CTS Faculty Member Explores Parenting and Scripture Beyond Boundaries

 

Christian Theological Seminary’s Dr. Amy Lindeman Allen, Associate Professor of New Testament and Director of the MDiv Program & Growing in God’s Word Initiative, has co-authored a new book that invites readers to think more expansively about parenting, family systems, and the biblical text. 

Parenting Beyond Boundaries in Mark’s Gospel, written by Sung Uk Lim and Allen and published by Eerdmans, explores the range of parent-child relationships depicted in the Gospel of Mark. The book was published in April 2026 and is available here and at other major booksellers. It examines approaches to parenting rarely discussed in biblical studies, including collaborative, politicized, borderless, and vulnerable parenting. 

The book was also featured on Episode 62 of Madang, released July 29, a podcast hosted by Baptist News Global. The podcast derives its name from the Korean word, madang, which references an outdoor courtyard, “the outdoor living room of the world,” and which the podcast refers to as a place where people gather for “unreserved, remarkable conversations” about religion, culture, and everything in between. 

On the episode, Lim, Allen, and the host, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, discussed Parenting Beyond Boundaries in Mark’s Gospel and topics including Markan parenting, ethnoracial identity, collaborative parenting, othering, and the Syrophoenician mother. 

For Allen, the project grew naturally out of both friendship and scholarship. Her co-author, Sung Uk Lim, is Associate Professor of New Testament at the United Graduate School of Theology, Yonsei University, South Korea. The two first met as graduate students at Vanderbilt University, where their academic work and family lives often overlapped. 

“During that time, we both had young children and so our families frequently spent time together at dinners, the zoo, aquariums, playgrounds, and that sort of thing,” Allen said. “So, our relationship has always been one that is doubly grounded in our intersecting scholarly and parenting journeys.” 

Over the years, Lim and Allen continued meeting regularly over Zoom to talk about scholarship, family, and life. During one season, as Lim was reflecting on the loss of his mother, their conversations turned more intentionally toward where parents appear in Scripture and how those relationships have been interpreted. 

“This book really emerged organically from both our friendship and our scholarly pursuits,” Allen said. “Given my scholarly interest in children and his personal reflections about parenting, we began talking more about where parents show up in Scripture and what has been written about that relationship, and we quickly realized that not a lot of work on this specific topic had been done.” 

The book connects closely to Allen’s broader work on children in the Bible. She said the connection is clear because children are always situated within relationships and communities of care. 

“The obvious answer, of course, is that children exist within families,” Allen said. “Every child relies, especially in early infancy, on some caregiver and we broadly define the term parent in this way.” 

As they worked with the Gospel of Mark, Allen said she and Lim became increasingly attentive not only to the adult caregivers in the stories, but also to the children and to the ways family relationships shape the actions and motivations of everyone involved. 

“We became particularly aware that who each individual is and how they interact with the world is influenced profoundly in these stories by their concern for their child,” Allen said. “One of the things that we highlight in each chapter is the agency of each child and the way in which the parent-child dyad or triad function together in their unique way in each story.” 

Allen said the co-authoring process was both challenging and meaningful. “To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when we began the process,” she said. “But now I can definitely say it is both more difficult and more rewarding (to co-write).” 

That partnership has resulted in a book that resists a narrow or singular definition of biblical parenting. Instead, Allen said, the authors hope readers will encounter a more complex and generous view of what parenting can mean in Scripture and in communities today. 

“Our hope for this book is that it will be a small answer to the large cultural myth of a singular ‘biblical parenting’ that encourages people in churches and communities to think more expansively about the many different ways of living into the role of parenting,” Allen said. 

She also hopes the book will be useful for scholars and students of the Bible. “We also hope it will help biblical scholars think holistically about family systems and how they impact motives and actions in familiar biblical narratives,” Allen said. 

The conversation around the book will continue this fall. A review panel for Parenting Beyond Boundaries in Mark’s Gospel is planned for the national gathering of the Society of Biblical Literature in November, where both Lim and Allen will participate. 

Their collaboration is also continuing beyond this project. Lim and Allen have an edited volume, New Testament Families in Global Perspectives, which is scheduled for publication in January 2027 and is available for pre-order here. Allen described this edited project as a scholarly engagement with multifocal approaches to families and family systems in biblical texts, featuring authors from six continents. 

For alumni and friends of CTS, Allen’s work offers another example of scholarship that begins in close reading of Scripture and extends outward into questions that matter deeply in churches, classrooms, families, and communities. 

The podcast episode of Madang is available through various channels. Click here to listen.