Theorizing Scriptures

Theorizing Scriptures PDF Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813542049
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
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.

Theorizing Scriptures

Theorizing Scriptures PDF Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813542049
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
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.

Transforming Graduate Biblical Education

Transforming Graduate Biblical Education PDF Author: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
ISBN: 1589835042
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This uniques collection of essays, originating in seminars held at SBL's Annual and International Meetings, explores the current ethos and discipline of graduate biblical education from different social locations and academic contexts. It includes international voices of well-established scholars who have urged change for some time alongside younger scholars with new perspectives. The individual contributions emerge from a variegated set of experiences in graduate biblical studies and a critical analysis of those experiences. The volume is divided into four areas of investigation. The first section discusses the ethos of biblical studies and social location, and the second explores different cultural-national formations of the discipline. The third section considers the experiences and visions of graduate biblical studies, while the last section explores how to transform the discipline. All the contributions offer ways to transform graduate biblical education so that it becomes a socializing power that, in turn, can transform the present academic ethos of biblical studies. (Back cover).

Transforming Scriptures

Transforming Scriptures PDF Author: Katherine Clay Bassard
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033880X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
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.

Ireland and the Reception of the Bible

Ireland and the Reception of the Bible PDF Author: Bradford A. Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567678881
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
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.

Scriptures and the Guidance of Language

Scriptures and the Guidance of Language PDF Author: Steven G. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108650724
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
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.

Refractions of the Scriptural

Refractions of the Scriptural PDF Author: Vincent L. Wimbush
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317243560
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
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.

Life Under the Baobab Tree

Life Under the Baobab Tree PDF Author: Kenneth N. Ngwa
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531503004
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intellectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance. A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as “religion” apart from its intimate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Africana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years

The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years PDF Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521768276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Leading scholars chart the complex, multifaceted cultural impact of the King James Bible over its 400 years.

The Social Life of Scriptures

The Social Life of Scriptures PDF Author: James Bielo
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813548418
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
What do Christians do with the Bible? How do theyùindividually and collectivelyùinteract with the sacred texts? Why does this engagement shift so drastically among and between social, historical, religious, and institutional contexts? Such questions are addressed in a most enlightening, engaging, and original way in The Social Life of Scriptures. Contributors offer a collection of closely analyzed and carefully conducted ethnographic and historical case studies, covering a range of geographic, theological, and cultural territory, including: American evangelicals and charismatics; Jamaican Rastafarians; evangelical and Catholic Mayans; Northern Irish charismatics; Nigerian Anglicans; and Chinese evangelicals in the United States. The Social Life of Scriptures is the first book to present an eclectic, cross-cultural, and comparative investigation of Bible use. Moreover, it models an important movement to outline a framework for how scriptures are implicated in organizing social structures and meanings, with specific foci on gender, ethnicity, agency, and power.

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States PDF Author: Seth Perry
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400889405
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
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.