The Desire for Miracles and Wonder (Elaine Pagels, PhD)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Elise Loehnen

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 900 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For decades, Elaine Pagels’s work has been changing the historical landscape of Christian religion. She’s also changed the way many people, including myself, see the world. Pagels is a religion professor at Princeton University, and the author of seminal, award-winning books like The Gnostic Gospels, and her newest, Miracles and Wonder. We talked about the surprising things she’s learned about Jesus and his followers; what his most radical teaching was; and why Jesus, this essentially unlikely traveling rabbi, emerged as the figure he did in our culture. And why this all still matters today. We talk about Pagels’s own story, her personal spiritual pull; as well as a vortex I went down in boarding school that made me understand how susceptible we all are to constraints that explain the world in overly reductive and simple ways. We reflect on how natural it is for us to want some sense of connection with a transcendent being. And how this has shaped the way Elaine approaches her work: not with the intention of destroying a framework, but looking for ways to expand it. For links to all of Elaine Pagels’s book and the (many) show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Elise Loonen, host to Pulling the Thread.
0:03.6	Today, I'm talking to one of my very favorite scholars and authors, Elaine Pagels.
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0:50.5	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:54.1	On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.
1:00.4	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
1:11.2	Here's today's guest, Elaine Pagels,
1:13.5	telling a story about the Stanford anthropologist
1:16.2	Tanya Lerman and why people practice religions.
1:20.3	She started working with a covent of witches in London
1:22.9	to try to understand how do they really think they can be witches.
1:26.2	And she practiced their practices.
1:28.2	And she said she began to see the things they saw. She said, what changes people is not beliefs.
1:34.9	What changes people is doing certain things. So as you may know, I'm a mega Elaine Pagel's fan.
1:41.5	Her books on religious history and faith have reshaped the way I see the world.
1:46.2	I'll be linking to all of them in the show notes. Elaine is a professor of religion at Princeton University.
1:52.6	In 2015, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama throughout her
1:58.8	truly extraordinary career, beginning with the publication
	...

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