Books by Elizabeth A. Clark

In The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth A. Clark examines the lives and scholarship of professors Arthur Cushman McGiffert, George LaPiana, and Shirley Jackson Case, who modernized the academic study of Christianity in the early twentieth century.

Founding the Fathers explores the development of early Christian history and theology as a discipline in four nineteenth-century Protestant seminaries in the United States. Archival sources reveal how professors adjusted German scholarship to fit Americans' evangelical assumptions and to make the Catholic past more palatable.

A study of how asceticism was promoted through Biblical interpretation, Reading Renunciation uses contemporary literary theory to unravel the writing strategies of the early Christian authors. Not a general discussion of early Christian teachings on celibacy and marriage, the book is a close examination, in the author's words, of how "e;the Fathers' axiology of abstinence informed their interpretation of Scriptural texts and incited the production of ascetic meaning."e; Elizabeth Clark begins with a survey of scholarship concerning early Christian asceticism that is designed to orient the nonspecialist. Section Two is organized around potentially troubling issues posed by Old Testament texts that demanded skillful handling by ascetically inclined Christian exegetes. The third section, "e;Reading Paul,"e; focuses on the hermeneutical problems raised by I Corinthians 7, and the Deutero-Pauline and Pastoral Epistles. Elizabeth Clark's remarkable work will be of interest to scholars of late antiquity, religion, literary theory, and history.