This is pre-publication preview introduces the major questions, methods, and insights of my book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).

On teaching race and ethnicity in high school and college classrooms and the challenges.

Discussion of the racist backlash against the casting of a Black actor as Achilles in BBC’s Troy: Fall of a City.

Discussion of reception of ancient Hippocratic environmental theory by Smithsonian anthropologist Otis Mason in his technogeography theory of human cultural development.

It is my modest goal in this essay to trace how Nock uses conversion to produce religion(s) and then to explore its similarities to and differences from an analogous construction of religion-through-conversion in late antiquity.