DeConick A.D

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research Colloquium on Theorizing Religious Change in 2012. My
thanks also to Catrin Williams and Christopher Rowland, who invited me
to rethink Gnosticism’s relationship to the Gospel of John and present my
ideas at their conference, John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic, at
Bangor University in 2010.
I am thankful for the support and advice of my literary agent, Anne
Borchardt, and my editor at Columbia University Press, Wendy Lochner,
who believed in this project from the very beginning and saw it through
to the end. Thank you both for your care and guidance. Thanks also to
Sylvia Louie, who made sure the office ran smoothly while I wrote.
My students have inspired me with their enthusiasm to know. They
listened when I talked about my ideas with them and provided useful
comments on my work as they fielded draft after draft of this book. My
thanks goes out to Grant Adamson, Cindy Dawson, Matthew Dillon,
Erin Evans, Michael Domeracki, Rebecca Harris, Jason Ford, Renee Ford,
Minji Lee, Victor Nardo, Erin Prophet, Mark Schmanko, C. J. Schmidt,
Franklin Trammell, and Adriana Umana.
I am deeply grateful for the financial support and teaching releases
granted to me by Dean Nicolas Shumway, the Humanities Research Center
at Rice, where I was a faculty fellow during the academic year 2012–
2013, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded my research
seminar Mapping Death, from 2010 through 2012. This book started
taking shape in that seminar.
My deepest gratitude goes out to my husband, Wade Greiner, and my
son, Alexander DeGreiner. I could not have written this book without
your spot-on suggestions, your unwavering belief in me, and your love.
To keep this book reader-friendly, I have tried to keep the references
to a minimum, and I provide citations to works and translations in English
whenever possible. Additional resources and deeper discussion of the
ideas presented in this book can be found in a series of academic articles
and books that I have published previously (DeConick 1996, 2001, 2003,
2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d, 2013e, and 2016).
April D. DeConick
The Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul