An Evening with Elaine Pagels and Pastor Laurie Hafner

***Please note: This event will take place at the Coral Gables Congregational Church. Tickets are REQUIRED. Each ticket admits one (1) guest into the venue and includes one (1) copy of MIRACLES AND WONDER ($30 +tax). If you would like to bring a guest, you must add our $5 guest fee. This fee does not include a copy and only accounts for one guest. Books will be handed out upon entry.

“Provocative, gracious, reverent: a great historian of religion gives us an account of the life of Jesus, one of history's most towering figures. Scholarly and inquisitive, but also contemplative and respectful, Pagels’ story is for believers and non-believers alike.”
—Tara Westover, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Educated
From a renowned National Book Award–winning scholar, an extraordinary new account of the life of Jesus that explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world.
Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.
The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus's followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?
The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus's life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn't illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus's body wasn't humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn't a failed messiah, his kingdom is a metaphor: he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers' numbers grow.
In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract.

ELAINE PAGELS is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. In 2015 she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, and earlier in her career was awarded a Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowship in consecutive years. As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. Her subsequent books include Why Religion? Revelations, Reading Judas, Beyond Belief, The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. She has been profiled in Time, The Atlantic, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Newsweek's issue "Women and Power."

The Rev. Dr. Laurinda M. Hafner’s passion for prophetic ministry, the social gospel, interfaith dialogue, and the arts has been the mark of her vibrant ministry. She was called as Senior Pastor of Coral Gables Congregational UCC in 2006. In 2022, Pastor Laurie, as she is known, along with another Christian, three Jews, one Unitarian-Universalist and a Buddhist, sued the State of Florida over reproductive rights on religious grounds. From that experience came her contribution to an anthology of writings called, Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade, edited by Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger from University of California Press. Pastor Laurie is a community activist, especially engaged in LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, the work of anti-racism, anti-book banning, and interfaith dialogue. She is probably best known as the pastor who goes up into the Church Tower each year and stays there until at least six tons of food is collected. Over the past years she has raised more than 125 tons of food for the hungry of South Florida.

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