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