“Queer Eye” in Theology and Biblical Studies:“Do you have to be queer to do this?”

This article addresses the question of whether one needs to be LGBTQ+ or queer-identifying in order to engage in queer studies in theology and biblical studies. In surveying the popularity of queer as cultural currency in the media and the academy, I express concern with queer studies being undertaken as if it were one approach among others, arguing that it is an “anti-approach”. In directly responding to the question, “do you have to be queer to do this?” I argue that one does not need to be queer identified to engage with queer theologies or queer biblical studies. Four points are made about the engagement of heterosexual identifying intellectuals in queer studies: i) queer theory reveals how all identities are unstable, including heterosexuality; ii) heterosexuality is not the site of disruption for queer studies—it is patriarchy, cisnormativity and heteronormativity that require dismantling; iii) queer is about the production of antinormative knowledge, a practice that anyone can engage in; iv) where queer studies are also done in conjunction with nonnormative gender and sexualities, researchers must incorporate voices from those individuals or communities. The article concludes that there should be no concern about straight-identifying individuals doing queer studies, but we should be careful that queer theologies and queer biblical studies do not become “straight” and normative

Decolonizing Biblical Studies: a View From the Margins

Author: Fernando F. Segovia. Title: Decolonizing Biblical Studies. Publisher: Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Bks, 2000

Anti-cultic theology in Christian biblical interpretation: a study of Isaiah 66:1-4 and its reception

Author: Stein, Valerie A Anti-cultic theology in Christian biblical interpretation xi, 161 p. Publisher: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, 2007. Series: Studies in Biblical Literature ; 97

The meaning of peace: biblical studies

Reviewed Book: Yoder, Perry B. The meaning of peace: biblical studies. Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. Studies in peace and scripture

Inquiry, Identity, and Integrity in a Biblical Studies Methods Course

In this study, a university professor, a high school teacher, and two teacher-candidates engage in an inquiry into the identity and integrity of the religious studies teacher. Using Charteris’s (2014) ‘epistemological shudders’ as a framework, the authors explore the experience of learning to teach Bible in Christian schools by paying attention to the ways in which their experience with the unfamiliar intersected with their taken-for-granted beliefs and perspectives. The authors believe such reflections on experience are essential in particular to teachers of the Bible in Christian schools, but also, more generally, for ongoing lifelong teacher growth. This paper offers insights into how inquiry can be used as a method in a teacher education context. It also serves as an example of the importance of the partnership between universities and schools in the education of future teachers

Kyiv in the Global Biblical World: Reflections of KTA Professors From the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The focus of this article is the global and European experience of the reception, assimilation, and social application of the Bible, reproduced in the works of a number of prominent Kyiv Theological Academy (KTA) representatives from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis specifically covers the works of professors Stefan Solskyi, Kharysym Orda, Nikolai Drozdov, Afanasii Bulgakov, Mykola Makkaveiskyi, Vasylii Pevnytskyi, Arsenii Tsarevskyi, Volodymyr Rybinskyi, Dmytro Bohdashevskyi, and Aleksandr Glagolev. The author uses the metaphor of the Biblical world to describe the historically developed spiritual and cultural component of the European world, for which the Bible played the role of a normative and symbolic core. Affiliation with the Biblical world — as a way of broad social application of the Bible and assimilation of the norms and public behaviors sanctioned by this text — was and still is a stable symbolic marker as well as a cultural and ideological factor of integration with European civilization. The historical panorama of the reception of Biblical knowledge and the inculturation of Biblical morality by Christianized nations, reproduced in the writings of Kyiv academics, is presented as a field of centuries-old intercultural contacts and active inter-confessional interaction, and as an important ideological and moral factor of the socio-political integration and development of civil society. The issues addressed by Biblical studies in Europe and the rest of the world and considerations and solutions prompted by these issues proved to be fruitful for both the academic research and public practices in which academics of the Kyiv Theological Academy were engaged. The past and modern foreign experience related to the inculturation of the Bible was interpreted by the Kyiv researchers in the local context, more specifically, in the modernization attempts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, the reflection of European and worldwide experience, though not fully implemented, was productive and was a potential factor that could have contributed to the European modernization of Kyiv cultural and religious life of the time and its integration into the global Biblical World

The Frankenstein of Biblical Studies?

Advances in archaeology and carbon-dating contribute to our understanding of the biblical text’s historical context, of daily life in ancient Israel, and of the provenance of inscriptions. All of this information (seemingly) makes us better readers of the text with greater understanding of the text’s context, but does it? Have we become complacent in our reading because we rely on these modes of empirical, scientific evidence so much that we lose our connection to the text

"How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect Theory, and the (Im)Personal"

This essay is an intellectual history, one of affect theory both within and without biblical studies, rendered as an ecology of thought. It is an “archive of feelings,” a series of thematic portraits, and a description of the landscape of the field of biblical studies through a set of frictions and express discontentments with its legacies, as well as a set of meaningful encounters under its auspices. That landscape is recounted with a fully experiential map, intentionally relativizing those more dominant sources and traditional modes of doing intellectual history. Affect theory and biblical studies, it turns out, both might be described as implicitly, and ambivalently, theological. But biblical studies has not only typically refused explicit theologizing, it has also refused explicit affectivity, and so affect theory presents biblical studies with both its own losses and new and vital possibilities

Hearers of the Word : Luke\u27s Gospel as Sacramental Formation for a Liturgical Community

(Excerpt) It is privilege to return to the Institute of Liturgical Studies after a long absence, especially on a subject that has consumed me in one way or another over the last fifteen years. I am very grateful to the advisory council for assigning me a topic that develops the biblical foundations of the catechumenate. My doctoral work on Emmaus, my vocation as professor of exegesis and pastoral theology, my participation in the ELCA and LCMS working groups on the catechumenate, as well as my participation in the Missouri Synod\u27s efforts to develop its own catechumenal process, have all contributed to my remarks this afternoon. But it is through conversations with colleagues about the New Testament as a catechetical document, and particularly my work on Luke\u27s gospel, that has been seminal to my own thinking about the biblical foundations for the catechumenate

Androgyny/Hermaphroditism: Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible lacks a term for androgyny or hermaphroditism. The term tumtumim, which identifies persons of indeterminate or “hidden” sex, appears later in rabbinic texts. Nevertheless, sexual fluidity, ambiguity, intersexed persons, and persons with a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics appear in the Genesis creation stories and prophetic texts. While gender transgression is relevant to the general discussion, this entry from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies: Oxford Biblical Studies Online focuses primarily on ancient understandings, namely those presented in the Hebrew Bible, of those of “both sexes.