What Does a Religion Feel Like? Thoughts on Emotion in Early Christianity
August 25, 2025
Meet VCU Authors: Andrew Crislip
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m
Location: Online via Zoom
Join us for a Meet VCU Authors talk with Andrew Crislip, Chair of the Department of History at VCU, and the author of Ascetic Passions: Emotions in Early Christian Egypt.
Description
The first Christians did not just preach the forgiveness of sin and the conversion to belief in Jesus as the Messiah. They preached a conversion of the emotions. Christians engaged in distinctive programs of emotional teaching and regulation, and demanded changes in emotional norms to distinguish themselves from outsiders. Even beyond their concerns with emotional norms or expression, Christians placed the passions at the heart of their spiritual life by critically reflecting on the value of emotions and the role of the passions in nature, humanity, and the divine. Christians did not just change the course of the Roman Empire, they offered new ways of feeling that transformed the self and community.
About the Author
Andrew Crislip, Ph.D. is the Chair of the Department of History, and the Blake Chair in the History of Christianity, at Virginia Commonwealth University. His current work focuses on Egyptian monasticism, ancient healing traditions, and the history of emotions, through which he explores Christian approaches to passions within the contexts of ancient philosophy and medicine and the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of emotion. His books include Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great (with David Brakke, Cambridge University Press), Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press). He has published articles in Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, The Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, Studia Patristica, and Vigiliae Christianae.