Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior

This chapter discusses the aims of Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible. The key research questions for this book are: (1) How did Hagar become Black? and (2) What purpose did or does that serve? It situates this project at the intersection of African American biblical scholarship and reception history within biblical scholarship. This chapter introduces terminology related to race and ethnicity and provides background information on issues of color within the ancient world and within biblical texts. It explores the persistence of racial categorization within US society and the US literary imagination despite the lack of biological or genetic basis for contemporary notions of race. It discusses the importance of African American vernacular traditions and the ongoing and dynamic social and cultural interactions between African Americans and biblical texts. It provides an overview of each chapter within the book.

Author(s):  
Sara M. Koenig

The biblical texts about Bathsheba have notorious gaps, even by the laconic standards of Hebrew narrative. Post-biblical receptions of the story flesh out the terse chapters of 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, ascribing feelings and motives to Bathsheba and David that are not contained in the Hebrew text. This essay examines the intersection of reception history and feminist biblical scholarship by considering eleven novels about Bathsheba from the twentieth and twenty-first century. These novels expand Bathsheba’s character beyond the text, but in fairly gender stereotypical ways, such that feminist readers of the novels may be left wanting more.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Church

Abstract The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to communicate appropriated receptions of biblical texts. The intimate connection that these objects have to their theological and political context marks them as significant moments of biblical reception, that have, up to this point, been overlooked by historians in the field. This article identifies the broader lacuna in scholarship surrounding the reception history of the Bible during the Counter-Reformation. Whilst this is due to a preference for studies of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, the lack of scholarly investment poorly reflects the relevance of the Counter-Reformation period to the reception-historical methodology. The context prioritized the interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Church tradition, or in other words, the history of the Bible’s reception. This affinity is echoed in the reception-historical approach found in contemporary biblical scholarship, creating a hermeneutical link between the two contexts. Visual culture was a valuable expression of Counter-Reformation rhetoric and visualized the mediation of biblical texts through Church tradition. This article uses Zuccaro’s altarpiece as a tool to argue this hypothesis and postulate the intimate relationship maintained between texts and their reception in Counter-Reformation Catholicism.


Author(s):  
Ol'ga Panova

Soviet contacts with African-American authors are an important part of both Soviet-Ame­rican literary contacts and African-American literature history. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), the most prominent African-American thinker, writer, public figure of the 20th century, occupies a special place. He travelled to the USSR five times (1926, 1936, 1949, 1958–1959, 1962) and had repeatedly addressed the subject of Russia and the USSR in his letters, essays, and fiction. The incentive for Du Bois’ first visit to the USSR was his interest in the Revolution of 1917 and the Russian social experiment, namely, the solution to the race and ethnicity problem. The following visits allow tracing not only the evolution of Du Bois’ viewpoint (which became increasingly leftist), but also the development of his public and literary reputation in the Soviet Union — from wariness (for Du Bois being a liberal and unreliable associate) to honoring him as a major African-American classic and a great friend of the USSR. The fact that William Du Bois had joined the US Communist Party six month before his death and his relocation from the US to Ghana finalized the Soviet idealistic attitude towards the writer’s life. The essence of Du Bois’ journey was perceived as a gradual transition from errors and misconceptions to a more complete acceptance of Marxism-Leninism.


Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior

This book offers a reception history of biblical Hagar. Despite the limited description of Hagar in biblical texts, she becomes an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While many interpreters often treat biblical characters as White or as non-Black, this book investigates how, when, and why some interpreters choose to identify biblical Hagar as a Black woman. It centers on treatments of Hagar by African American biblical interpreters and focuses attention on how professional and non-professional interpreters identify and engage issues of difference, including gender, race, ethnicity, and status. Building on the work of African American classicists and biblical scholars, Reimagining Hagar discusses the African presence in biblical texts and issues of race within biblical studies. It details the portrayal of Hagar in nineteenth century pro- and anti-slavery literature in the United States, in African American vernacular traditions, and in religious studies and biblical studies scholarship. Engaging an array of literary and artistic sources, Reimagining Hagar illustrates that interpretations of Hagar as Black emphasize elements of Hagar’s narrative in order to connect her with or disassociate her from particular groups. This book traces some of the key points within the emergence and development of this unique understanding of Hagar as a Black woman.


Author(s):  
Ian Boxall

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.


Author(s):  
Ralph Catalano ◽  
Deborah Karasek ◽  
Tim Bruckner ◽  
Joan A. Casey ◽  
Katherine Saxton ◽  
...  

AbstractPeriviable infants (i.e., born before 26 complete weeks of gestation) represent fewer than .5% of births in the US but account for 40% of infant mortality and 20% of billed hospital obstetric costs. African American women contribute about 14% of live births in the US, but these include nearly a third of the country’s periviable births. Consistent with theory and with periviable births among other race/ethnicity groups, males predominate among African American periviable births in stressed populations. We test the hypothesis that the disparity in periviable male births among African American and non-Hispanic white populations responds to the African American unemployment rate because that indicator not only traces, but also contributes to, the prevalence of stress in the population. We use time-series methods that control for autocorrelation including secular trends, seasonality, and the tendency to remain elevated or depressed after high or low values. The racial disparity in male periviable birth increases by 4.45% for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate of African Americans above its expected value. We infer that unemployment—a population stressor over which our institutions exercise considerable control—affects the disparity between African American and non-Hispanic white periviable births in the US.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110361
Author(s):  
Gentian Qejvanaj

Roma segregation in Albania has been causing growing concern since the fall of the communist regime. In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of the Albanian national action plan for Roma inclusion 2016–2020, in 2018, halfway in its implementation period. We gathered data on education and employment from the pre-implementation period (2015) and compared it with the latest available data in 2018. Interviews with local experts and surveys by the Balkan Barometer will provide background information to assess the current state of Roma integration in Albania. Moreover, descriptive statistics from national and international institutions and structured interviews will draw an independent narrative of Roma affairs. In our conclusion, we suggest moving beyond the “us and them” approach with programs run on inertia; our findings highlight that although encouraging achievements have been reached under the 2016–2020 action plan, real inclusion is still far, as statistical achievements do not say much about the quality of the education or job training provided under the 2016–2020 action plan.


Author(s):  
Thomas Tops

Summary The present study analyses recent criticisms against the use of modern-historical methodologies in Biblical Studies. These methodologies abstract from the historical horizon of the researcher. In order to relate properly to the historicality of the researcher, historical objectivism needs to be transformed into historical hermeneutics. Recent developments in the historical methodology of biblical scholars are unable to reckon with the historicality of the researcher due to the partial or incorrect implementation of Gadamer’s views on reception history. I analyse the views of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gadamer on historicality and contend that the study of reception history is a necessary condition for conducting historical study from within the limits of our historicality. Reception history should not be a distinct methodological step to study the “Nachleben” of biblical texts, but needs to clarify how the understanding of these texts is already effected by their history of interpretation. The awareness of the presuppositions that have guided previous interpretations of biblical texts enables us to be confronted by their alterity. This confrontation calls for a synthesis between reception-historical and historical-critical methodology that introduces a new paradigm for conducting historical study in Biblical Studies in dialogue with other theological disciplines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Brad E. Kelle

Moral injury emerged within clinical psychology and related fields to refer to a non-physical wound (psychological and emotional pain and its effects) that results from the violation (by oneself or others) of a person’s deepest moral beliefs (about oneself, others, or the world). Originally conceived in the context of warfare, the notion has now expanded to include the morally damaging impact of various non-war-related experiences and circumstances. Since its inception, moral injury has been an intersectional and cross-disciplinary term and significant work has appeared in psychology, philosophy, medicine, spiritual/pastoral care, chaplaincy, and theology. Since 2015, biblical scholarship has engaged moral injury along two primary trajectories: 1) creative re-readings of biblical stories and characters informed by insights from moral injury; and 2) explorations of the postwar rituals and symbolic practices found in biblical texts and how they might connect to the felt needs of morally injured persons. These trajectories suggest that the engagement between the Bible and moral injury generates a two-way conversation in which moral injury can serve as a heuristic that brings new meanings out of biblical texts, and the critical study of biblical texts can contribute to the attempts to understand, identify, and heal moral injury.


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