During the course of my work on A Spiritual Economy, I have incurred gift-debts too numerous to count, which I do not pretend to be able to discharge. I offer this book in the hope that it may, however inadequately, serve to “pay forward” some of the gifts that I have received during the course of my research and writing.
It was my reading of Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s Harvard Theological Review article on reciprocity in Paul and Seneca in 2010 that piqued my interest in gift exchange; it was then that I began to read the material that forms the basis of many of the arguments I put forth in this book: Marcel Mauss’s The Gift and Seneca’s On Benefits. Initial forays into the logic of Paul’s system of divine-human exchanges based on the charis of reciprocal exchange resulted in the essay that appears herein as chapter 2, which I first presented at the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy program unit at the International Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Meeting in Tartu, Estonia, in August 2010. I am grateful to Alanna Nobbs and Don Barker for inviting me to present a version of the paper at the “Corinth: Paul, People, and Politics” conference hosted by the Society for the Study of Early Christianity at Macquarie University in May 2011.
Gratitude is due to those who have read or commented on various chapters of the book. Larry Welborn has been a constant support since the inception of the project and has read and provided helpful feedback on virtually every chapter. It was he who, as an editor of the Synkrisis series, invited me to submit a book proposal. John Fitzgerald and David Hollander have read portions of the manuscript and offered feedback during sessions of the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy SBL program unit, domestically in San Francisco, Chicago, and Baltimore and internationally in Vienna and St. Andrews. Gratitude is also due to participants who offered valuable comments during those sessions. I thank John Barclay for offering valuable feedback on chapter 3, originally published as (and slightly adapted from) “The Benefactor’s Account-book: The Rhetoric of Gift Reciprocation in Seneca and Paul,” in New Testament Studies 59.3 (July 2013): 396–414, copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 and reprinted with permission by Cambridge University Press.
I recall fondly the students in my “Gift Exchange in Religion and Society” class at Luther College during spring semester 2013; it was there that the insights now contained in chapters 4 and 5 began to take shape. Students in my “Life and Letters of Paul” courses at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC) in 2014 and 2015 provided a source of renewed stimulation and spurred me to refine and nuance my understanding of Paul’s complex relationship with gifting discourses and practices. I thank Ray Pickett and my academic dean, Esther Menn, for their continued support and collegial friendship at LSTC.
No academic book can be written without the support of research libraries; I thank Kathy Buzza, the Interlibrary Loan Coordinator at Preus Library, for her assiduity in fulfilling numerous requests for materials from 2010 to 2013. Barry Hopkins, Associate Librarian for Public Services, and Elaine Bonner, Access Services Manager, at the JKM Library in Hyde Park (Chicago) have facilitated my research since I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School; it is a pleasure to be able to work with them both at LSTC. I also express my appreciation to Bill Beermann, Catalog Librarian at JKM, for speedily fulfilling a last-minute request.
I thank Jennifer Banks and Heather Gold of Yale University Press for their support and advice and the Synkrisis series editors, Larry Welborn and Dale Martin, for backing A Spiritual Economy throughout the various stages of its review. Jessie Dolch reviewed the entire manuscript with keen editorial eyes.
Finally, I thank my wife, May May Latt, whose support enabled me to complete the manuscript of this book during the spring of 2015, and my sister-in-law, Kyi Kyi Latt, and Cho Cho Win for graciously making available their house in Wisconsin.
For all of these unrepayable debts, I issue my wholly inadequate but nonetheless heartfelt “thank you.”