority. Other sources cite Moses positively and present him as a prophet of true, spiritual realities, even to the point of portraying Moses as a proto-Gnostic. This variety of attitudes, moreover, follows exegetical patterns stemming from New Testament writings, especially Matthew, and social patterns, providing an index to how Gnostics viewed themselves vis-à-vis other Christians and other Christian Gnostics.

 My most recent book, which came out in 2025, is The Wild Word: Animals in the Gospels .  You can get it from McGill-Queen's University Press. Here is a description: Placed in a manger as an infant, Jesus seems to have been born into a world teeming with animal life. Yet read the stories again. Does Mary ride a donkey? Does the centurion ride a horse? Animals are everywhere in the gospels, though not always in the ways we expect. Where animals are visible, their presence means more than we realize. The Wild Word  explores the gospels’ well-known, forgotten, and missing portrayals of animals. Jaeda Calaway examines the many interactions between humans and other animals in these biblical texts, first considering forms of consumption, such as eating animals, wearing animal products, working animals, and sacrificing animals. She then turns to symbolic animality: how humans assign animal traits and archetypes to other humans, how divine and demonic powers intersect with wild a...

 Since I have been away from this blog, I have published two books. The first one I published in 2019 is The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity , and it is available at McGill-Queen's University Press . Here is a description from the publisher's website: Two verses about Moses in the Bible have been the subject of debate since the first century. In Exodus 33:20, God tells Moses that no one can see God and live, but Numbers 12:8 says that Moses sees the form of the Lord. How does one reconcile these two opposing statements? Did Moses see God, and who gets to decide? The Christian Moses  investigates how ancient Christians from the New Testament to Augustine of Hippo resolved questions of who can see God, how one can see God, and what precisely one sees. Jaeda Calaway explains that the decision about whether and how Moses saw God was not a neutral exercise for an early Christian. Rather, it established the i...

 As older followers of this blog might notice, some things are changing: slightly altered name and greatly altered appearance ... for my blog.   I am updating my sidebar because I have published two books in the last decade.   My most recent book is The Wild Word: Animals in the Gospels by McGill-Queen's University Press (2025).   Previously, I had also published The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity also by McGill-Queen's University Press (2019).  You can see how some of decade-old posts were leading up to the content of this book.   I will start posting a bit more on these books and any open-access publications I have accrued since last blogging in the next few days.  

 So ... after many years of not remembering my password to this blog, for some reason, today, of all days, I had a flash of remembrance and was able to log back in.  I will spend the next few days updating some information on the blog, maybe update its look if possible, and every so slowly breathe new life into these old dusty bones as they acquire new muscles, sinews, flesh, and blood.