One of my guilty pleasures is watching old Westerns. These movies create a “West of the Imagination.” However, when I heard the Martin Marty lecture on the future of the Baptist denomination on Monday night, and more so when I read the recentg article on the lecture that appeared in the Baylor Lariat I was reminded of a line in the movei. The scene is some action, that is a euphemism for violence where the protagonist dispatches some villain. All this prompts someone to ask who are you. The reply Jacob McCandles. The response, “I thought you were dead.” Wayne retort, “Not hardly.”
One might wonder if the decline in denominational verve may not represent the transition to a new denominationalism rather than a post-denominationalism.
I had just come back from the gym and was getting a little breakfast when the first airplane crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001. The metaphor that grabs me most about that day is fire; imagine the temperature that it took to melt the infrastructure of those buildings. I vividly remember thinking to myself “how does one forgive a person for committing such a heinous and hateful act.
I taught courses at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies hosted by Xavier University in New Orleans for several years. On the one hand I listened intently as various news agencies described the event around hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, I tried to distance myself lest I be overcome with grief. Like many post-moderns in this “global village†the access to news in this “flat world†means one must carefully negotiate between empathy and distance. The hurricane brought the flood. Like the biblical account of the flood there were winners and losers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the hurricane on the New Orleans lifestyle. They relented when mainstream America mouth agape and stunned by the callous use of biblical historiography retaliated with denunciations. The reaction to Katrina and the subsequent aid dramatized issues of race and class in ways that many Americans found quite disturbing.
This week the earthquake in Haiti once again reminds us of natural disasters and human frailty and courage.
The fire and the flood, the human caused trauma and the natural disaster shape the lives of women and men living in North America but does that change biblical studies? Kathleen M. O’Connor (Lamentations & the Tears of the World) and Tod Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book) have done this for the book of Lamentations. I wonder what other books in the area of biblical studies examine hermeneutics after these sorts of disasters.
Bible, Theology and Theological Education