by Helen Paynter | Dec 2, 2020 | Opinion
An email from someone I had never met arrived in my inbox in February 2019. We’ll call her Jenny. She had heard me speaking on a series of podcasts produced by the Bible Society, talking about some of the stories of sexually violent men in the Old Testament. As a...
by EthicsDaily.com Staff | Jul 24, 2019 | News
Helen Paynter is director of the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence, based at Bristol Baptist College in England. Where did you grow up? I was born in the south of England, but we moved to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, when I was 11; I lived there until I...
by Helen Paynter | May 28, 2019 | Opinion
“There’s just so much wrath in the Bible!” “The God of the Old Testament is so different from the God of the New Testament!” “Why is there so much violence in the Old Testament?” If I had an English pound for every time someone had said something like this to me, I’d,...
by Helen Paynter | Feb 11, 2019 | Opinion
“Bad theology can make people kill each other.” I wrote these words in a blog post published just over a year ago. Nothing I have seen or read since then has made me change my mind. In fact, bad theology – and bad biblical interpretation – can cause people to do all... by Helen Paynter | Jan 26, 2018 | Opinion
How Christians have responded to the issue of immigration is often shared in articles and videos. However, the prior question of why they should is not necessarily as easy as we might think. And while there are people in our churches who would throw open the borders...