Christine Shepardson

CAN RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION AFFIRMATION COEXIST IN SOCIAL WORK? A CRITIQUE OF HODGE'S THEORETICAL, THEOLOGICAL, AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

Social work strives to be inclusive of all cultural groups and religious identities. However, a tension exists in the profession between freedom of religious expression and full acceptance of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. David Hodge and others claim social work is oppressive to evangelical Christians. This article critiques primarily Hodges arguments using an analysis of biblical scriptures, new class theory, freedom of expression, and social work ethics. Social work and human rights principles are discussed as a guide for negotiating these issues in the social work educational environment. Intergroup dialogue is offered as a pedagogical method for addressing the tension in social work classrooms.

Hopes for Intergroup Dialogue: Affirmation and Allies

This article is an invited response to “Toward a Learning Environment That Supports Diversity and Difference: A Response to Dessel, Bolen, and Shep - ardson,” by David R. Hodge (Journal of Social Work Education, 47(2), pp. 235-251).

Rewriting Julian's Legacy: John Chrysostom's On Babylas and Libanius' Oration 24

Libanius’ Oration 24 and John Chrysostom’s On Babylas represent contemporaneous and competing efforts to reshape narrations of the emperor Julian and thus influence local and imperial politics fifteen years after his death. Following the emperor Valens’ death at the battle of Adrianople in 378, which echoed Julian’s death in battle in 363, Libanius and Chrysostom revived the memory of Julian in order to address the strength of the gods and define ideal imperial behavior as Theodosius I came to power. Reading these two texts in light of each other highlights the renewed importance that Julian’s legacy carried immediately following Valens’ death, and the late fourth-century implications of that legacy for Antiochene and imperial politics.

Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity by Alexei M. Sivertsev (review)

Alexei Sivertsev demonstrates that eschatological Byzantine Jewish literature of the fi fth through the early eighth centuries “attempted to build its own ideological master narrative through constant dialogue with the dominant imperial culture,” which “involved the conscious positioning of Judaism as the successor of Rome’s and Constantinople’s universalism” (7). Sivertsev’s close textual analysis is complemented by a solid methodological framework, and his thesis is persuasive and thought-provoking. Although the book’s persistent repetition of its main point is unnecessary, its detailed textual analysis and examination of how the texts under consideration participated in the narrative culture of their time contribute meaningfully to scholarship on Late Antiquity and the history of Judaism. The book begins from the concept of a Byzantine commonwealth set forth by Dimitri Obolensky and given clearer shape by Garth Fowden, particularly the observation that Constantinople’s claim to be a Second Rome allowed minorities to perpetuate Byzantine culture’s supersessionist ideal by imagining themselves as Byzantium’s successor, a Third Rome (2). Sivertsev’s goal is to apply this model “to describe the Jewish experience in the Byzantine Empire” (5); Jews integrated and inverted the dominant culture, he argues, by positioning “themselves as the Byzantine imperial narrative’s sole legitimate heirs” (6). Adapting methodological approaches from David Biale and Ra’anan Boustan, Sivertsev interprets the Jewish texts he studies as “examples of ‘counter-historical’ and ‘counter-geographical’ engagement with dominant Byzantine literature” (6). In chapter 1, Sivertsev examines Christian and Jewish eschatological traditions in Late Antiquity. “By combining Roman imperial universalism with the messianic universalism of the Hebrew Bible as well as early Christian millenarian expectations,” he writes, “late antique Christianity succeeded in producing a comprehensive and coherent ideological framework that tied together the destiny of imperial Rome with that of Christ’s kerygma” (10). Not surprisingly, Byzantine Jews “also developed their own supersessionist narrative that both internalized and inverted a traditional Christian Roman supersessionism,” a narrative that “envisioned Jews as the legitimate heirs of the Roman imperial legacy” (13). Using data from disparate times and places, Sivertsev tries to trace the development of a fairly coherent eschatological expectation regarding a divinely sanctioned Jewish kingdom. He argues that in Byzantine Judaism, this coming kingdom was understood to be at once the restoration of the original Davidic kingdom and the direct successor of Rome (14). Chapters 2 and 3 are in-depth studies of individual texts, placed within the context of contemporary Byzantine culture and the upheaval caused by the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Chapter 2 focuses on some texts of the ’Otot ha-Mashiah genre, arguing that they represent “a Jewish reaction to the Heraclean imperial mythology,” such as