Download or read book Theorizing Scriptures written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. This volume takes a look at the social, cultural and racial meanings invested in these texts.
Download or read book Theorizing Scriptures written by Vincent Wimbush and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-04 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, religious scriptures are defined as holy texts that are considered to be beyond the abilities of the layperson to interpret. Their content is most frequently analyzed by clerics who do not question the underlying political or social implications of the text, but use the writing to convey messages to their congregations about how to live a holy existence. In Western society, moreover, what counts as scripture is generally confined to the Judeo-Christian Bible, leaving the voices of minorities, as well as the holy texts of faiths from Africa and Asia, for example, unheard. In this innovative collection of essays that aims to turn the traditional bible-study definition of scriptures on its head, Vincent L. Wimbush leads an in-depth look at the social, cultural, and racial meanings invested in these texts. Contributors hail from a wide array of academic fields and geographic locations and include such noted academics as Susan Harding, Elisabeth Shüssler Fiorenza, and William L. Andrews. Purposefully transgressing disciplinary boundaries, this ambitious book opens the door to different interpretations and critical orientations, and in doing so, allows an ultimately humanist definition of scriptures to emerge.
Download or read book Transforming Scriptures written by Katherine Clay Bassard and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the “great code” of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard discusses how such texts respond as a collective “literary witness” to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.
Download or read book Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States written by Seth Perry and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships. While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.
Download or read book Refractions of the Scriptural written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization. The book focuses on the ways in which individual and social bodies manipulate—and are manipulated by— the politics and power encoded in language and formalized canonical knowledge. Scriptures, in this sense, function as complex phenomena that are instrumental to social conservatism as well as social critique and social change. The essays in this volume, written by established and up-and-coming scholars across a wide range of disciplines, seek to locate, engage, and interpret the ways in which the scriptural shapes and reshapes people and the dynamics of identity formation. The chapters are organized around four domains or types of inquiry: the cognitive, the conscientized, the inscriptive, and the formative. It will be of interest to scholars of religion, as well as those interested more broadly in critical social and historical studies.
Download or read book Scriptures and the Guidance of Language written by Steven G. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Steven G. Smith focuses on the guidance function in language and scripture and evaluates the assumptions and ideals of scriptural religion in global perspective. He brings to language studies a new pragmatic emphasis on the shared modeling of life-in-the-world by communicators constantly depending on each other's guidance. Using concepts of axiality and axialization derived from Jaspers' description of the 'Axial Age', he shows the essential role of scripture in the historical progress of communicative action. This volume clarifies the formative power of scriptures in religions of the 'world religion' type and brings scripture into philosophy of religion as a major cross-cultural category of study, thereby helping philosophy of religion find a needed cross-cultural footing.
Download or read book What Is Religion written by Aaron W. Hughes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversies over how to define the word religion have persisted for decades. It is a term of art and of academic study, but also one of governance, technologies, and of networks; it is a concept whose diversity is often its own worst enemy. Religion is as much a fuzzy set of conceptualizations and generalizations about a range of human activities as it is an authorizing system of persons, ideas, and practices. What is Religion?: Debating the Academic Study of Religion invites readers to eavesdrop on scholarly debates over the limits of, and uses for, a word commonly used but infrequently defined in a precise manner. This volume takes the temperature of the modern field of Religious Studies by inviting a diverse group of scholars to offer their own substantive contribution that builds on the shared opening prompt, Religion is.... Their essays document the current state of the field and its various sub-fields, assess the progress that has been made over the past generation, and propose new directions for future work. Seventeen of the international field's leading scholars show how they work with each other's definition, or, sometimes, the lack of a definition. Of interest to students, scholars, and general readers alike, What is Religion? will provoke debate and provide insights into the state of the field.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions written by Randall L. Nadeau and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising the most up-to-date, interdisciplinary research on the study of Chinese religious beliefs and cultural practices, this volume explores the rich and complex religious and philosophical traditions that have developed and flourished in one of the world's oldest civilizations. Covers the main Chinese traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as well as Christianity and Islam Features a unique organizational structure, with groups of readings focused on historical, traditions-based, and topical elements of Chinese religion Explores a number of contemporary religious topics, including gender, nature, asceticism, material culture, and gods and spirits Brings together a team of authors who are experts in their sub-fields, providing readers with the latest research in a rapidly growing discipline
Download or read book The Future of the Biblical Past written by Roland Boer and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does global biblical studies look like in the early decades of the twenty-first century, and what new directions may be discerned? Profound shifts have taken place over the last few decades as voices from the majority of the globe have begun and continue to reshape and relativize biblical studies. With contributors from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America, this volume is a truly global work, offering surveys and assessments of the current situation and suggestions for the future of biblical criticism in all corners of the world. The contributors are Yong-Sung Ahn, George Aichele, Pablo R. Andiñach, Roland Boer, Fiona Black, Philip Chia, Nancy Cardoso Pereira, Jione Havea, Israel Kamudzandu, Milena Kirova, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Monica Melancthon, Judith McKinlay, Sarojini Nadar, Jorge Pixley, Jeremy Punt, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fernando F. Segovia, Hanna Stenström, Vincent Wimbush, and Gosnell Yorke.
Download or read book Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century written by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chart the development of feminist approaches and theories of interpretation during the period when women first joined the ranks of biblical scholars This collection of essays on feminist biblical studies in the twentieth century seeks to explore four areas of inquiry demanding further investigation. In the first section, articles chart the beginnings and developments of feminist biblical studies as a conversation among feminists around the world. The second section introduces, reviews, and discusses the hermeneutic religious spaces created by feminist biblical studies. The third segment discusses academic methods of reading and interpretation that dismantle androcentric language and kyriarchal authority. The fourth section returns to the first with work that transgresses academic boundaries in order to exemplify the transforming, inspiring, and institutionalizing feminist work that has been and is being done to change religious mindsets of domination and to enable wo/men to engage in critical readings of the Bible. Features: Essays examine the rupture or break in the malestream reception history of the Bible Exploration of the term feminism in different social-cultural and theoretical-religious locations Authors from around the world present research and future directions for research challenging the next generation of feminist interpreters
Download or read book Democratizing Biblical Studies written by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Schüssler Fiorenza addresses such questions as, What are the educational practices and procedures that are advocated by traditional educational models, and how can they be changed? What kinds of educational and communicative practices do biblical studies need to develop in order to fashion an emancipatory democratizing rhetorical space and a forum of many voices? To envision, articulate, debate, and practice a radical democratic ethos of biblical studies, she identifies emerging didactic models that can foster such a radical democratic style of learning"--Pbk. cover.
Download or read book Ireland and the Reception of the Bible written by Bradford A. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the work of leading figures in biblical, religious, historical, and cultural studies in Ireland and beyond, this volume explores the reception of the Bible in Ireland, focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of such use of the Bible. This includes the transmission of the Bible, the Bible and identity formation, engagement beyond Ireland, and cultural and artistic appropriation of the Bible. The chapters collected here are particularly useful and insightful for those researching the use and reception of the Bible, as well as those with broader interests in social and cultural dimensions of Irish history and Irish studies. The chapters challenge the perception in the minds of many that the Bible is a static book with a fixed place in the world that can be relegated to ecclesial contexts and perhaps academic study. Rather, as this book shows, the role of the Bible in the world is much more complex. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ireland, with its rich and complex religious, cultural, and social history. This volume examines these very issues, highlighting the varied ways in which the Bible has impacted Irish life and society, as well as the ways in which the cultural specificity of Ireland has impacted the use and development of the Bible both in Ireland and further afield.
Download or read book Foster Biblical Scholarship written by Frank Ritchel Ames and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2010 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays describes the pursuit of biblical scholarship in the twenty-first century and explores the implications of modern and postmodern approaches, collaborative and emancipative models of graduate and undergraduate education, and public and political uses of the Bible. Special attention is given to the role of the Society of Biblical Literature. Essays by nine SBL presidents appear in the collection, which honors SBL Executive Director Emeritus Kent Harold Richards.
Download or read book Remapping Biblical Studies written by Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, scholars of African, African American, Asian, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American heritage have employed their intellect, histories, and lived experience as a means to produce new and courageous scholarship and imagine greater in the Society of Biblical Literature. This volume celebrates the thirty years of service of SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP), a vital body in SBL dedicated to advancing the representation and work of racial and ethnic minoritized scholars in biblical studies. The volume includes the presidential addresses of groundbreaking scholars Brian K. Blount, Fernando F. Segovia, Vincent L. Wimbush, and Gale A. Yee. Gay L. Byron, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Leslie D. Callahan, Jin Young Choi, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Velma E. Love, Andrew Mbuvi, Raj Nadella, Janette H. Ok, Angela N. Parker, Abraham Smith, Yak-hwee Tan, and Ekaputra Tupamahu provide reflections and responses that honor those who have led the way and point in new directions for future generations of scholars.
Download or read book Pillars of Cloud and Fire written by Herbert Robinson Marbury and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the birth of the United States, African Americans were excluded from the newly-formed Republic and its churches, which saw them as savage rather than citizen and as heathen rather than Christian. Denied civil access to the basic rights granted to others, African Americans have developed their own sacred traditions and their own civil discourses. As part of this effort, African American intellectuals offered interpretations of the Bible which were radically different and often fundamentally oppositional to those of many of their white counterparts. By imagining a freedom unconstrained, their work charted a broader and, perhaps, a more genuinely American identity. In Pillars of Cloud and Fire, Herbert Robinson Marbury offers a comprehensive survey of African American biblical interpretation. Each chapter in this compelling volume moves chronologically, from the antebellum period and the Civil War through to the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Obama era, to offer a historical context for the interpretative activity of that time and to analyze its effect in transforming black social reality. For African American thinkers such as Absalom Jones, David Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Frances E. W. Harper, Adam Clayton Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the exodus story became the language-world through which freedom both in its sacred resonance and its civil formation found expression. This tradition, Marbury argues, has much to teach us in a world where fundamentalisms have become synonymous with “authentic” religious expression and American identity. For African American biblical interpreters, to be American and to be Christian was always to be open and oriented toward freedom.
Download or read book From Scrolls to Scrolling written by Bradford A. Anderson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, the study of sacred texts has focused almost exclusively on the content and meaning of these writings. Such a focus obscures the fact that sacred texts are always embodied in particular material forms—from ancient scrolls to contemporary electronic devices. Using the digital turn as a starting point, this volume highlights material dimensions of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The essays in this collection investigate how material aspects have shaped the production and use of these texts within and between the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, from antiquity to the present day. Contributors also reflect on the implications of transitions between varied material forms and media cultures. Taken together, the essays suggests that materiality is significant for the academic study of sacred texts, as well as for reflection on developments within and between these religious traditions. This volume offers insightful analysis on key issues related to the materiality of sacred texts in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while also highlighting the significance of transitions between various material forms, including the current shift to digital culture.
Download or read book Scripturalectics written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Vincent Wimbush seeks to problematize what we call "scriptures," a word first used to refer simply to "things written," the registration of basic information. In the modern world the word came to be associated almost exclusively with the center- and power-defining "sacred" texts of "world religions." Wimbush argues that this narrowing of the valence of the term was a decisive development for western culture. His purpose is to reconsider the initially broad and politically charged use of the term. "Scriptures" are excavated not merely as texts to be read but understood as discourse: as mimetic rituals and practices, as ideologically-charged orientations to and prescribed behaviors in the world, as structures of relationships and social formations, as forms of communication. Wimbush is naming and constructing a new transdisciplinary critical project, which uses the historical and modern experiences of the Black Atlantic as resources for framing, categorization, and analysis. Using Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a touchstone, each chapter offers a close reading and analysis of a representative moment in the formation of the Black Atlantic, regarded as part of a history of modern human consciousness and conscientization. Such a history, Wimbush says, is reflected in the major turns in what he calls scripturalectics, part of the construction of the modern world, defined as efforts to manage or control knowledge and meaning.
