A collection of essays exemplifying new directions in biblical scholarship being taken by biblical scholars who use new literary, historical and sociological critical tools in exploring issues of concern to their communities, and pose a challenge to others in the discipline to broaden the canons of interpretation and sources. These essays, which are from the generation of scholars who follow the writers of the historic "Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Fortress, 1991), address issues of cultural criticism, utilization of Black religious sources such as the...

With one Australian exception, American scholars of religious, Judaic, and biblical studies explore the work of Lithuanian-born French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1905-95) as it relates to their fields. His own essay On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures precedes ten others on such topics as his biblical hermeneutic, facing Job, eschatology, t

Literacy is essentially about the control of information, memory, and belief, and with colonialism in Southern Africa came the Bible and text-based literacy monitored by missionaries and colonial authorities. Old and new oral traditions, however, are beyond the control of empire and often carry the resistance, hopes, and dreams of colonized people. The essays in this volume recover aspects of Southern Africa's rich oral tradition. The authors, from disciplines such as anthropology, African literature, and biblical studies, delineate some of the contours of the indigenous knowledge systems...

While biblical scholars increasingly use insights from postcolonial theory to interpret the Bible, the Bible itself is often neglected by postcolonial criticism, with the result that there is little influence in the other direction: from the Bible to postcolonial criticism. This second edition of Last Stop before Antarctica begins to repair the imbalance by pointing to the vital role that the Bible played in colonization, using Australia????????????????????????one of the first centers of postcolonial criticism????????????????????????as a specific example. Drawing upon colonial literature,...

Regional concerns-climate change, conquest, migration, displacement, resettlement, asylum, discipleship, and others-challenge authors currently situated in Oceania to reflect on the practices of biblical interpretation and to consequently reread biblical texts with fluid understandings of borders and belonging(s).