Inside BAR

Charles Kennedy, Professor of Religion at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, is a noted authority on the catacombs of Rome. This expertise may or may not explain the fact that Kennedy’s students at Virginia Tech sometimes complain that his lectures leave them in the dark. In response to their complaints, Kennedy (who is no mean wit himself) decided last year to accept a position as a visiting fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale, a university noted for both lux and veritas. Upon completion of his Yale assignment last January, Kennedy returned to Rome to continue exploring the catacombs.

Kennedy’s research in the catacombs permits him to combine his interest in Biblical archaeology, art history and Jewish Christianity. In “Were Christians Buried in Roman Catacombs to Await the Second Coming?” Kennedy explains why he believes Rome began to replace Jerusalem as the apocryphal site of the Second Coming.

Letizia Pitigliani is first and foremost a painter. But she is also a writer and photographer, as she demonstrates in “A Rare Look at the Jewish Catacombs of Rome.” Pitigliani describes a visit last year to the two Jewish catacombs of Rome that have survived.