Marianne Sawicki


    WELCOME! Greetings to colleagues, friends, former students, and other visitors.

    After several decades as a seminary and university teacher, most recently at Penn State Altoona, I begin the study of law in August 2009 at the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State. That means that my projects in archaeology, phenomenology, biblical studies, and ethics will be on indefinite hold. I rely on Providence and on the good wishes of so many of you with whom I have worked in the past.

    Although I have tried to tie up all remaining loose ends, I'll be happy to send a brief response to any concerns expressed. The information and links below are streamlined from my former academic page, for convenience.





Background: I'm a native of Baltimore, Maryland, but I live in central Pennsylvania now with my husband, Bob Miller. Early in my career, I was a newspaper editor. I worked at the Baltimore Sun during the Watergate era. I was on staff at the Miami Herald when Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency, and in between I filled in on weekends and holidays at the New York Daily News. During and right after college, I was editor of the weekly Baltimore Jewish Times.

Education: I studied at The University of Kentucky (Ph.D. in philosophy, 1996), The Catholic University of America (Ph.D. in religion, 1984, M.A. 1978), The University of Pennsylvania (M.A. in Communications, 1974), and Loyola College in Baltimore, Evening Division (B.A. summa cum laude 1971).

Research Interests: My archaeological field work in Galilee helped to establish the kinship practices of the people who were family to Jesus of Nazareth, including their understanding of gender and caste. Galilee today is the northern part of the state of Israel. In the first centuries BCE and CE, Galilee was occupied by Judean administrative families from the south, and then by Roman imperial administrators from the west. Out of this multicultural and politically tense situation would come many of the gospel stories in the New Testament as well as some of the stories and legal rulings handed down to us in the Mishnah and the Talmuds -- classic works of religious literature for Christians and Jews, respectively. That written evidence correlates with the physical evidence of the material culture produced through archaeological research. Below are some links to books and articles that I have written about this. I also translated and edited the social and political treatises of the philosopher Edith Stein, who died at Auschwitz in 1942. My philosophical interests included critical theories of natural and built environments; scientific logic; social critiques of religion, science and technology; philosophy of law; and of course the history of philosophy itself.

Curriculum vitae





Let me show you around my garden.





    Recent Work

    • "Who Wouldn't Marry Jesus?" A study of kinship and other social practices in first-century Galilee. A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Sean Freyne. Edited by Zuleika Rodgers with Margaret Daly-Denton and Anne Fitzpatrick McKinley. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

    • "Person or Practice: Judging in James and in Paul.” The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul: Tensions in Early Christianity, 385-408. Novum Testamentum Supplements, vol. 115. Edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

    • "No Graven Thing: Renouncing Idolatry in Religious Education.” Hermeneutics and Religious Education, 269-88. Edited by H. Lombaerts and D. Pollefeyt. Louvain, 2004.

    • "Catechesis and Resurrection." Die Wirklichkeit des Auferstehung, 77-91. Edited by Hans-Joachim Eckstein and Michael Welker. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2002.

    • Reconstruction of women's poiesis in pre-canonical Christianity. “Making Jesus.” A Feminist Companion to Mark. Edited by A.J. Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001.

    • Remarks for a session on my book Crossing Galilee, Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

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    • On the development of the concept of empathy in phenomenology.

    • On the development of a theory of the social in phenomenology.

    • Edith Stein on association in David Hume.

    • An excerpt from Edith Stein's Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities.

    • Edith Stein's 1925 treatise "On the State."

    • First chapter of Body, Text, and Science.

    • Second chapter of Body, Text, and Science.

    • A development of the categorical imperative through experiences of university students.

    • A paper for the Third World Congress of Phenomenology, Oxford University, August 2004, "The Choice to Choose."







updated July 22, 2009

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