Kim Haines-Eitzen

Professor of Early Christianity, Cornell University

The Conversation

Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is the H. Stanley Krusen Professor of World Religions and Director of the Religious Studies Program at Cornell University.

Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is the H. Stanley Krusen Professor of World Religions and Director of the Religious Studies Program at Cornell University. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Classics. Her first book Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000) is a social history of the scribes who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries. Her most recent book, The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity, deals with the intersection of gender and text transmission (Oxford University Press, 2012). Currently, she is working on a new project, entitled A Sacred and Sonorous Desert in Late Antiquity, which focuses on the desert monastic literature of late antiquity and its attention to sensory landscapes, especially the acoustic dimensions of the desert environment.


priest

How views on priestly celibacy changed in Christian history

Religion

The fact is for a long time the Catholic Church struggled with its interpretation of Scriptures on priestly celibacy. It wasn’t until the 12th century that priestly celibacy became mandatory.