Authors: Fernando F Segovia (Editor), Mary A. Tolbert
ISBN-13: 9780800629496, ISBN-10: 0800629493
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Date Published: September 2000
Edition: New Edition
Are some readings of the Bible more objective than others? More privileged? More true? How does one's own life situation shape one's reading of the text? What will acknowledgment of the validity of a variety of perspectives mean for historical-critical methods of interpretation? The present dizzying pluralism of "locations" - not only of ethnicity, class, and gender, but also of social and religious standpoints - presents a daunting challenge to older, mainstream interpretive schemes. In this landmark project, Segovia, Tolbert, and their fifteen other contributors have begun to measure the impact of social location on the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. This volume, and the international one to follow, signals the critical legitimation of reading strategies that supplement or modify or even in some ways dethrone the historical-critical paradigm that has dominated academic biblical studies for 200 years. It will provide immediate and enduring guidance to scholars and students sorting through the complex epistemological, social, historical, and religious questions that issue from this paradigm shift.
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Contributors | ||
Introduction: "And They Began to Speak in Other Tongues": Competing Modes of Discourse in Contemporary Biblical Criticism | 1 | |
1 | Acknowledging the Contextual Character of Male, European-American Critical Exegeses: An Androcritical Perspective | 35 |
2 | Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement | 57 |
3 | Social Location and the Hermeneutical Mode of Integration | 75 |
4 | Reading Texts as Reading Ourselves: A Chapter in the History of African-American Biblical Interpretation | 95 |
5 | The Author/Text/Reader and Power: Suggestions for a Critical Framework for Biblical Studies | 109 |
6 | They're Nothing but Incestuous Bastards: The Polemical Use of Sex and Sexuality in Hebrew Canon Narratives | 121 |
7 | Reading from My Bicultural Place: Acts 6:1-7 | 139 |
8 | "By the Rivers of Babylon": Exile as a Way of Life | 149 |
9 | Reading the Cornelius Story from an Asian Immigrant Perspective | 165 |
10 | "Hemmed in on Every Side": Jews and Women in the Book of Susanna | 175 |
11 | "And I Will Strike Her Children Dead": Death and the Deconstruction of Social Location | 191 |
12 | Solidarity and Contextuality: Readings of Matthew 18:21-35 | 199 |
13 | A Second Step in African Biblical Interpretation: A Generic Reading Analysis of Acts 8:26-40 | 213 |
14 | The Uninflected Therefore of Hosea 4:1-3 | 231 |
15 | Framing Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary: A Student Self-Inventory on Biblical Hermeneutics | 251 |
16 | Reading for Liberation | 263 |
17 | The God of Jesus in the Gospel Sayings Source | 277 |
Afterwords: The Politics and Poetics of Location | 305 | |
Index of Names | 319 |