Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
Partaking in the Great Supper of God: Figuring Birds in the Apocalypse of John
Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
Sarah E. Rollens [+]
Rhodes College
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Sarah E. Rollens is the R.A. Webb Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. She completed her MA at University of Alberta in 2008 and her PhD at University of Toronto in 2013. Her work focuses on the social context and history of earliest Christianity. Her first book Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project of the Sayings Gospel Q was published in 2014. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.
Description
This essay examines the small collection of avian imagery present in the Apocalypse of John, which helps animate the unfolding conflict in the unfolding revelation. The imagery of birds is consistently aligned with the agency and activity of the divine, and they are also figures with communicative power, closely connected the divine violence that plays out in the text. Far from being merely ornamental in the story or peripheral to the eschatological visions, these feathered figures are complex and intriguing characters in the Apocalypse.