My research focuses on New Testament narratives, particularly the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, though I have also published on 1 and 2 Corinthians. Drawing on my early graduate training in English literature, my work tends to foreground literary analysis and intertextual analysis (especially of the role of Israel’s scriptural traditions in the New Testament). More recently, I have begun incorporating reception history into my research. Because I believe that Scripture does and should speak a word of challenge and encouragement to the church as it seeks to navigate complex situations of injustice and division in the world today, I integrate these approaches into a holistic framework that centers matters such as emotions, embodiment, and social location—both within the biblical text and in relation to readers of Scripture. Even at its most technical, then, my scholarship is informed by concern for such pressing contemporary issues as mental health and social justice.
My current book project—tentatively titled Embodied Allusions: Intersectional-Intertextual Analysis as a Resource for Practical Theological Interpretation of New Testament Narratives—most clearly illustrates this convergence of approaches and commitments. The project, which is under contract with Baker Academic, arises from a classroom conversation in which an African American woman student asked whether the meticulous work of tracing connections between the Testaments made any difference for oppressed people. Embodied Allusions is my attempt to respond to this student’s probing question. I supplement intertextual analysis with intersectional analysis that attends to characters’ complex embodied lives in community. Through case studies focused on passages in which scriptural allusion is carried by characters’ bodies and social locations, I demonstrate that this integrated approach to NT narratives can indeed help us to hear how Scripture speaks to a range of theological-ethical questions today—including pressing pastoral issues related to gender, age, parental status, and other sorts of difference that are often marked by power imbalances, conflict, and injustice. Thus, in addition to shedding light on selected passages and stimulating conversation across subdisciplinary divides within New Testament scholarship, this project will show that the technical work of intertextual analysis has the potential to bear much fruit in practical theology.
Similar reading strategies and pastoral impulses animated my dissertation, a revised version of which has been published as Lukan Joy and the Life of Discipleship: A Narrative Analysis of the Conditions that Lead to Joy according to Luke. Contributing to a recent surge in publications on emotions in the New Testament, I analyze the conditions—that is, the dispositions, circumstances, commitments, practices, and the like—that lead to joy in the Gospel according to Luke, with a briefer treatment of Acts. By attending to the interconnection of joy with other components of discipleship, my holistic description of joy-according-to-Luke helps to make sense of the fact that Luke attaches moral weight to whether and why people rejoice. For Luke, I argue, one’s joy(lessness) in a given situation can indeed be praiseworthy or blameworthy, insofar as (and only insofar as) this reflexive response evinces faithfulness or a lack thereof in the whole life of discipleship. The project arose, in part, from my concern for the glib ways in which contemporary Christians sometimes demand rejoicing. Through a nuanced depiction of joy and what facilitates it, Luke-Acts offers resources for cultivating joy today, a possibility that I explore in a pastoral postscript. While Luke does not directly address mental illness, unresolved medical issues, or the effects of racial trauma, his treatment of joy does offer pastorally sensitive wisdom for those seeking to foster joy in the midst of these or other difficult circumstances.
Several of my article- or chapter-length publications also engage in careful literary analysis with practical theological questions in view. For instance, in “Paul’s Allusive Reasoning in 1 Corinthians 11.7–12” (New Testament Studies 65 [2019]: 43–58), I argue that recognizing an underappreciated allusion to 1 Esdras can help us perceive, if not a total undoing of patriarchal reasoning, at least a much more nuanced take on gender than is often thought to be present in Paul’s argument about head-coverings. In “Scriptural Allusion and Bodily Age in Luke 1–2: Narrativizing Theological Continuity through Allusive Characterization and Plotting” (in Practicing Intertextuality: Jewish and Greco-Roman Exegetical Techniques in the New Testament. Ed. Max J. Lee and B.J. Oropeza. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021, 91–108), I analyze the theological import of characters’ ages in the Lukan infancy narrative, showing how this biosocial descriptor serves the narrative purpose of underscoring theological continuity across Israel’s scriptural traditions, Luke’s Gospel, and Acts. The resulting interpretation pushes against both anti-Jewish/supercessionist and ageist interpretations of Luke 1–2. More recently, in “Age, Maternity, and Allusion: Elizabeth and Other Mothers” (Journal for the Study of the New Testament 46.3 [2024]: 321–48), I argue for the usefulness of intertextual-intersectional analysis by showing how attending to scriptural allusions enriches our understanding of Elizabeth's complex characterization in Luke 1. I have also written a chapter-long commentary on 2 Corinthians for The New Testament in Color (ed. Esau McCaulley et al., IVP, 2024). In my comments, I was tasked with foregrounding the hermeneutical effects of my social location as a white woman—a particularly pertinent question as I wrote during the summer of 2020. This project reinforced my resolve to seek out the voices of scholars from historically underrepresented groups, both as a way of becoming more aware of my own oversights and biases and as a way to allow my scholarship to be further deepened and nuanced through learning from differently situated others.
Together, these projects reflect my abiding interest in the theological interpretation of Scripture, the study of intertextuality, embodiment in the New Testament, and academically rigorous scholarship that has implications for the life of the church today. Going forward, I anticipate that my scholarship will continue to bring together literary analysis and practical theology with a view to highlighting how a careful reading of the New Testament might motivate and inform the church’s commitment to fostering a more just world in which all people have more ready access to the conditions that lead to joy.