Alter's Canon and Creativity

I've recently read Alter's little book Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. Like so much of what Alter does, this study is rich and fascinating, and yet rather lacking in the requisite theoretical groundwork. For example, Alter wants to claim that writers of faith, writers in faithful ages, can produce destabilizing, even subversive literary reflections upon biblical material, only because they have a sense of the 'double canonicity' of the Bible. The Bible, that is, both organizes religious life and theological reflection and is the linguistic/literary repository of biblically-informed culture. Thus, when faithful writers playfully rework biblical texts in unorthodox ways, they are merely taking up the biblical language (i.e., the second sense of biblical canonicity), divorced from any and all religious or theological concerns. The reason for this claim?: "if the canonicity of the Bible were strictly a matter of doctrinal truth [i.e., if there were only a single way of understanding the Bible as canon] . . . radical [literary] redirecting of biblical language would be unimaginable" (48). What's lacking here is any awareness - odd, because Alter does know better - of poststructuralist textuality, intertextuality, etc., or even a much more basic appreciation of the multiple ways in which scholars of reception history complicate questions of interpretation and meaning.

This idea of 'double canonicity' seems ultimately a device for gauging a writer's religious commitment. If so-and-so alters biblical language in such a way as to call into question the Bible's authority or some basic doctrinal point, then so-and-so must be writing beyond or outside of faith. Why this simplistic binary should be attractive is quite unclear to me, but that it is attractive to some (like Stanley Fish or James Wood) is obvious. Unfortunately, it's also the very thing against which I must struggle in my Bible and Literature courses every year. Perhaps actually teaching Alter, thereby trying to encourage students to reflect critically upon their own positions by getting them to notice the flaws in his, would be one way to go.

Teaching the Fall

I'm about to teach David Maine's Fallen. It's an excellent retelling of the Fall, but in reverse. We begin on page 3 with chapter 40, featuring Cain as an old man, and we end with chapter 1 on the last page of the book, with Adam and Eve still in the garden. Additionally, each of the novel's four books takes up the narrative from a new character's perspective, but without disrupting the reverse plot trajectory. Really, it's a remarkable novelistic feat. In terms of biblical rewrites, Nino Ricci's Testament similarly attempts to divvy up the narrative into Rashominic segments, but it's less successful, in my view, than Maine's work. Maine seems to be making a career of biblical rewrites, having also written a book about the Flood (The Preservationist) and another called Samson. See his blog for more info.

This term I've also taught Paradise Lost and Byron's wonderful little verse drama, Cain: A Mystery, in which Lucifer (the Romantic enlightener) takes Cain on a cosmic journey to the "pre-Adamite" worlds, and to the realm of death. Almost immediately after his return to earth our hero has a rather unfortunate spat with his brother. However, because Cain is now a Romantic rebel, his biblical verses are spoken by his wife/sister Adah - which has the effect of making Cain seem radically indifferent to his punishment. He has already embraced his essential alienation and thus is already (figuratively if not yet actually) a fugitive and a wanderer in this earthly life.

Our Seminar at the ACLA

Second Comings and Strange Goings (On): Versions of the Messianic

• Seminar Organizer: Jay Twomey, U of Cincinnati, W. David Hall, Centre College

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, on the eve of his crucifixion, “if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you” (16:7 NRSV). This nexus of arrival and departure, of a future coming at the expense of the departing present and its specific pasts, is characteristic of the messianic in a variety of its manifestations — in religious texts, in writers like Nicanor Parra, Gore Vidal, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in theorists like Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors, in theologians like Catherine Keller, in films or television shows like the new Battlestar Galactica, and so on. Taking up the theme of the 2008 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Long Beach, CA, “Arrivals and Departures,” this panel seeks to engage scholars from across the humanities in a series of discussions on the messianic. What is it? What is it not? How does it work? Where can we find it? And most importantly: is it good for us? Prospective panelists whose work draws upon relevant scholarship in religious studies and/or recent work by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben will be given highest priority. Most ACLA panels function as two- and three-day seminars. We are proposing a three-day panel, for which we will only consider participants who can commit to staying for the duration of the conference (April 24-27, 2008).

Please go to the ACLA conference Web site for information on submitting paper proposals.

Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism

In December, I’ll be presenting a paper at MLA on reappropriations of Jonathan Edwards in contemporary evangelical thought, with a particular focus on a strain of crisis theology running through evangelicalism’s revival of Edwards (one of my main primary texts will be the volume of essays, A God Entranced Vision of all Things). Some of you have already offered insightful suggestions and provided helpful citations for further reading in other discussions I’ve had with you about my larger interest in the half-life of Edwardseanism. But I thought I’d beat the BibleAnd bushes just to be thorough. I’m particularly interested in any studies of contemporary revivals or other attempts to recover colonial Puritan or other early American thinkers or theology for presentist purposes. That said, we’re all eclecticists now, so anything you might think worth passing along, please do.

All the best in your fall term.

The Fountain

Last year's The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky — director of at least two other notable films, Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Pi (1998) — is blogworthy for its easy syncretism of putatively Mayan mythology, a Biblical theme, and Yogic imagery.

The first frames of the film quote Genesis 3:24, concerning the flaming sword that severs humanity's connection to the tree of life. Throughout the story, Aronofsky plays with the idea of pushing back against that sword, telling stories of humans who attempt to defeat death, who, like the man and the woman in the garden, might live together forever in the presence of God if they weren't prevented from doing so (Gen. 3:22).

In this picture, Aronofsky himself pushes against narrative conventions – a much different kind of flaming sword – telling a refracted story about the marriage of a dying woman (Rachel Weisz) and about the story of her hand-written novel manuscript. The mundane "historical" context of this fantastic novel's story is its author's relationship to her husband, a research doctor (played by Hugh Jackman) trying to cure his wife's brain tumor by testing out drugs on monkeys. He discovers the medical key to reverse the aging process and cure all disease, but is just too late to save his beloved. His reading of her novel unfolds the full story of the film. The novel, also called "The Fountain," provides a parallel story involving the tree of life. The tree of life is discovered and captured in a Mayan temple by 15th century Spanish conquistador (also Hugh Jackman).
The sword referred to in the opening frame reappears in the hands of a Mayan warrior-priest guarding the halls of a secret, hidden temple which contains the tree of life. The conquistador, although he loses his beloved queen of Spain (also Rachel Weisz), gains access to immortality. Perhaps a thousand years later or more, the same man brings the tree into distant space. He is no longer a conquistador, but is now a cosmic explorer surviving by slowly eating at the flesh of the tree. The sword also comes back as the distant nebulae of swirling, fire-colored clouds to which, across the vastness of space, the cosmic explorer brings the aging and dying tree. He travels in a bubble of air, a new garden of eden, meditating his way through the light-years in full-lotus position, floating in the microgravity of the tree's capsule. At the end, he appears to be reunited with God, or sacrificed for God, in a kind ekpurosis or self-dismemberment. Then, like the Vedic being Purusha or like the putative Mayan "first father" he is identified with in the film, his death becomes a cosmogony, renewing the tree of life, recreating the world, and also bringing reunion with the beloved, discovered now at last in the divine bosom.

The second shot of the movie dwells on a gold replica of the shekinah of God, part of the altar tabernacle before which the conquistador worships, vowing to succeed in his quest for the tree. Its radiant beams of gold, surrounding a mirror-like polished silver globe, represent the burning light of purification that simultaneously reveals God and annihilates all flesh which approaches, suggesting that humanity and God remain forever severed, that our union with the divine comes only in the dissolution of life.

Thus, in the other story line, the "real" one perhaps, the novel remains a novel, and the bereaved doctor who lost his wife, the book's author, remains cut off from the beloved, separated by death, left with only a token golden ring.

At times reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at others of Tarkovsky's Solaris or even of Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, this movie seems to be consistent with a narrative pattern that imagines a divine human connection mediated by a journey into the distant reaches of space, and overcoming the problem of mortality, death, and meaning through solitary searching into the beyond.

I was surprised because I liked this complex film less than I thought I might — perhaps this is because the mundane romance at the film's heart is slow paced and not particularly moving. I wonder how others responded to the movie, and I wonder where Aronofsky will take his unique filmmaking from here.

Catherine Keller

I taught Catherine Keller's God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys in my seminar (entitled 'Revelation(s) in Theory') the other day, and was surprised at my students' responses. They found it rhetorically confusing and logically weak. While I sympathize to some extent (Keller's metaphors are sometimes unnecessarily bizarre), the project as a whole is consonant with other work we've read -- by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Stephen Moore, Derrida and Benjamin. Have any of you taught Keller before? My sense is that, because we were reading the whole book, the students felt they had more purchase on Keller's project than they did on the other, shorter, pieces we've studied (including one by our friend and ally David Hall), and so they could respond to its argument more fully. It seemed to me, though, that this only means they were able to express a desire they've been hinting at all term: namely, they want claims about religious or biblical or indeed generally hermeneutical issues to be universally coherent, both in their logic and in their evidentiary bases. These students are bright and savvy, and enjoy engaging with difficult material, so I don't mean at all to disparage their concerns. It's just that I found this attitude a bit perplexing. I wonder whether or not I'm just blinded to serious problems in Keller's book because I'm so sympathetic to her argument. If any of you have read or taught God and Power, I'd be curious to know what you think.

In the news

I might be wrong about this, but I think the Lesleigh Cushing quoted in a recent NYT story on faith and religion on college campuses may be the same Lesleigh some of us know from various conferences. And even if I'm confused, the article is worth a glance anyway.

Fishing for Truth

In today's New York Times, Stanley Fish says (subscription required) that teaching religion or teaching the Bible, without endorsing the truth claims of either, is pure foolishness. The Bible, religious doctrines, theological texts . . . everything we generally do teach in generally secular ways is just so much cartoonish trivia unless the truth claims of this material and these traditions are valid. It's "like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice" he fairly spits at Steve Prothero's bracketing of religious truth in the neutral zone of the religious studies classroom. Fish has gotten pretty good in his old age at fighting straw men. In this case few of us are really such aesthetes as to study religious texts without both recognizing and engaging seriously with the truth issues gleaned from these texts by any number of theologically, politically, philosophically-interested readers. But isn't it also intellectual sleight-of-hand to insist that the religious traditions and texts we study are themselves always committed to, or clearly endorse, Fish's simplistic standard: Truth? When did fundamentalist literalism, to put it polemically, become the arbiter of meaning across entire traditions, or in such complex and conflicted anthologies as the Bible? This kind of Fishy thinking, along with some territorial anxieties, led the faculty senate at my institution to vote against the creation of a religious studies certificate program a few years ago. It's disheartening to realize that the students in my classes, many of them religious people, are much more responsive to complex treatments of complex issues than the professors (like Fish) tasked with deciding upon their educational options.

Taking Tom Waits Literally

Do you know the Tom Waits song "Chocolate Jesus"? Here's a story about the real thing, from the BBC.

Storm in US over chocolate Jesus

The sculpture is due to be exhibited in the run-up to Easter

A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ.

The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled "My Sweet Lord", depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever".

The sculpture, by artist Cosimo Cavallaro, will be displayed from Monday at Manhattan's Lab Gallery.

The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition.

"The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate," Mr Donohue said.

He called for a boycott of the gallery and the hotel which houses it.

'Overwhelming response'

The gallery's creative director, Matt Semler, said the gallery was considering its options in the wake of angry e-mails and telephone calls.

"We're obviously surprised by the overwhelming response and offence people have taken," he said. "We are certainly in the process of trying to figure out what we're going to do next."

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental.

Mr Cavallaro, the Canadian-born artist, is known for using food ingredients in his art, on one occasion painting a hotel room in mozzarella cheese.

He used 200 pounds (90 kg) of chocolate to make the sculpture which, unusually, depicts Jesus without a loincloth.

Angels and Eunuchs in the NYT

Disfiguring Treatment? No, It Was Healing

Disfiguring Treatment? No, It Was Healing
By RICHARD WASSERSUG

Published: March 27, 2007

Correction Appended

My daughter and I were talking about outing oneself — the act of disclosing one’s inner identity. The discussion was not purely academic.

Skip to next paragraph

ND/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

“Dad, when most people out themselves, they open the closet door and just come out,” she said. “You, Dad, you went through the wall.”

I had just told my daughter that I was a eunuch.

It all started with a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1998, when I was 52. Two years later, after failed surgery and radiation, I started hormonal therapy. This meant taking chemicals that slow the growth of prostate cancer cells by depriving them of androgen — in effect, castrating the patient.

Chemical castration is the common treatment for advanced prostate cancer, and more than 250,000 American men are taking these drugs. But few people know of any men taking them, simply because we hide. It is shameful to be castrated.

My initial response to the therapy was typical. My mood plummeted along with my testosterone level. Hair vanished from my arms and legs. Muscle disappeared, fat appeared. My memory suffered. Not only was I now more likely to lose my car keys, I occasionally couldn’t remember where I left the car.

“Eunuch” simply means a castrated man. Given the pervasive stereotype of eunuchs as ineffective wimps, it is no surprise that men dread this label. I became curious about whether the stereotype was true, and how eunuchs functioned in the past.

The first thing I discovered was that eunuchs were anything but mindless, cowardly automatons. There were philosophers (Abelard, Origen of Alexandria), saints (Ignatius), military leaders (Cheng Ho, Narses) and even assassins. They were the chamberlains, diplomats and senior government officials in the major long-lasting, dynastic governments across Asia for 3,000 years. Furthermore, descriptions of eunuchs’ physique and psychology mirrored many of the anatomical and emotional changes I experienced.

Then I discovered the classicists’ hypothesis that the eunuchs of antiquity were models for our depiction of angels. God is thought to surround himself with angels as advisers and emissaries, who are identical in appearance to males castrated before puberty: tall, beardless, nonsexual beings with voices like the legendary castrati.

It appears that from the Judeo-Christian standpoint, the occupants of heaven were exalted eunuchs. In turn, earthly rulers aspired to reach this divine ideal. In “The Perfect Servant” (University of Chicago, 2003), Kathryn M. Ringrose notes that by the 10th century the Byzantine court was “perceived to be an earthly replica of the court of heaven where the emperor functioned as Christ’s representative on earth and was attended by an ‘angelic’ corps of eunuchs.”

This eunuch-angel connection has helped me understand and adapt to the side effects of androgen deprivation. When I was stoked up on testosterone in the old days, for example, I would obsess about exacting revenge on those who offended me. Now I see the foolishness in such macho fury. Rather than trying to undo others, I can now willfully exercise restraint. It’s not that I’m never pugnacious anymore, for I’m no perfect angel, but I realize it’s better to maintain a higher mission than fight petty battles.

I don’t recall crying much as an adult, but since my castration I’ll weep while watching Mothers Against Drunk Driving commercials. At first, I feared that my tears would be perceived as maudlin self-pity. But the truth is that I’ve become more sensitive to the trials and tribulations of others. I am thus no longer embarrassed by my tears. I consider them humanizing, just as they are for angels. The link to my chemical castration is obvious; testosterone fuels aggression but suppresses empathy and the ability to cry.

Understanding angel (and eunuch) psychology has even helped me overcome the cognitive side effects of hormonal therapy. Angels may be omnipotent, but they undertake just one task at a time. According to the Talmud, they are not permitted to attempt more. Biblical angels blessed, cursed, relayed messages and even killed, but they were never on two missions at once. It seems that thousands of years ago it was already recognized that androgen deprivation makes multitasking difficult — but doesn’t prevent one from accomplishing a single task well. This realization has helped me maintain a busy, productive academic life.

I still have a beard and sing bass: androgen deprivation in adulthood doesn’t change those male features. Singing in a group never appealed to me before my castration, because it offered little opportunity for individual advancement. But recently I joined a choir, where I now enjoy the richness of the collective sound born of collaboration — and how much I’ve gained by accepting how much I’ve changed.

Angels cry. So do I. They also sing, and so do I.

Dr. Richard Wassersug is a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Correction: March 28, 2007

Because of an editing error, the byline on an essay in Science Times yesterday about hormonal treatment for prostate cancer referred incorrectly to the writer, Richard Wassersug. He is not an M.D.

Religion and Literature at the MMLA

The call for the 2007 Religion and Literature session of the Midwest Modern Language Association follows. Interested parties please respond with short (250 word) proposals and contact information.

Spiritual Anarchists and Sacred Troublemakers: (Auto)Biographies of the Saints as Subversive Discourses.

The lives of exemplary religious figures can exert a disruptive effect on accepted canons of religious literature. While accounts of the lives of saints and other religious virtuosi eventually play a central role in the lives of ordinary practitioners, these same exemplary figures often stand in opposition to authoritative religious and cultural institutions of their times. Attempts to bring these figures into the fold of orthodoxy typically involves an elision of the more seditious aspects of saintly lives. This session seeks papers that address the subversive elements that reside in the (auto)biographies of saintly personages. The organizers are particularly interested to address the topic from multiple religious traditions; papers addressing figures outside the Judeo-Christian tradition are especially, though not exclusively, invited.

Reception Studies Conference

The Bible is missing from the list below, but the work many of us do would be just right for this conference, I think.

Call For Papers

Suggestions for panels and papers in all areas of English, American, and other literatures, media, and book history are welcome. Here are some possible panels and topics:

1. The Reception of Brokeback Mountain, including internet activity

2. The reception of serialized fiction in periodicals.

3. Marxism and reception study

4. Rereading Huckleberry Finn

5. The Reception of Toni Morrison’s fiction

6. Reading Torture Or Human Rights in Literature

7. Rereading Stanley Fish’s Is there a Text in this Class?

8. Reception and nineteenth-century (American) women's fiction

9. Trans-Atlantic receptions of British and American fiction

10. American fiction and reception as (re)construction

11. Feminist theories of reception

12. Reception and/of children's literature(s)

Proposals are due by May 1. To suggest papers or panels or for more information, please contact the organizers:

Philip Goldstein, University of Delaware, 333 Shipley St., Wilmington, DE 19801 pgold@udel.edu

Tom Poe, Department of Media Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 202 Haag Hall, 5120 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110 ThomPoe@aol.com

Religion and Literature at MLA 2007

This just in from the MLA:

Dear Members of the Division on Literature and Religion,

The Executive Committee of the Division on Literature and Religion would like to invite you to join a conversation about our mutual interests that stretches beyond the four-day Convention each December. This email is being sent to all of you who listed the Division on Literature and Religion on your annual dues form. We hope throughout the year to use this means to keep you informed about upcoming events and other matters of interest.

The Division-sponsored sessions at the 2007 Convention in Chicago are on holy beauty and the teaching of world literature:

HOLY BEAUTY: concept and function of beauty in sacred texts and religious literature, representations of the divine and their legitimacy, taste and exclusivity, devotional uses, ontology of beauty, aesthetics. 300-word abstracts by March 1 to Susan Felch (felch@calvin.edu) and Achsah Guibbory (aguibbor@barnard.edu).


RELIGION AND THE TEACHING OF WORLD LITERATURE: Bridging divide between religious and secular; the use of sacred texts; all genres and cultural traditions; one traditional session, one roundtable format. 200-word abstracts by March 15 to patricia.a.ward@vanderbilt.edu.

We encourage you to submit abstracts for these sessions and look forward to a robust conversation in December.

For the convention in 2008, we would like to address "the current state of the field in religion and literature." If you have suggestions for specific sessions or papers on this topic, or would like to propose a speaker, or have ideas for other topics, please contact the Chair of the Division.

Please do feel free to correspond with any member of the committee regarding your concerns and suggestions.


All the best,

Susan M. Felch, Chair (felch@calvin.edu)
Dennis Taylor, Secretary (taylor@bc.edu)
David Damrosch (dnd2@columbia.edu)
Patricia Ward (patricia.a.ward@vanderbilt.edu)
Achsah Guibbory (aguibbor@barnard.edu)

Speaking of Sci-Fi and Bible...

Hi all. Sorry I haven't been around, reading, posting, or commenting: I've been remodelling my basement, a full time job on top of a full time job.

I noticed J.T.'s post about Zelany's Ecclesiastes, and for some reason, it reminded me of a couple of books I haven't thought of in about four years.

Have any of you read Mary Doria Russell's works, such as The Sparrow or it's sequel, Children of God? These are really interesting books, and I'd love to either discuss them or spread the word. Also, if anyone has read anything else by her and likes it, I'd like to know.

My copy of Political Theologies just arrived. I'm so disappointed that we don't all work at the same institution, as I'd love to work my way through it with you all.

Slightly OT?: truth vs the truth

This is slightly off topic, I fear, but reading Jay's thoughts on Kristeva and the challenges of speaking to and engaging with questions of religious ideology and absolutism, I was reminded of Nick Bromell's recent American Scholar essay, in which he uses his friendship with Scooter Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff currently on trial for perjury, to reflect on fundamentalism and how one grapples with it honestly, both at the personal and on the public level.

Teaching Help?

I suppose it's too late now, but if anyone has any advice on teaching sci-fi writer Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" I'd appreciate it for next time around. I've assigned this story in my Bible And Literature course, but I find it a bit thin, unfortunately. This week we're reading Ecclesiastes, as you might have guessed. In the story a vain writer from Earth and a pessimistic Martian community clash and yet join together to produce hope for the future. The writer takes it as one of his tasks to translate into Martian the Book of Ecclesiastes, and then reads it to the community of Martians he's living with in order to show them how a culture (in this case, western Judeo-Christianity) can be dark and pessimistic and yet brazen enough to push the boundaries of possibility and to succeed in unexpected ways. Zelazny misreads Qohelet's hebel, and doesn't acknowledge the biblical text's skepticism either. Having said all of this, though, I think I've said it all . . . and I've got 75 minutes of teaching time on my hands!

Lessons of Empire Not Learned

From USA Today:

'In an interview published Tuesday in The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, [Virginia state legislator Frank D.] Hargrove said slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War and added that "our black citizens should get over it."

The newspaper also quoted him as saying, "are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"'

As punishment for his anti-Semitic ignorance (not to mention his racism), perhaps Hargrove should be made to visit an exhibition of Fernando Botero's recent paintings of the victims of torture in Abu Ghraib. Those paintings comment upon the obscenity of the 'war on terror.' But, iconographically, they may also link Abu Ghraib to the punishments endured both by American slaves and by Jesus in the Passion narratives.

More from MLA's Profession 2006

As though in response to Kristeva's thesis (see my post on Kristeva's piece in Profession below), Ariel Dorfman writes in the same volume: "the most formidable intellectual challenge of our era is not how to reach out yet again to the thousands who admire Susan Sontag but how to connect with the sixty-five million Americans who read the apocalyptic Left Behind series."

Idea for an Edited Collection on the Bible and Popular Music

Roland Boer recently took note of oblique biblical references and analogues in Nick Cave's music in a study which advocates a hybrid of biblical criticism and cultural studies. The idea is to read the Bible not only in terms of later texts clearly dependent upon it, but also through a more ad hoc juxtapositioning in which "[b]iblical texts and cultural products are thrown together for mutual illumination, revealing aspects of each that only show up in light of the other."

I was reminded, as I read Boer's piece, of the biblically-inflected music of Tom Waits, and in particular of his song "Sins of the [or 'my'] Father" (from his 2004 album Real Gone), which includes the verses: "God all mighty for righteousness sake / Humiliation of our fallen state / Written in the book of tubold Cain . . . ." Punning on the name of Cain's great-great-great-great grandson, Tubal-Cain (from Gen. 4:22) such that the book of the history of Cain and his descendants is the book of the 'too bold,' while at the same time reflecting self-referentially upon the musical style of one who (in the curious words of the Golden Legend) "had delight in the sound of his hammers of which he made the consonants and tunes of accord in his song," this Waits song creates interesting options for scholars of reception history-as-juxtaposition. Taking a step beyond even what Boer proposes, I'd suggest reading Waits and the Bible in juxtaposition with commentary traditions and a specific history of appropriation. I could refer, for instance, to the ways in which this song intimates (or exploits, or mocks) something of Calvin's grudging respect for Cain's descendants in his Genesis commentary: "Let us then know, that the sons of Cain, though deprived of the Spirit of regeneration, were yet endued with gifts of no despicable kind." It's not a matter of establishing lines of influence, of course, but rather it's a question of deploying, via suggestive juxtaposition, and the broadest possible understanding of intertextuality, cultural products such as this song for the purposes of a critical, productive and entertaining rhetorical/cultural studies.

Any takers?

Kristeva in MLA's 'Profession'

In an annual publication of the MLA, Profession (2006), Julia Kristeva asks whether or not we're facing a global threat of religious war, and what a renewed literary/philosophical humanism can do about it. What spurs her to these questions are the riots in France late in 2005 -- or at least she takes these riots as a specific instance of the (only apparent) clash of religious cultures tearing at the fabric of the postmodern global order. Her argument, it seems to me, is a contribution to recent versions of the secularization debate, in which she comes down on the side of reason v. religion. I'm oversimplifying to a very great extent here, not only because Kristeva rejects this binary, but also because (in my reading at least) her psychoanalytic models are just as fully an instance of belief as is religion itself. But reading her pithy analysis of the present moment, it's difficult not to conclude otherwise: "The problem we're facing at the beginning of this new millennium is not one of religious wars but rather the rift that separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who prefer not to, so as to be pleasured by the show that announces he exists." As for those youthful Parisian rioters, Kristeva has this to offer: "beneath the vandalism, there is the long-neglected [and, moreover, 'prereligious'] need to believe" in ideals typical of adolescents. She even hints, through a couple of oddly unnecessary references, that there's something "primitive" or at least "Medieval" about these prebelievers. And while she doesn't return to the questions with which she began her essay to consider whether or not Sunni v. Shia violence in Baghdad is equally adolescent, the notion is there for the reader to consider.

I don't mean to disparage Kristeva's essay (entitled "Thinking in Dark Times") entirely. It doesn't withhold a certain sympathy for the "pyromaniacs" torching Paris, nor is it without political awareness of the real sources of the crisis. Still, it's brought me a new appreciation for friends who work, ever so creatively, at the fluid margins of theology. For a long time I've wondered why non-religious thinkers would want to engage in theological discourse; but if the alternatives are an increasingly irrelevant rejection of religious belief, or worse, a Kristevan condescension, then theology becomes rather more attractive as an option. At the very least, I think the humanities can do a far better job than this to mend wounds and build bridges.

From the old version!

You won't be able to add your comments to any of the posts below. Another consequence of my blog blunder. All new posts, though, will function as they should. Also, please note that the URL for this blog has changed. It's now: www.bibleand.blogspot.com.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Christmas Eve on FOX NEWS and CNN

On Dec. 24th I found a front-row vantage on the annual "War on Christmas," while running on a treadmill at my hometown gym: two televisions side by side, one set to CNN and one to FOX News Channel.

It was the afternoon, and FNC was exploiting (and perhaps positively shaping?) the religious commitments of its base audience, by showing a special on Rick Warren (famous evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church and author of the multi-million dollar bestseller The Purpose Driven Life) entitled "Purpose Driven Life: Can Rick Warren Change the World?" The story explored Warren's new found commitment to reverse-tithing and fighting poverty around the globe... and his wife's struggle against cancer.

FNC was also advertising (every 2 minutes or so) its evening line up for that night: a special pandering to the right-wing of the religion-and-public-life set, hosted by Newt Gingrich, and entitled One Nation Under God: Religion and History in Washington, D.C.. Families could sit down together after Christmas eve supper and tune into Fox for a discussion of why America really is a Christian nation—dontchaknow?

CNN, in the meantime, had it's own religiously themed line-up slated for prime time: After Jesus: The First Christians. This would be a special interviewing Bart Ehrman and Amy-Jill Levine, among others.

I found the juxtaposition telling: the evangelical right (or left?) on FOX, lined up against the historical critics on CNN. Who would win the ratings war?

I managed to tune into "After Jesus" that night. Parts of the show were good. For instance, the graphics were truly incredible: some techie had turned hundreds of beautiful classical paintings of early Christian scenes into moving, "three dimensional" panoramas.

But on balance, the show was terrible.

The music and dramatic narration (by Liam Neeson) was straight-up DaVinci code sensationalism, while the slap-dash review of the years 30–325 C.E. was, to say the least, confusing and over-simplified. (To say a bit more: it was also occasionally uncritical with regard to the Biblical sources used). The interspersed interviews with the critical scholars — most of whom offered only freshman-level summaries of old-school scholarly consensus dressed up as "news" — lent only a touch of credibility to the project.

Of course, the worst part was the commercials: they occurred about every 5 minutes. For some reason I forced myself to sit through the whole two hour program, watching with my mom and dad.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas,
and in states blue and red,
we all got religion
while the execs got fed.

The Gingrich special is being rebroadcast on Jan 1st.

Happy New Year!

Saturday, December 9, 2006

A Worthy Biblioblog...

I don't know if y'all have seen The Bible Films Blog by Matt Page but it is worth a look!

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Brilliant!

Congratulations to Matt! His book, Whose Acts of Peter?, which is a steal at Amazon for just $81.57 used, was declared brilliant by a reviewer at RBL.

Saturday, December 2, 2006

Religion and Literature at 2007 MMLA

The call for the 2007 Religion and Literature session of the Midwest Modern Language Association follows. Interested parties please respond with short (250 word) proposals and contact information.

Spiritual Anarchists and Sacred Troublemakers: (Auto)Biographies of the Saints as Subversive Discourses.

The lives of exemplary religious figures can exert a disruptive effect on accepted canons of religious literature. While accounts of the lives of saints and other religious virtuosi eventually play a central role in the lives of ordinary practitioners, these same exemplary figures often stand in opposition to authoritative religious and cultural institutions of their times. Attempts to bring these figures into the fold of orthodoxy typically involves an elision of the more seditious aspects of saintly lives. This session seeks papers that address the subversive elements that reside in the (auto)biographies of saintly personages. The organizers are particularly interested to address the topic from multiple religious traditions; papers addressing figures outside the Judeo-Christian tradition are especially, though not exclusively, invited.

Friday, December 1, 2006

From Thirteen to Nativity

After watching the well-crafted but extremely desolate film Thirteen, by director Catherine Hardwicke (2003), I vowed to lock my future daughter in a closet between the ages of 11 and 18.

Hardwicke has a new movie now: The Nativity.

I'll be very curious to see what's motivating this film. Which side of the "War Against Christmas" is "The Nativity" fighting on? Lol.

Predictions, reviews, reactions?

Sovereign assistance

I'm currently working on a number of ideas which seem interrelated but need, I feel, a defining center. My SBL paper dealt with theories of political sovereignty in Giorgio Agamben's book on Paul (The Time That Remains), and I'm interested in extending this work, but in a way that would allow me not only to discuss theoretical, but also literary and pop-cultural appropriations of the New Testament. I've written on violence and theology in British playwright Sarah Kane's work, on Johnny Cash's fictional life of Paul, on Jonathan Edwards' polemical/political readings of certain Pauline texts, on Derrida's readings of the NT, and so on. What all of my recent work has in common, I think, is an interest in exploring how issues of sovereignty and political community are given shape via creative (mis)appropriations of NT texts. The question is how to bring it all together. I'd welcome your thoughts, as well as any suggestions you might have for further reading.

By the way, be sure to check out David's (aka WDH) comment to my initial post for information on the upcoming M/MLA session he and Meredith are organizing.

OK I'm on

Jay
Thanks for starting this. I'm on - my first blog posting ever. Will look forward to lively discussions.

Posted by Glenn whitehouse at 10:06 AM 0 comments