Thursday, 5 December 2019 - 7:00 PM
Cohen Hall 2nd Floor Lounge, University of Pennsylvania
Sponsored by: Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins
For the 2019-2020 year, the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins will explore home life and the domestic in conjunction with religious identity. Recent scholarship has interrogated the traditional demarcation between the public and the private, opening fresh ground for conversation about religious practice and privacy that sidesteps discourses of interiority. This year, PSCO hopes to integrate archaeological, anthropological, and textual data which give diverse portraits of domestic life in the ancient world. This year, we hope to ask questions such as: Who is included in “the household,” and how do ideas of kinship overlap (or not) with the category of the home? How did the home lives of early Christians look similar to or different from their neighbors? Were Christians remarkable or unique in how they approached domestic issues? How did the emergence of Christianity affect discourses of oikos and oikumene in the Greco-Roman world? What types of variation are visible between Christians of different geographic and cultural locales, and between Christians and others in the same locale?