BlakeLeyerle: Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth‐Century Antioch. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024; pp. xii + 152.

One of the most prolific preachers in the late fourth century, John Chrysostom (347–407) weighed in on imperial propaganda, slavery, religious competition, martyr cults, childrearing, anti-Judaism, and the fragility of Christian identity. Before his congregations in Antioch, he sounded at turns encouraging, exasperated, compassionate, jubilant, or scolding. How his words were received by his audiences has been a challenge for Chrysostom scholars. His silenced interlocutors come to life in this magisterial study by Blake Leyerle, one of this preacher's most astute and nimble interpreters today. Christians at Home focuses on what Chrysostom meant when he called on his congregants to “make your house a church.” More than a figure of speech, Chrysostom's advice amounted to a temporal, spatial, and behavioural programme for Christianising homes and thereby transforming his congregants' embodied spirituality. Leyerle argues that as much as Chrysostom admired monastic practices, he did not set out to render the home into a mini-monastery. Instead, he drew on both monastery and church to transform the practices and temporalities of prayer, celebrations, meals, and furnishings of Christians in the world. Chapter one, “The Rhythm of Prayer,” focuses on prayer's power to acoustically reshape the home. Inspired by monastic psalmody, Chrysostom advised householders to incorporate psalm singing in the course of their daily routines, as they arose, gathered to eat, or prepared to sleep. He also advised them to sing psalms in the course of their work activities. Typically one-verse refrains from psalms congregations sang as responses during the church liturgy, their brevity recalls scriptural phrases inscribed on walls and doorways in the home or upon small objects (e.g., amulets), worn on one's body. Leyerle reveals functional affinities between amulets and ecclesial prayers, even as preachers like Chrysostom struggled to demonise some ritual technologies. Her careful research into current material culture of amulets, charms, oaths, and other ritual practices demonstrates elegantly and effectively how a congregant might regard church and home as compatible ritual sites. Much as Chrysostom tried to extend church practices into the home, he also demanded the home be purged of some enduring domestic rites. Chapter two focuses on times and seasons, particularly life-cycle rites and non-Christian feasts. That is to say, Leyerle demonstrates Chrysostom's laser attention to the way his congregants saw no contradiction between Christian identity and age-old rites for naming newborns, bawdy nuptial celebrations, and extravagant mourning. That women in some homes used lamp-divination to select a name for a newborn irked Chrysostom. Nor did he hide his contempt for women's ritual agency. When his congregants celebrated Kalends to mark the civic new year or joined in Jewish festivals, Chrysostom's rebuke apparently fell on deaf ears. Even as congregants embraced this “merry everything” mentality, their preacher appears an outlier in condemning such indecorous behaviours. Their this-worldly orientation, he countered, ignored the long-term consequences of their behaviours at the final judgement, a temporal framework beyond anyone's ken but his. Chapter three, “The Two Tables,” attends to ways Chrysostom attempted to transform the home dining table into a "spiritual table" for post-sermon discussion of scripture. Storytelling is central to both “tables,” as he exhorts fathers to instil a love of scriptural stories when raising sons by recounting stories about biblical heroes in brief instalments. Such interval storytelling, he advised, ensured better memorisation and moral reflection. As Leyerle showed so richly in her previous book, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (2020), storytelling stirred and amplified quite powerful and complex emotions. This new book calls even greater attention to the temporal dimensions of these affecting narrative strategies. More protracted scriptural storytelling increased the exposure of lay Christians to stories (and storytelling techniques) they encountered in Chrysostom's own exegetical sermons. The iterative immersion possible at home allowed his ideal Christian family to delve into the interior lives of biblical figures, who became more vivid and proximate in one's daily life, an effect reminiscent of what the anthropologist of religion T. M. Luhrmann calls “real-making.” By following his prescribed quotidian domestic practices, Chrysostom predicted his congregants would have increased exposure to (and recollection of) scripture, a more reliable touchstone for being Christians in the world. Moreover, if a family had access to a Bible, they could be better prepared for biblical readings in the liturgy. Such daily domestic Bible immersion rendered the home an extension of the church, in Chrysostom's thinking. The final chapter, “The Ritualized House,” focuses on how familiar objects were key to Chrysostom's programme of making the house into a church. Leyerle focuses on the table, box, and bed, three familiar objects by which to focalise home rituals. All three more or less mirrored church, both in imitating church rituals (almsgiving, ritual meal, and reflection). They also set the stage for reenacting the house-churches of the Apostle Paul's times, a nostalgia capable of normalising patriarchal and ecclesial hierarchies of Chrysostom's day. This engaging book shifts our perception of the preacher's audience. Whereas earlier interpreters have construed them as obdurate or rebellious, Leyerle demonstrates convincingly that Chrysostom understood his lay audiences were capable of justifying their actions with scriptural proof and Christ-like emulation. Even as he exhorted them to aspire to more spiritual and collective goals than short-term individual wants and material needs, Chrysostom also acknowledged his congregants' rebuttal: that Jesus himself called on his followers to pray for their own “daily bread” and that biblical heroes could also exact revenge and oath-taking. Leyerle pits the preacher's prescriptions against the reasoned (and scriptural) pragmatism of his congregants' rebuttals. Drawing on current scholarship on ancient magic, Leyerle sets the audience's needs for justice and protection from unseen forces against Chrysostom's programme to assure their wellbeing by more scriptural methods. Chrysostom might not always approve of their home rituals, but he acknowledges the scriptural imagery and language they marshal in defending their deeds and needs. What is wrong with oaths and curses if biblical patriarchs did the same? As Leyerle shows, lay people have been paying attention in church and have biblical precedents to justify their behaviours. Leyerle avoids tropes of out-of-touch preachers scolding rebellious, benighted, or wayward congregants. By showing how ritualised practices might be reimagined in divergent temporal frameworks and through lay exegesis, Leyerle reveals how coexisting unseen worlds inflect quotidian realities. Akin to Sarit Kattan Gribetz's studies of how late antique rabbis navigated diverse Jewish, Christian, and Roman temporal frameworks, Leyerle considers the temporalities — collective and subjective experiences of time — that shaped both the preacher's programme and the audience's ritual lives in one place and time. This marvellous book is a milestone in the study of lived religion in antiquity.