AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Verrrrrry Interresting

A provocative past 24 hours, including lovely catch-up with friends from the Catholic Biblical Association, dinner with our friend (and my editor — he actually remains both) Jon, a strong and encouraging presidential address, a delightful social hour, a good night’s sleep, a good session of the Hermeneutics Task Force (“CSI: Hermeneutics”), and a fascinating talk from Mark Allan Powell.

Here are some of the things I learned:

Jean-Pierre keeps up on my blog enough to have learned where to go for wifi connectivity in Halifax. I’ll bear that in mind, and say only the most positive things about my deep, abiding respect for him and for his marvelous scholarly work in the areas of Bible and technology. Jean-Pierre also showed himself a close reader of the PR for St. Mary’s University, which blurbs one of the buildings in which we meet as “fully wired, should personal computers for connecting to the internet ever become affordable” (or something like that).

Jon my friend and editor, who applied only the gentlest twist to my arm, wants my book about Matthew’s Gospel more than my book about exegetical method, so that’ll be next up when I finish my James commentary.

Frank Matera, the new president of CBA, is working on the topic of New Testament Theology, taking an approach with which I’m quite sympathetic. After having been plugging away at this topic for years (I think I read my first public paper on NT theology fifteen years ago), it’s intensely gratifying that so prominent a scholar as Matera is taking the same general direction I’ve been staking out.

I pitched the “comics history of the early church” idea to several publishers, at least one of who expressed some interest (and they already have illustrators on the payroll, so they might be well-positioned to tackle such a project).

In the Hermeneutics Task Force meeting (“We’e just after the interpretations, ma’am; nothing but the interpretations”), Toni Craven tried out some material about postmodern thought, chaos theory, pedagogy, and hermeneutics. Much to be said and thought here, certainly much more than we could have brought to a satisfying discussion in the time allotted us. It wasn’t entirely clear to me that Toni was recognizing a difference between the possibility of emergent order coalescing from the chaos of biblical interpretations (on one hand) and the troubling notion of “rules of chaos” (on the other). I sometimes hear people talk about chaos theory as though fractals and various sets abolish the very notion of disorder, a position about which I’m very dubious — as opposed to the entirely plausible notion that we recognize in retrospect patterns, where we once had observed only randomness. I’m quite sure others understand this whole chaos business much better than I; Toni didn’t articulate her perspectives in a way that convinced me she understood it better than I, though perhaps with more time we both could make more sense. I think she’s absolutely right, though, to intuit that there’s a connection between emergence and the effective constraints on interpretation. I should remember to work with my classes more on the emergent, nomadic, adaptive, character of the interpretation I encourage.

I met Sandra Schneiders for the first time in our session, though, and she and I had a lovely conversation.

After the first session, I traipsed over to Mark Allan Powell’s lecture, the beginning of which I missed, but which reported some piquant research results that Mark and I have discussed before. (Mark and I conduct an on-going dialogue in which he is delightfully, persistently wrong, and I am patiently, steadfastly correct. To show how wrong he is, I’ll simply note that he would say that the roles are reversed. How perverse can you get?) Among his findings (published in his under-appreciated book, Chasing the Eastern Star), he explained an experiment he ran among his seminarians in Columbus, Ohio, and St. Petersburg, Russia. When asked to read and summarize the parable of the Prodigal Son, U.S. seminarians all mentioned the son’s financial imprudence — and only 6 % mentioned the famine in the land that precipitates the son’s impecunity. Among the Russian students, on the other hand, %84 remembered the famine, and only %34 said anything about the son’s spending habits. In follow-up discussion, Russian students and faculty strongly identified the son’s sin as his presumptuous illusion that he could be self-sufficient, whereas the Americans typically cited his bad financial planning.

In a similar experiment, Mark found that when he asked a sample of American clergy what a particular passage means, %52 referred to the author in their explanation, while none of the sample of American lay Christians mentioned the author. Contrariwise, all of the lay interpreters mentioned themselves, and their affective response to the passage, in answering the “what does it mean?” question, whereas only %40 of clergy mentioned themselves.

As Mark stresses, these are only rough findings, but they’re not insignificant. I asked him how this had affected his pedagogy, and he allowed that it hadn’t changed his intro-course teaching much, although it had somewhat influenced his upper-level courses.

Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Halifax was the celebrant and preacher at midday mass, and very wonderfully gave thanks for the work of theologians and biblical scholars in his prayers. Sometimes it seems as though the church regards us mostly as annoyances; his prayer came as a touching surprise.

An usher asked Margaret and me to bring the Offerings of the People to the altar at mass, but we had to explain that — willing though we were to participate in that way — we would be involved in the exquisitely ironic position of not being canonically permitted to receive the elements we had just offered, as we are not Roman Catholics. She appreciatively found other volunteers.

Now, back to the conference.

Posted by AKMA at August 8, 2004 12:57 PM | TrackBack