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	cplayoust@jtc.edu.au Dr Catherine Playoust joined the JTC faculty in 2008 as a lecturer in New Testament and related literature. Her current teaching areas are the Gospel of Luke and New Testament Greek. Catherine comes from Sydney, where she was awarded a BA (Hons) in music and pure mathematics followed by a BTh at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, part of the Sydney College of Divinity. She spent eleven years in Boston, Massachusetts, receiving an STL at Weston Jesuit School of Theology and a ThD in New Testament and Christian Origins at Harvard Divinity School. Her doctoral dissertation, "Lifted Up From the Earth: The Ascension of Jesus and the Heavenly Ascents of Early Christians", examined the Gospel of John, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocryphon of James to see how early Christians' hopes and beliefs about their own heavenly ascents were frequently bound up with their understandings of Jesus' ascension. While in the Boston area, she was a teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School and a part-time faculty member at Boston College, as well as an editorial assistant for the Harvard Theological Review. Her research interests include: early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, mysticism, and religious experience; the diversity of early Christianity and the emergence of the category of heresy; early Christian narratives, dialogues and liturgical texts of the first three centuries CE; and reworkings of biblical and early Christian traditions in modern literature and music. She has given papers on these topics at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. Catherine's article (co-authored with Ellen Bradshaw Aitken), "The Leaping Child: Imagining the Unborn in Early Christian Literature", will be appearing soon in Imagining the Fetus: Embryology and Mythology from Around the World, ed. Jane Marie Law & Vanessa R. Sasson (AAR Religion and Culture Series; New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Another article, "The Beauty of Jesus and His Twin: Redirected Erotics in the Acts of Thomas", will be published in the Proceedings of the colloquium, "Late Antique Crossroads in the Levant: Space, Ritual, Texts, and Daily Life" (Montreal, 1-4 Nov 2006). She is a member of the New Testament Mysticism Project Seminar, an international team which is preparing a jointly-authored three-volume commentary on New Testament passages relevant to early Jewish and Christian mysticism. Since 2007 she has been a book reviewer for Religious Studies Review. Catherine is a Roman Catholic layperson. For most of her life she has been engaged in liturgical ministries (music, reading, preaching, eucharistic, planning) in various parishes and educational settings.

Home > Faculty > Dr Catherine Playoust

cplayoust@jtc.edu.au

Dr Catherine Playoust joined the JTC faculty in 2008 as a lecturer in New Testament and related literature. Her current teaching areas are the Gospel of Luke and New Testament Greek.

Catherine comes from Sydney, where she was awarded a BA (Hons) in music and pure mathematics followed by a BTh at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, part of the Sydney College of Divinity.

She spent eleven years in Boston, Massachusetts, receiving an STL at Weston Jesuit School of Theology and a ThD in New Testament and Christian Origins at Harvard Divinity School. Her doctoral dissertation, "Lifted Up From the Earth: The Ascension of Jesus and the Heavenly Ascents of Early Christians", examined the Gospel of John, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocryphon of James to see how early Christians' hopes and beliefs about their own heavenly ascents were frequently bound up with their understandings of Jesus' ascension. While in the Boston area, she was a teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School and a part-time faculty member at Boston College, as well as an editorial assistant for the Harvard Theological Review.

Her research interests include: early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, mysticism, and religious experience; the diversity of early Christianity and the emergence of the category of heresy; early Christian narratives, dialogues and liturgical texts of the first three centuries CE; and reworkings of biblical and early Christian traditions in modern literature and music. She has given papers on these topics at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Catherine's article (co-authored with Ellen Bradshaw Aitken), "The Leaping Child: Imagining the Unborn in Early Christian Literature", will be appearing soon in Imagining the Fetus: Embryology and Mythology from Around the World, ed. Jane Marie Law & Vanessa R. Sasson (AAR Religion and Culture Series; New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Another article, "The Beauty of Jesus and His Twin: Redirected Erotics in the Acts of Thomas", will be published in the Proceedings of the colloquium, "Late Antique Crossroads in the Levant: Space, Ritual, Texts, and Daily Life" (Montreal, 1-4 Nov 2006). She is a member of the New Testament Mysticism Project Seminar, an international team which is preparing a jointly-authored three-volume commentary on New Testament passages relevant to early Jewish and Christian mysticism. Since 2007 she has been a book reviewer for Religious Studies Review.

Catherine is a Roman Catholic layperson. For most of her life she has been engaged in liturgical ministries (music, reading, preaching, eucharistic, planning) in various parishes and educational settings.