Mary, did you consent?

The Christian and Islamic doctrine of the virgin birth claim God asexually impregnated the Virgin Mary with Jesus, Mary's impregnation was fully consensual (virgin consent), and God never acts immorally (divine goodness). First, I show that God's actions and Mary's background beliefs undermine her consent by virtue of coercive incentives, Mary's comparative powerlessness, and the generation of moral conflicts. Second, I show that God's non-disclosure of certain reasonably relevant facts undermines Mary's informed consent. Third, I show that a recent attempt by Jack Mulder to rescue virgin consent fails. As divine goodness and virgin consent are more central to orthodoxy, Christians and Muslims have powerful reason to reject virgin birth.

Adaptive, caste-specific changes to recombination rates in a thelytokous honeybee population

The ability to clone oneself has clear benefits—no need for mate hunting or dilution of one's genome in offspring. It is therefore unsurprising that some populations of haplo-diploid social insects have evolved thelytokous parthenogenesis—the virgin birth of a female. But thelytokous parthenogenesis has a downside: the loss of heterozygosity (LoH) as a consequence of genetic recombination. LoH in haplo-diploid insects can be highly deleterious because female sex determination often relies on heterozygosity at sex-determining loci. The two female castes of the Cape honeybee, Apis mellifera capensis , differ in their mode of reproduction. While workers always reproduce thelytokously, queens always mate and reproduce sexually. For workers, it is important to reduce the frequency of recombination so as to not produce offspring that are homozygous. Here, we ask whether recombination rates differ between Cape workers and Cape queens that we experimentally manipulated to reproduce thelytokously. We tested our hypothesis that Cape workers have evolved mechanisms that restrain genetic recombination, whereas queens have no need for such mechanisms because they reproduce sexually. Using a combination of microsatellite genotyping and whole-genome sequencing we find that a reduction in recombination is confined to workers only.

Battle for the Soul of a City: John Roach Straton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York, 1922–1935

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a defining moment for New York in the 1920s and one of the most significant theological battles in the city's history, as key doctrines of the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Christ were debated in the mainstream as well as the religious press. The principal figures in the controversy were John Roach Straton and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two prominent clerics whose intellectual and oratorical confrontation showed just how deep this nationwide religious divide had become. Straton and Fosdick used their New York pulpits as public platforms to articulate their opposing theological visions and to justify them as the correct expression of historic Christianity in the present. In doing so, they made the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy very much a New York story, remapping the city's Protestant evangelical culture and reorienting one of the most important episodes in American religious history. The aftermath of the conflict, however, reveals that the lines between “fundamentalist” and “modernist” as distinct categories of religious experience became blurred as each embraced elements of the other. By 1935, both fundamentalists and modernists in New York City had been transformed, just as they had transformed the city.

Virgin Birth Controversy. Study in the Anthropology of Ignorance

Virgin birth controversy enjoys a privileged status in the history of anthropology and reflects the exceptional interest anthropology takes in “biological facts” of human procreation. In the widest sense, this controversy centers around procreative beliefs, or more precisely, the “discovery” of people who were considered to be ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity and the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy (in humans). This paper offers an overview of the main theoretical approaches and an insight into the variety of empirical findings presented by the numerous participants in the virgin birth debate. It especially focuses on a critical assessment of the provided argumentation on the subject of procreative ignorance, as well as the matter of interpretation of ethnographical facts and an analysis of the meaning of “biological facts” from a cross-cultural perspective.

An Exegesis Paper On Ignatius To Ephesians 18-19

There are 7 letters written by Ignatius from Antioch, while traveling to Rome. One of them is the church at Ephesus which consists of 21 chapters. In this letter, Ignatius urges these Christians to be in unity with their bishop, because the Docetists were denying the true humanity of Christ. We also find here the unique emphasis on Jesus Christ as the one physician and the Eucharist as ‘the medicine of immortality’. Furthermore, by insisting on the virgin birth to explain Jesus’ existence as the Christ, Ignatius makes a vigorous anti-docetic statement. In this exegetical study, the writer will specifically examine only chapters 18-19, to find the meaning of the writing of these two chapters, which are related to suffering through self-sacrifice. Ignatius speaks in self-deprecating terms as he gives his life as a self-offering. By the world, he is regarded as a criminal but in God’s plan of salvation (oikonomia) his sufferings benefit the church. Ignatius merely makes this more explicit with his remark that what God had prepared ‘had its beginning’. He probably would have gone on to stress the passion as the culmination of God’s plan, though he was also conscious of the fact that Satan’s power had not even yet been completely destroyed.

The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Virgin Birth

This chapter surveys the place of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Christian tradition. It examines her place in the New Testament, with particular focus on her role in the infancy narrative found in the Gospel of Luke. It also considers Mary’s place in the early Church, from the first Christian community through the Christological councils of the fourth and fifth centuries The chapter includes a brief history of Marian devotions such as the Rosary from the Reformation period to modern day, including debate over the Immaculate Conception and the perpetual virginity of Mary, and the history of Marian apparitions at Lourdes, Guadaloupe, Mexico, and Guadaloupe, Spain.

The Oxford Handbook of Christmas

Christmas is an unrivalled annual celebration. This volume traces its history from the early Church’s decision to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on 25 December through the medieval period and all the way into the twenty-first century. It explores Christmas around the world, including in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America. It also presents the variety of ways that worshipping communities observe the festival from Roman Catholics to Reformed Protestants. All of the features of the Nativity Story are covered from the Holy Family to the Magi and the Star, as are the biblical and theological unpinning of Christmas, including the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. Carols and music, as well as paintings, literature, and film and television, are all treated by experts, as are the more cultural aspects of the season ranging from Santa Claus to Christmas trees to food and drink. Finally, societal issues related to the law, secularity, commercialism, and consumerism are addressed as well. In other words, this volume aims at comprehensive treatment of Christmas across time, space, cultures, and the varieties of religious and secular contexts.