No Modern Joshua : Nationalization, Scriptures, and Race

With the United States as primary context and point of reference, this essay aims to show how inextricably the modern world phenomena of nationalization, scriptures, and race have been inextricably woven together in the United States. The rhetorics and ideological and political orientation of Frederick Douglass offer an analytical wedge. A speech Douglass delivered in Washington, D.C., in 1883 was part of the celebration of the twentieth year of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, an event seen as an appropriate and meaning-charged occasion to take stock of the plight of black peoples in the country. His assessment that in the aftermath of the Civil War, black peoples, especially in the South, faced even more challenges with the establishment of new forms and styles of social, economic, and political slavery led Douglass to rail against the nation\u27s conspiracy of silence around the race question

Asceticism

Origen could not be a more profoundly influential--if not sometimes enigmatic--figure when considered in conjunction with the controversial and puzzling historical phenomenon that is now called asceticism, the English term that is the usual (all too flat) translation of the astonishingly multivalent Greek term askesis

African Americans and the Bible: Outline of An Interpretive History

Since every reading of important texts, especially mythic or religious texts, reflects a reading or assessment of one\u27s world, and since the Bible has from the founding of the nation served as an icon, a history of African Americans\u27 historical readings of the Bible is likely to reflect their historical self-understandings—as Africans in America

Historical Study As Cultural Critique: A Proposal for the Role of Biblical Scholarship in Theological Education

Some things are a bit clearer to me today than they were a decade or so ago. For example, I can now better understand and articulate the reasons for my initial and continuing interest in biblical studies. It was the recognition of the pervasive influence of the Bible in the historical experiences of African Americans that first inspired the interest. The importance of the Bible among African Americans is not of significance to me because it is assumed to be unique in the history of the United States. I am quite aware of the historical importance of the Bible among the great majority of Americans, since the European settling of what has become the United States.1 But the importance of the Bible among virtually all Americans has only added impetus to my interest in its functions among African Americans. The extent to which the Bible provided Americans a language with which to articulate different interests and concerns and negotiate social and political existence, to this extent African American reading of the Bible—and self-understanding—is different from the majority culture and needs to be studied carefully

Book Review: Ed. Musa W. Dube, Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible

I take great delight in having the opportunity to review this collection ofthirteen essays having to do with contemporary African women and their engagements of the Bible. Ably edited and introduced by Musa W. Dube, Senior Lecturer in the New Testament in the Department ofTheology and Religious Studies at the University ofBotswana, the essays have been long awaited. They fill a tremendous need--among and beyond the women of Africa. They inform and challenge and inspire communities far beyond the circle ofthe discussants in the book. They make a dramatic statement about the powerful voices and sentiments and creative impulses of African women and their potential to enliven thinking about and approaches to the Bible in particular and the sacred in general. The volume is also a fine contribution to the growing phenomenon of the heightened consciousness and re-awakening among non-dominants throughout the world--different racial-ethnic minority groups, women, the poor-about the social power to be realized in the interpretation of texts and other objects and phenomena widely regarded as canonical

Book Review: Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk

This is a book review

Influence of Feminist Scholarship on My Theological Work

It is an honor for me to have been asked to be a part of this roundtablediscussion. I join Francis Fiorenza in recognizing the enormous (that is,radical, disturbing) contributions that feminist scholarship (in all of its variety)has made to religious studies. I take special delight in having theopportunity to reflect upon the influence of feminist scholarship upon biblicalstudies and upon my own scholarly development and work

Scriptures

Introduction Interchangeable with holy/sacred book, “scriptures” is the English language term that is still popularly used to refer to a text or collection of texts deemed to be of special if not unique origins, authority and power. Users of the term also tend to assume that “the Bible” of the Jewish and Christian traditions represents either the only instance of such or the example par excellence among some others. A popular linguistic and rhetorical placeholder among cultures of Indo-European origins, the English term originally simply meant (from the Greek graphe/-ai, ta biblia; Latin, scriptura/-ae; Hebrew, ketav/-uvim) and continues to mean “writing”/“writings” (German, schrift; Italian, scrittura; French, ecriture). But precisely as it is a baseline reference to a collection of writings, or a book, the term is reference to nothing basic or simple; rather, it is freighted shorthand for the most significant site around which turns questions and issues having to do with things that matter most and are society-ordering and culture-determining. Wider experiences, more information and perspective—of and about others—have caused the narrow notions and assumptions to be questioned and rejected. Both popular and critical scholarly discourses have come to recognize the cross-cultural if not near universal representation of such texts; but only very slowly have a few critics wrestled with scriptures as a general social-cultural category and phenomenon as part of comparative theoretical analysis