Monthly Archives: April 2011

Identity

All Reading is Local

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Former Speaker of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress Tip O’Neil once said, “all politics is local.” When I say that we read the Bible locally I am speaking confessionally. Growing up in Dayton Ohio in the Church of the Brethren, a denomination historically dominated by a German immigrant ethos, even though I was in a Black family I learned to read the Bible from a German immigrant perspective.  Moving to Chicago required a more sophisticated reading strategy but still privileged a European American perspective.  The Chicago I experienced in the early 1970 was still dominated by various types of European immigrant communities and African American neighborhood built in the great immigration form the South.  Things changed for me living in Atlanta. It was a “chocolate city”. Atlanta had recently elected Black Mayor Maynard Jackson and experienced an ever increasing appreciation of the power of the strong Black middle class and emerging Black ruling class. As I was finishing my Ph. D. at Emory University I was doing a post graduate work at Interdenominational Center in Black Church studies.  I learned to read the Bible in Black and White. I could go on but I think these examples are sufficient to posit a question whether our place is not another factor in our reading perspective.

I am coming at the issue of cultured space from a different angle. Congratulations on coining such an interesting and helpful phrase.  I think that the city functions as “cultured space”. Reading the Bible in Chicago, Berkeley, Atlanta, and Washington D.C.  rovides valuable data.I was thinking that I could learn a lot from cohorts of pastors and maybe rabbis reading poetic texts in great U.S. cities. But that requires a grant but it is a idea who is growing. I want to explore how thinking like a metropolitan/cosmopolitan reader compels us to leave a narrow Euro-centric perspective.

Christl Maier in her book Daughter Zion, Mother Zion describes the city, Jerusalem as the mother city. The term we now know as metropolis. The sense of urbane vision is captured in the works of two insightful writers Kwame Appiah on Cosmopolitanism and Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From are informing my re-imagined interest in urban vistas.

I was in the midst of writing an introduction to Hebrew poetry for English readers when it struck me that my other books paid more attention to race and ethnicity. I want to continue to pay attention to those issues but allow the city to compel me into a reading informed by the diversity of a place like Chicago. What is it like to read the Bible under the Houston moon?

 

 

Identity

What comes after a multicultural reading of the Bible?

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My first book Experience and Tradition provided me an opportunity to think with others about Black biblical hermeneutics. That book began as I reflected on growing up in a Black and White world in the Midwest and five years in Atlanta. The book Stony the Road We Trod pioneered African-American hermeneutics.  The  African Americans and the Bible project  lead by Vincent Wimbush turned a different corner with the exploration of reception history as the backdrop for the “signifyin(g) of Scriptures .“  He subsequently founded the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at Claremont University. More recently his work reflects a broadening perspective. The new collection Theorizing Scriptures invites the reader to examine the phenomenon of “scriptures” itself.

Experience and Tradition was shaped by the Midwest and Atlanta. My next book Listening In: A Multicultural Reading of the Psalms was born in California.  We moved from Atlanta of Berkeley California in 1981. Berkeley was not Black and White it was multicolored.  Listening In examined how Psalms texts might sound in Asian-American, Hispanic and African American contexts.

From Race to Space

I spent twelve years in the medium sized Texas city of Austin which was not Black and White like the Midwest or Atlanta.  It was not multicolored like Berkeley. But if you traveled south down I-35 to San Antonio the cultural fusion took on a different tone. If you traveled north on I-35 to the Metroplex (Dallas Fort Worth) then you entered a multilingual and multicolor polyglot. After a short sojourn in Richmond Indiana now I am back in Texas but in the small city of Waco, a Black, White and Brown town.

I thought the move from African American hermeneutics to multicultural hermeneutics was a matter of time. I now think it was a matter of space.  Atlanta and Berkeley invited me to think of hermeneutics in different ways than Austin, Richmond, and Waco. Race interacts with the realities of space to determine hermeneutics.  I saw a Facebook posting by Frank Yamada that mentioned cultured space. I wonder what it would be like to explore reading texts together in a cultured space.

This idea came to me as I was in Tiberias Israel talking with colleague Todd Still and pastors Stephen Wells and Ralph West. What Revs. Wells and West shared with me was the excitement of reading the Bible in Houston, the fourth most populace city in the United States with diversity to spare, racial, cultural, interfaith etc.  We thought about how I might spend a season reading in Houston where they pastor large successful congregations. But what if Houston was just the beginning?  I would begin in Houston and then spend a semester or better yet a year reading the Bible with pastors in some of the most interesting cities in the United States. Places like New York City, Washington D.C. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco.  All we lack is sabbatical time and a foundation for support.

A Song and a Prayer

But reading is best done with specific texts. In December 2010 I recorded a set of audio lectures for Now You Know Media. The title was An Introduction to Hebrew Poetry for English Readers.  Today’s English readers in the United States live in a context or age of anxiety. I would want to explore how these poems interact with readers in the United States in these cities in an age of anxiety. One of the things that we observe is that many of the songs in Hebrew poetry are also religious speech, what we might call prayers. Hence a song is often in Hebrew a prayer.

Coming attractions: In upcoming posts I will share my reflections on Willie J. Jennings’ book   The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and J. Kameron Carter the author of Race: A Theological Account. These writers explore the present context of race in America.

 

Steven Johnson describes the role of space in innovation in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. The pre-digital age the incubator of innovation was the urban space. So the idea that the urban area is a reading context fits well with his idea of spaces of innovation. The short video gives you the basic idea of Johnson’s project.

Short talk on Where Good Ideas Come From

 

Uncategorized

Pentateuch Studies in Very Brief

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A few weeks ago  I  gave a mini lecture on Pentateuchal studies. I spent time talking about the French physician Jean Astruc and the Lutheran Pastor Bernhard Witter who were among some of the earliest writers on the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch. We also talked about the groundbreaking work of DeWette who correlated the reforms of Josiah and the message of Deuteronomy. Hence DeWette located the Deuteronmomic source to 620 BCE. I next moved to Julius Wellhausen’s construction in his Prologomena to the History of Ancient Israel which posited in a cogent manner Israelite history of religion as having a Yahwist document from the United monarchy, and Elohist Document from the northern kingdom during the divided monarchy, the Deuternomic source associated with  Josiah and finally an exilic Priestly document. We talked about the critique of Lutheran orthodoxy of the nineteenth century with its preoccupation with legalism and structure implicit in Wellhausen’s work. We had only time to contemplate how this rendering of Israelite religion was later used in Germany to evil ends.

We recognized that the documentary hypothesis never attained scholarly consensus status. For instance Umberto Cassuto challenged it before that was fashionable. We also spent some time talking about the difficult process of getting the documentary hypothesis accepted in Baptist circles.

John Van Seters has argued that the date of the Yahwist is substantially later than the nineteenth century scholars suggested. Konrad Schmid argues that Genesis and Exodus were separate story lines until  an editor in the Persian period (539-333 BCE) This shift of so profound that Schmid and Dozeman edited a volume titled the Death of the Yahwist.

 

New Media

Curating and Researching in a Digital Age

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Chris Long of Penn State  made a compelling presentation on curating your digital vita and an evolving digital resource ecosystem fascinating. He uses Mendeley, Dropbox, GoodReader, Evernote and Zotero as an ecosystem.

Mendeley is a both a social network site as well as a bibliographical index. For instance when I did a search on psalms I came up with 725 references. It shares some functionality with Zotero as a searchable research database. However, the social networking element is not as advanced in biblical studies many of the 725 references have only one reader listed at the time when I built my list.

Zotero is a strong bibliographical tool. It replaces Endnote as a bibliographical management system. At this point it is also free. However, it is, at this point linked to Firefox.  One can share it as a database like Mendeley but only with a group that you have already designated.  Long remarks, that if an independent Zotero emerges, it may have more bibliographic power than Mendeley which also organizes the material on Dropbox.  Zotero has very good word processor plugins.

Dropbox is a cloud based storage system that consistently receives rave reports. However, like the university based cloud storage system the free limit is 2 GB which is not enough to be helpful. The 50GB is $9.99 a month and the 100 GB is $19.99. So up to this point I have not ventured there.  Baylor like many universities has cloud storage but the limits are substantial. I may have to move to a Dropbox model.

His suggestion about Evernote was more familiar. I have used Evernote since the summer of 2010. Here I paid the $45.00 a year for the premium service that allows up to 1 GB a month in uploads.  On Evernote you can store word processing docs, html, pdf, and videos. Also Evernote allows you to annotate pdfs that are part of your research. Evernote is tagable and searchable.  I continue to struggle to find my way in this digital wilderness.