Biblical Characters

From David to Arthur and Back Again

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Philip Davies argues that David like Arthur is an invention to explore the ideas of emerging politics. I have always been interested in Arthur. As a young man when  I read Idylls of the King by Tennyson. The musical and movie “Camelot” based on the Theodore White book Once and Future King.  Cable television has created a program Camelot in the spring of 2011. So I talked with Tom Hanks of Baylor University a Mallory scholar  to get more clarity on the Arthurian story.

He told me that Arthur began in Celtic circles as they were pushed out of Brittany by the Anglo-Saxons. One community of Celtic background remained in Britain and another group in Brittany. The political force came from Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Ambrosius evolved into a character Arthur recounted by Gildas. There are other sources such as Annales Cambriae and Historia Brittorum. Also testify to the tradition.  This last volume was the product of Gregory of Monmouth in his fanciful and imaginative treatment of the Arthurian story. Chretien DeTroyes (1170-1185) presented a French version of the Arthur legend. This material was probably a source for Mallory’s work Mort D’Arthur .  Tennyson’s Idylls of the King ere developed in ideas from Mallory.  Arthur and David share the position as the model king but that is an ambivalent and complex model of power.

 

New Media

Scholarship for Everyone: How to use Google Translate

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I happened upon Google Translate by accident but now it is clear it was a happy accident. Let’s say you are writing an article and you have a foreign language source that you need a rough translation. If you scan the foreign language source as a RTF (rich text format) then you will be able to feed that into the translation window of Google Translate. You are able to do some tweaking of the Google translation on the website.  You must get a good clear scan. However you will want to clean it up, how much will depend on you, in a regular word processor, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or Open Office.  Some of you will no doubt say this is still cumbersome; however it is much less cumbersome than attaining real fluency in foreign languages.

Psalms

Hebrew Poetry: Reading in a Cultured Space in an Age of Anxiety

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Age of anxiety is a popular meme. A meme is an idea, belief or belief system or pattern that can be replicated. The word meme derives from the Greek word something imitated. Richard Dawkins the British evolutionary biologist coined the term on his book the Selfish Gene (1976) according to Wikipedia. Memes can be propagated in many ways. Malcolm Gladwell describes connectors, mavens, and sales men and women as vehicles of meme propagation in his book Tipping Point (2000). Today there is also the Internet meme

W.H. Auden, author of The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) coined the phrase according to Wikipedia. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem (1948) inspired a Leonard Bernstein symphony “Age of Anxiety by the same name and a Jerome Robbins ballet (1950). Alan Watts used this concept as the title of the first chapter of his book Wisdom of Insecurity (1951).

Clergy even examine this meme. Nancy E. Petty preached the sermon “The Age of Anxiety” with Matthew 6:24-34 as the text. It is easy to understand the rise of Christianity amidst an age of anxiety.  M. Scott Peck used this meme in his book The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety.

For some anxiety is a psychological state. For instance Andrea Tone in her book The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers.  American Science in an Age of Anxiety by Jessica Ward,

You can look at this meme form the perspective of political science.  Clarence A. Glasrud The Age of Anxiety published in 1960 by Houghton Mifflin was one of the earliest treatments.  At the turn of the millennium Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter edited a collection of essays on the Age of Anxiety. Zero-Sum Future: American Power in and Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman   another political science approach is found in the work of Jane Parish and Martin Parker edited a collection of essays The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and Human Sciences. Hope in the Age of Anxiety: A Guide to Understanding and Strengthening Out Most Important Virtue by Anthony Scioli and Henry B. Biller, Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism.

In future posts I will investigate what we mean when we say anxiety but for today I want to paraphrase Bowen and Friedman on anxiety. Friedman in his book, published posthumously A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix contends that the age of the quick fix is an expression of anxiety. Hence we might say that the age of the quick fix is also the age of anxiety according to Friedman.  The book was edited by Margaret M. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.

Probably one of the most insightful plays on this “age of anxiety” meme is  a blog post by Michael Jinkins who compares this age to the years before the Protestant Reformation. I will recommend Jinkins’ The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context which frames many of the same issues but form the perspective of the transitions from ecclesiastical life framed by modernity and the emerging post-modern horizons for the church.

 

Psalms

Thinking about Zion’s History in the Psalms

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I am reading J.J.M. Roberts work on Davidic and the Psalter. “J.J. M. Roberts “The Davidic Origin of the Zion Tradition” originally published in JBL 92 (1973) 329-44. Also in The Bible and the Ancient Near East Eisenbrauns 2002.

His claim: The Zion material begin during the Davidic-Solomonic period.

One of the things you notice when you read or reread this article is how much the terrain has shifted since 1973. Roberts was arguing against a pre-Israelite Zion tradition.
Edzard Rohland and Gunther Wanke He properly observed that the weakness of this poisition was that it depended on the “unproven and unprovable assumptions about Jebusite role in Davidic Jerusalem.” (314)
“…if the Zion tradition goes back to the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Jerusalem, and particularly to the cult of El, that tradition should be compatible with the extra-biblical traditions about this Canaanite deity. However, such is not the case.” (316) For instance the mythological topography of Zion do not match.
“There is no reason to believe the Jebusites would have fused the separate mythological traditions of EL and Baal.” (321)
While Roberts refutes a pre-Israelite  Zion tradition he does think that Ps 110:4-5 indicates that “traditions about Melchizedek is unquestionably pre-Israelite. But as they say on television that is a different show.
Roberts says about what he is doing in this essay. “So far this paper has attempted to show that one cannot derive the Zion tradition form the pre-Israelite cult of Jerusalem. …I suggest that all the features in the Zion tradition can be explained  most adequately by positing an original Sitz im Leben in the era of the Davidic-Solomonic empire.” (324)
The Psalms texts in play are Pss 46:5; 47:3; 83:19; 97:9 and Ps 82.
Roberts is leading us  to a major methodological direction. “Politico-religious propaganda has never been overly concerned with keeping its mythology straight.” The rise of the Davidic “empire” provides the impetus for the creation of Zion tradition. This process may have borrowed form Canaanite mythology.
Nonetheless Roberts rightly says: “Religious ideology often outlives the political realities it was in part  created to justify.” (329)
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.

 

Uncategorized

Regional Fusion

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I was sitting in a hotel on the Sea of Gallilee with friends Todd Still of the Truett Seminary, Ralph West pastor fo Church Without Walls Houston and Stephen Wells, the pastor of South Main Baptist church.  West and Wells described compelling ministries in Houston Texas. It was a stimulating conversation with working pastors who loved their congregations and their city. When I could not sleep that night I knew that I  wanted to learn more about how one might read the Bible in Houston Texas.

Several years ago I explored African American biblical hermeneutics in a book called Experience and Tradition: A Primer in Black Biblical Hermeneutics.  The book grew out of conversations with the writers who contributed to the Stony the Road We Trod volume on black biblical hermeneutics. The book reflected a black and white world that shaped me.  However, over the years, as I lived in Berkeley California it became clear that I was no longer living in a black and white word. It was a world of living and every changing colors.  The book Listening In: A Multicultural Reading of the Psalms explored the ways that a person might overhear the readings of different cultures.

There is a new way to ask the basic questions of biblical hermeneutics. When Mary Ann Tolbert and Fernando Sergovia edited the volume Reading in This Place they construed place a social location. I want to examine the intersection of social location and physical location. The urban context of let us say Houston, New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. requires a reader to present a reading that makes sense in a multiracial, interfaith context.  Rather than trying to find one way of reading I want to ask how one reads the Bible responsibly in Houston, New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. This is a regional fusion. The term fusion is used in music and food to explore the pastiche of cultures.

Like the Listening volume this experiment is in no way meant to legislate a prescriptive hermeneutic. These essays will outline a basic melody that can take a particular riff as they say in jazz. The riff will have the flavor of the location of the reader. When Dave Brubeck was learning how to play jazz his teacher told him to travel the world listening to all he could and allow that to inform his playing. We will take a similar trip. It will be part the Travel Channel, part Food Network and all Bible and Theology.