The semester is beginning. What a way to begin a blog post. This semester I am teaching a course on Hebrew Narrative, what we at Truett call Christian Scriptures 1 Genesis through 2 Kings. I am also teaching Prophets and Writings, what we call at Truett Christian Scriptures 2. Today we have two speakers coming in to introduce us to the possibility of learning through blogging.
As I await the kickoff of the Baylor A & M football game I spent some time scanning blogs that deal with biblical studies. Here is a smattering of what I found that might be interesting to you. It also will introduce you to blogs you might want to check out.
I looked at the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog and happened on an interesting and thoughtful reflection on the gender in translation issue that focuses on the Revised New American Bible Old Testament. Whether you are new to Hebrew or work with English alone this entry will be worth your time. You might begin with his discussion of How Ancient Hebrew Poetry Works. I was thinking he answered the syntactical question but it is really about how the blog works but it was still not a disappointment. John F. Hobbins has an impressive background in biblical languages. He teaches at University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. I continue to work through his blogroll.
Charles Halton of Southern Seminary presents a well curated website that is also part blog. Awilum.com
Pete Bekins of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. His posts are a little irregular but his short piece on An Introduction to Linguistics for Students of Biblical Hebrew is well worth the time.
Now the game is over and we lost. I need to go mourn.
I spent twelve years in the medium sized Texas city of Austin which was not Black and White the way I remembered the Midwest or Atlanta of my childhood and youth. 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, Texas, Richmond, Indiana and Waco, Texas. Race interacts with the realities of space to determine hermeneutics. I saw a Facebook posting by Frank Yamada (now President of McCormick Theological Seminary) that mentioned cultured space. I wonder what it would be like to explore reading texts together in a cultured space. Frank Yamada talked about reading in cultured spaces. He names four identifiers:
This idea of cultured spaces came to me again 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 their 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, and San Francisco.
Reading in Cultured Spaces requires some basic competencies. We often encounter the cultured space as character in film, art and music. However, we forget how the city as character can shape our reading, even readings of the Bible and other formative texts. As humans we often encounter any method with more simultaneity than sequence for the purposes of reading we should begin with the character of the reading context, the city as a partner in our reading.
Often we think of the first competency as the historical linguistic one. We will return to that competency but here we want t
o begin with the city as character. There are a number of strategies to understand the city. One can begin with the analysis of the city. Every city we visit has a guide that analyses it. We will follow a pattern borrowed from the volume Studying Congregations: A New Handbook edited by Nancy Ammerman et al. At the same time a person does not live by analysis. A city must be experienced with the senses through exposure to the museums, restaurants and venues of performance. Shape the character of this fixture in reading in cultured spaces. A reader/preacher must be competent in understanding and interpreting these elements of the city’s character.
Recently in Sunday school we started a series on the Book of Judges. The Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges are like two different movie genres. Well really Joshua and Judges are both part of the movie genre the western.
There was the singing cowboylike Gene Autry and finally my favorite Roy Rogers. These characters lived not only in a black and white movie world but also in a black and white moral world. The singing cowboy The singing cowboy began in 1923 with Ken Maynard in 1923 in a silent movie.
The Book of Joshua begins with a strong exceptionalist tone and texture. “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you…(Joshua 1:3 NRSV) This becomes a sense of manifest destiny. In fact the notion of manifest destiny that emerged in the nineteenth century in the United States re-appropriated Joshua as an analog for the emerging American tale. This was the world of the singing cowboy, American exceptionalism written on the manufactured history of the so-called Old West.
This exceptionalism or election as it is called in faith communities fits well into a sense of volunteerism. Who can forget the passage in Joshua “Choose this day who you shall serve.”(Joshua 24:15b)Like the Hercules story democratized the Joshua story invites persons to enlist in this new covenant. One might think of the John Wayne western Rio Bravo. The good (John Wayne) and the flawed other heroes triumph over evil.
The Book of Judges is substantially more complicated. This is the western world of the “Unforgiven,” the literary world of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series. The best of the heroes are flawed and the evil is intense. It is almost as if the mixed nature of the flawed hero requires a more evil antagonist. Ehud needs the excesses of the King of Eglon. (Judges 3:12-30).
The more I think about this the more I want to go back and reread Jane Tompkins The West of Everything and Gale Yee’s Judges and Method.
I learned from my involvement with two movies the Prince of Egypt and Gospel of John: The Movie taught me that the process of digital story telling requires the filmmaker to come to grips with the social world of the Bible in a profound way. I want to have the biblical simulations to mimic that type of experience.
My teachers Robert W. Neff , Graydon F. Snyder and Donald E. Miller wrote Using Biblical Simulations and Using Biblical Simulations 2 in 1974 and 1975 They used the idea of simulations as a learning tool. Each of them had training in small group process that they brought to bear in structuring the simulation. More recently Reta Halteman Finger used this approach to understand the world of early Christianity in her book Paul and the House Churches: A Simulation. One resource I have not been able to get my hands on is Beginnings (Being There: The Bible Through Simulation) from Faith and Life Press published in 2001.
A simulation is a form of participatory learning. When leading a simulation maximize the class participation. This means have as many people have parts. In the birth of Isaac I wanted about ten participants. I include a director and a videographer. The theory of multiple intelligences opens a new horizon to how we utilize the biblical simulation. It is more than a linguistic exchange. It is kinesthetic learning as well as visual and auditory learning.
My goal was a greater appreciation of the social world of ancient Israel. Therefore I tried to pick an event in a life cycle rather than a famous Bible passage. The Neff, Snyder and Miller volumes strive to provide a more hermeneutical exercise than opportunities to discover the social world of the Bible. My goals are somewhat different therefore I try to avoid volatile or famous passages. For instance the birth of Isaac story is a scant seven verses.
(Gen 21:1-7)
After the simulation we take several minutes to debrief. What did we feel? Press about the mechanics of this childbirth ritual. In my preparation I found a picture of a modern day birth stool.
Last year we have a group of students and present their version of whatever historical social world tableau. Student who choose this option must find self-conscious ways to achieve participatory learning rather than learning through listening.
I do not remember what friend first lead me to the TED talks. Maybe it was Gardner Campbell. But they are world class speakers and thinkers in accessible presentations. For instance here is Matt Cutts a computer scientist with a intriguing idea of trying something for 30 days. Try Something New for 30 Days As the school year begins this openness to change is salutary. What if one read the Bible every day for thirty days, began a new prayer regimen for 30 days. You get the point. Watch his talk and try TED talks for 30 days. And by the way its free.
Jeff Jarvis
observation about the death of business journalism reflects on the transformation of many institutions in the technological age including the church. Seminarians like undergraduate journalism majors face a world where education is not a union card for a stable job in a stable industry. Instead it is a vistas to survey the range of opportunities of a new frontier.
Mike Stroup describes the vista idea in his blog mereHope.
Last week my home computer would beep and beep in an annoying fashion and refuse to come on. I spent several days of magical thinking, that is hoping that if I turned it off waited a little while hours or days that the computer would change its mind and decide to turn on. Of course that did not work. The problem persisted. I gave up the magical thinking for a while and took the computer box into the repair facility. I trust the folks at Altex in Waco so it was no problem. Until they called and said there was nothing wrong with the computer. I paid the fee for their consultation and took my poor old (three years) computer home.
I returned to my magical thinking plan. I plugged then pushed buttons all to no avail. Then I came to my senses, my rational self. I asked what happened at the repair shop, Altex that did not happen at my house. Eventually it came to me. They provided their own power cord. Once I swapped out the old computer power cord for a different one the computer came back to life.
It strikes me that this could be a metaphor for life. All too often when things break we try magical or dysfunctional thinking. We try to connect to the world with faulty power cords. What the Pietists knew was that true life depended on an appropriate power cord. We might say God as revealed in the Scriptures. That great theologian Holly Cole sings “I read the Bible every day just to keep the demons a way.” I hope I will remember to check my power cord as the semester begins and continues.
Recently I read a post from a well-respected friend of mine. She recounted a conversation with someone from denominational headquarters. You see a group of liberal and progressive members of the denomination were seeking new ways to stay in relationship with a denomination that expressed little interest in their concerns and testimonies. This group was trying to pull together different configurations and structures. The staff person told my friend that any new structure would have to provide for insurance, pensions, and benefits that such a group of progressive/liberal folk could neither understand nor fund. And she believed him.
INSURANCE! Really? Denominations in the twentieth century have so bought the corporate myth that they have lost their biblical and historical vision. So they are cooking up institutional dishes such as insurance and pensions as what keep us together. Advocacy groups on the left and the right are both told. “You need our insurance or the government will get you. “ The biblical text that comes to mind is Genesis 25:29-34. Jacob the trickster was cooking. Esau came in from the field, battered by denominational battles and famished for some new hope. Esau said to his brother “give me some of that red stuff, that chili, that insurance that I need for I am famished.” His brother Jacob from the status quo church staff said “First sell me your birthright.” You see Esau did not know that he had a birthright as an Anabaptist, as a non-conformist Christian. So he replied “What good is a birthright to me when you have insurance. ?” The chapter ends thus Esau despised his birthright.
I am no prophet or even a courageous Christian. Further I have no clear idea what progressive folk in the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonite Church, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship should do. But I can tell you that if we who are heirs to Alexander Mack, Menno Simmons, Smyth and Helwys, Dan West, Art Gish, Ken Brown, James Dunn, Anna Mow and more than I can count sell that birthright as hell raising, non-conformist , Anabaptist Christians are persuaded that insurance is worth that much we have indeed despised our birthright.
INSURANCE! Really?
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.
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