2026 Costan Lectures presented by Dr. Margaret M. Mitchell

Series Theme: The Theological Problem of Hunger, from Paul to Chrysostom to SNAP Professor Mitchell analyzes how the earliest Christians literally wrote their way into history, developing a literary and religious culture that was deeply embedded in Hellenistic Judaism and the wider Greco-Roman world, while also proclaiming its distinctiveness from each. She is the author, most recently, of a volume of analyses and original translations of twenty-five late fourth-century sermons dealing with thorny passages in Paul’s letters: J ohn Chrysostom on Paul: Praises and Problem Passages (2022). Her earlier studies include, among many others, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics ; and a volume of collected essays, Paul and the Emergence of Christian Textuality: Early Christian Literary Culture in Context . She is also co-editor, with Frances M. Young, of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1: Origins to Constantine. Partly inspired by VTS's “Have Mercy” initiative (which is itself inspired by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s brave speech at the inauguration), Professor Mitchell will address the following topic for the series and each of the lectures. This represents a theme on which she has worked over the years, both in terms of the ancient sources and modern appeals to biblical warrant on debates on SNAP, for instance. It is also timely, in that she recently published an essay on Chrysostom’s appeals for almsgiving and has another one on Origen that is in press, in what I hope will be a constructive dialogue for the present precarious moment on a most pressing issue. As often in her scholarly work, she seeks to analyze New Testament and patristic sources together (in all their conversational complexity) and bring them into discussion with the present, as apposite. Series Theme: The Theological Problem of Hunger, from Paul to Chrysostom to SNAP Lecture One: Paul and Chrysostom on the Visibility of the Hungry Lecture Two: John and Origen on the Bread from Heaven Lecture Three: Biblical Witness and Public Debate Over Food Stamps in 2025 America