Biblical Jazz

Marc Ellis in his book Reading the Torah Out Loud provides a number of provocative observations. The story richly ruminates on the process of reading aloud. J.L. Austin in his William James lectures at Harvard How to Do Things with Words. His notion of performative nature of words gives one a way to think about how words form human and bounding between humans. Reading the Ellis’ book prompts me to think about two contexts for reading aloud. On the one hand Ellis reminds us of the intimate, family situation. On the other, there is the reading in the public square.
When the seventh month came –the people of Israel being settled in their towns—all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD has given to Israel. (NRSV Neh 7:73b-8:1) The reading out loud as reading in public in Nehemiah indicates that this performative speech/reading functions as part of a covenantal renewal process. We might see reading out loud as a form of testimony.
At the side of the child’s bed we read the Bible together as more like a Lectio Divina than as a public testimony of covenantal renewal.

I had just come back from the gym and was getting a little breakfast when the first airplane crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001. The metaphor that grabs me most about that day is fire; imagine the temperature that it took to melt the infrastructure of those buildings. I vividly remember thinking to myself “how does one forgive a person for committing such a heinous and hateful act.
I taught courses at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies hosted by Xavier University in New Orleans for several years. On the one hand I listened intently as various news agencies described the event around hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, I tried to distance myself lest I be overcome with grief. Like many post-moderns in this “global village” the access to news in this “flat world” means one must carefully negotiate between empathy and distance. The hurricane brought the flood. Like the biblical account of the flood there were winners and losers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the hurricane on the New Orleans lifestyle. They relented when mainstream America mouth agape and stunned by the callous use of biblical historiography retaliated with denunciations. The reaction to Katrina and the subsequent aid dramatized issues of race and class in ways that many Americans found quite disturbing.
This week the earthquake in Haiti once again reminds us of natural disasters and human frailty and courage.
The fire and the flood, the human caused trauma and the natural disaster shape the lives of women and men living in North America but does that change biblical studies? Kathleen M. O’Connor (Lamentations & the Tears of the World) and Tod Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book) have done this for the book of Lamentations. I wonder what other books in the area of biblical studies examine hermeneutics after these sorts of disasters.

Some books continue to hold up even after a span of years. Walter Brueggemann wrote the book Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology in 1988. However, more than twenty years hence the argument remains compelling. Brueggemann built on the work of Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien 1921-1924. In these as of yet un-translated volumes Mowinckel explores the creative and formative function of the ancient Israelite cult as evidenced in the biblical Psalms.
What Brueggemann does so effectively is put this in a post-modern context bringing to bear the work of literary critics/biblical scholars, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians in order to analyze the constructive work of praise. Brueggemann claims that praise constructs a life world.
At the same time praise as constitutive of a life world also functions as a boundary. This boundary provides a hard edge to the soft idolatries and ideologies of post-modernity.
So even after over twenty years Brueggemann’s observation of the constitutive and discerning role of praise continues to challenge the reader of the Bible.

The air was frosty in North Manchester Indiana as the spring term began. T. Wayne Reiman nearing retirement offered a course called the Philosophy of Education. I enrolled in the course as one of my last requirements for graduation. The class read as book by Carl Rogers, who I knew of from psychology classes. The name of the book was Freedom to Learn. Rogers among other things commended the idea of learning contracts. Paulo Freire was another reading in this class. Freire described an implicit philosophy of education metaphor that dominated higher education in the twentieth century, the banking idea. The student comes to the bank. The professor makes a deposit in the brain, or we might say the database of the student. The student pays tuition in exchange for this increased database. Freire challenged his readers to hold out for a different educational metaphor one with a more librerative outlook. Years of graduate school and teaching put me pretty far back into the banking model.

However, increasingly I decided to go back to the future. Over the semester break I read The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles fifth edition revised by Elwood F. Holton III and Richard A. Swanson. I have decided to go back learning contracts and a more self consciously student centered approach in my classes.
This semester I want to see what happens when the adult learner encounters a Web 2.0 world. I wonder where it will lead.