Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. A historian of religion, her early research focused on the discovery of ancient secret gospels in upper Egypt. Pagels has written several books on the history of religion, including, most recently, “Miracle and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.” Other books include “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent,” “The Origin of Satan,” “Why Religion? A Personal Story” and the award-winning “The Gnostic Gospels,” which suggests that the Gospel of Thomas echoes mystical Jewish traditions. Pagels is the recipient of the 2016 National Medal for the Humanities from President Obama, an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Highlights
Big IdeaIf these [religious] traditions weren’t reappropriated, recreated, reinvented, and transformed to deal with the needs and issues of very different generations and people all over the world in different situations, they wouldn’t survive.Elaine Pagels
Previously
With so much of Western philosophy centered on the individual, we can only understand those around us in comparison — and competition — with ourselves. There are less self-cen...
Jesus and Buddha, separated by 3,000 miles and 400 hundred years, both speak to central questions of meaning. How similar — and how different — are their perspectives and how...