Angie Peters

Every family has customs nobody remembers choosing. Every church has habits nobody remembers voting on. Every nation has stories it tells about itself that nobody remembers fact-checking. At some point, a practice stops being something a person does and starts being something a person is — and the moment that happens, questioning it stops feeling like curiosity and starts feeling like betrayal. That's the terrain of Mark 7. Is faithfulness measured by getting the details right? The scene...

We are remarkably good at cleaning house. We sweep the floor, scrub the counters, organize the pantry, and draw stark, black lines around our lives. In civil religion, this is what passes for holiness: a carefully maintained checklist of what we don't touch, where we don't go, and who we don't associate with. We call it morality. We call it spiritual discipline. Underneath the bleach, it is often something far older and more frantic: a transactional curse-list designed to keep God appeased,...

There's a limestone slab in a museum in Istanbul with seven lines of Greek chiseled into it, found buried near the Temple Mount in 1871. It once stood on a low stone wall inside Herod's Temple, and it says, in effect: no foreigner may pass this point. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for the death that follows. That wasn't a metaphorical threat. Archaeologists have found copies of it. Josephus describes the wall it stood on. Rome itself permitted Jewish authorities to carry out...