The Bible

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Coogan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Western History ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Saturday Night Live ◽  
Influential Book

The Bible is the most influential book in Western history. As the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible has been interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, utilized to promote a seemingly endless run of theological and political positions. Adherents and detractors alike point to different passages throughout to justify wildly disparate behaviors and beliefs. Translated and retranslated, these texts lead both to unity and intense conflict. Influential books on any topic are typically called “bibles.” What is the Bible? As a text considered sacred by some, its stories and language appear throughout the fine arts and popular culture, from Shakespeare to Saturday Night Live. In Michael Coogan’s eagerly awaited addition to Oxford’s What Everyone Needs to know® series, conflicts and controversies surrounding the world’s bestselling book are addressed in a straightforward Q&A format. This book provides an unbiased look at biblical authority and authorship, the Bible’s influence in Western culture, the disputes over meaning and interpretation, and the state of biblical scholarship today. Brimming with information for the student and the expert alike, The Bible: What Everyone Needs to Know ® is a dependable introduction to a most contentious holy book.

Publishing in Bible and American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 536-552
Author(s):  
Robert Paul Seesengood
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Future Work

This essay is an examination of scholarship on the Bible and (American) popular culture. It reviews the history and assumptions of cultural studies and maps how this body of work influenced biblical scholarship after 1990. It surveys an array of examples of scholarship on the Bible and popular culture and concludes with some suggestions for future work. Specifically, this essay asks the following: How has interest in Bible and popular culture affected academic publishing? How did these trends emerge, and what assumptions prompt them? What new journals or series or reference works have appeared that are specifically devoted to this broad topic, and what are some ways that the Bible and popular culture have been treated therein?

Introduction

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Art ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Court Records ◽  
White American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Popular Subject

Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature. The introduction explains how Samson becomes identified with people of African descent in American literature. It discusses the biblical story of Samson and the lack of physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible. It provides examples of the racialized uses of Samson in poetry, sermons, speeches, narratives by enslaved persons, court records, and newspapers. It offers some possible reasons why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans.

Afrocentrism and Biblical Authority

1992 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cain Hope Felder
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Western History ◽  
Tacit Assumption ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Church

“Throughout Western history, the authority of the Bible has been predicated upon the tacit assumption of the preeminence of European cultures as somehow the most suitable and, thus, the most reliable ‘bearers of the tradition'—a tradition that has been passed on and otherwise shared with the Americas and Asia. Especially in the modern period, the attitude developed that African Americans, Afro-Asiatics, Asians, and Hispanics were quite secondary to the ancient biblical narratives. The Europeans and Euro-American church and academy historically and unevenly struggled to speak and, sometimes, to write with a vision of universalism and inclusiveness, but, actually, the church and academy thought and practiced particularity and exclusiveness without reference to the authority of what the biblical authors thought or did in their ancient contexts. Recent studies, however, help us to appreciate the biblical world as being, as one title indicates, Before Color Prejudice.”

scholarly journals Magic Mike, Dirty Dancing, and the (Empty) Promise of Heteromasculinity

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Addie Tsai
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Compulsory Heterosexuality ◽  
Saturday Night Live ◽  
The Relationship

In 1987, Eddie Murphy performed a comic sketch about white men dancing that would inform future movers and makers of white male dancing in American popular culture, helping to create a trope mocking white men for their inability to dance, most often referred to as the “white man dance.” At that time, Saturday Night Live, with the help of its host Patrick Swayze, fresh off the popularity of his work in sleeper hit Dirty Dancing, contributed to the trope itself with a sketch comparing the hypermuscular physique of Swayze vs. the flabby physique of comedian Chris Farley. Almost thirty years later, American popular culture would see a return to a renewed interest in the dance film with the stripper film Magic Mike. This article argues that although Magic Mike, like Dirty Dancing, relies on the makeover trope as its narrative and thematic engine, Magic Mike revises the popular dance film format to instead focus on the relationship between two men, Mike and Adam, rather than on a heterosexual partnering. Magic Mike’s focus on this male-to-male relationship inevitably comments on the exchange between heteronormative masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality and their assumed whiteness.

scholarly journals The Feminist and the Bible: Hermeneutical Alternatives

1997 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Osiek
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Authority ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Interpretive Methods

Amid the varieties of feminist interpretive methods in biblical scholarship, this article suggests a general typology of approaches: rejection of the claims of biblical authority; acceptance of those claims with critique of oppressive interpretations; revisionism, which holds to the possibility of reconstructing the lost experience of women in the texts; reliance on symbol and image of the feminine to convey meaning; and finally, the liberation critique of oppressive structures. An appreciation and critique is offered for each alternative.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Beatrice J. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Biblical Texts

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

The Bible in the German Empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Rieger
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
German Empire ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Production

Even though Germany’s colonial empire lasted merely three decades, from 1884 to 1915, German colonial fantasies shaped intellectual production from the late eighteenth century onward. This cultural climate shapes a great variety of engagements with the Bible, from the beginnings of liberal theology with Friedrich Schleiermacher to missionary efforts and the rather abstract academic productions of biblical scholarship in the late nineteenth century, including the prominent history of religions school. At the same time, there are also efforts to resist colonial tendencies, sometimes in the work of the same authors who otherwise perpetuate the colonial spirit.

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