FAITHANDREASON is proud to present "God and Imperial Power, Jesus and Economic Injustice" featuring scholars John Dominic Crossan and Joerg Rieger.

Walk-ins are welcome at this event!

Please view the map at right for directions to First United Methodist Church in Richardson for the event. The full schedule is listed below.
For those who pre-registered for a meal, we'll have your meal preference ready.
For a list of nearby local restaurants, please click here for a downloadable PDF.

About the Scholars

In the last forty years John Dominic Crossan has written twenty-three books on the historical Jesus, earliest Christianity, and the historical Paul. Five of them have been national religious bestsellers for a combined total of twenty-four months. The scholarly core of his work is the trilogy from The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) through The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998), to In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2004). His latest book, God & Empire, Jesus Against Rome Then and Now, was published by HarperSanFrancisco in March 2007. His work has also been translated into twelve foreign languages, including Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Russian.

Along with Marcus Borg, he is co-authoring a series of books with HarperOne, San Francisco: The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem (2006); The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about the Birth of Jesus (2007); and The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009).

He has lectured to lay and scholarly audiences across the United States as well as in Ireland and England, Scandinavia and Finland, Australia and New Zealand, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. He has been interviewed on 200 radio stations, including four times on NPR’s "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross. He has also been interviewed on television networks such as ABC's PrimeTime, Peter Jennings Reporting, and Nightline, CBS' Early Show and 48 Hours, NBC's Dateline, and Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and on cable programs such as A&E, History, Discovery, and the National Geographic Channel.

Joerg Rieger was recently named the Wendland-Cook Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, an appointment that will be celebrated with a lecture and reception October 8 at 5:00 PM in the new Elizabeth Perkins Prothro building on the Perkins campus at SMU. His work addresses the relation of theology to public life, using tools from cultural studies, critical theory, and religious studies, and reflecting on the misuse of power in politics and economics. A United Methodist clergyman and a native of Germany, he has lectured in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, England, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. He is active in Jobs with Justice in North Texas and is co-founder of the Workers' Rights Board in the Dallas area. His books include Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (2007); Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology (ed., 2003); God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (2001); and Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (1998). His most recent book, No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future, is due in fall 2009. A volume that he co-authored with Brazilian theologian Jung Mo Sung and Argentinian theologian Nestor Miguez, titled Beyond the Spirit of Empire: New Perspectives in Politics and Religion, is also forthcoming in October.