Jewish history through Christian eyes
Must Christianity always define itself against Judaism? The Didache didn't.
church fathers
Chaos and continuity
Luminaries praise Paula Fredriksen's Sin as gripping and magnificent. Her book on Augustine was both of these things. This one isn't.
A sociologist might see in football a society's need to control and ritualize violence. The church fathers, however, weren't much for sociologists.
When black theologians focused on nontraditional and extra-Christian sources, white theologians had an excuse to ignore them. Not anymore.