I’m still curious to know about the gospel choir number about which I’ve posted before, and today somebody arrived at my page looking for the answer. I don’t know who you are, knowledge-seeker, but I still haven’t turned up any evidence that that song existed apart from your query (the mere existence of which gives…
All posts in May 2014
Metaphorically Literal
Ages ago — the last time I blogged a two-paragraph hermeneutics post — I opened the case that the familiar distinction between literal and figurative (and its relatives “metaphorical” and especially “symbolic”) should be abandoned. Of course, the terms do very well for casual and heuristic purposes. I’m not in the least suggesting that we…
Here’s the Thing
It’s been a long week of marking and revising and meeting and saying Masses and leading classes, so I’m allotting myself more than two paragraphs (if I want them — we’ll see how this turns out) to point to an oblique aspect of my hermeneutical proposal. First, I acknowledge that this hermeneutic of offering-and-uptake risks…
More Desire and Interpretation
I suspect I’ve found another example of the role of desire in interpretation: the alleged prevalence of promiscuity and prostitution in first-century Corinth. At this point, the prevailing sense among classical historians (as far as I can tell) favours the view that interpreters of the relevant texts should acknowledge that the oft-cited instance of the…
Outage
Between some marking and examining (on one hand) and a brief site outage (on the other) I’m behind. Can’t wait to get past this crest of busyness.
Devotion Love Surrender
Here at St Stephen’s House, we have the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament every Friday after Evensong — and since Father Damian is gallivanting around Australia, spreading the Good News and offering the benefit of his wisdom on mission, evangelism, and congregational life to the Diocese of the Murray, my turn to preside at that…
Exit the Symbolic
If you’ve been following along more or less agreeably, you’ve assented to a number of very powerful points. You are on board with my characterisation of words as an extraordinary but highly atypical (hence, at risk of misleading) mode for expression and apprehension. You have allowed me the notion that any verbal mode of expression…
Placeholder
Once again the beginning of the week is kicking me to the turf. Tomorrow should be better. Tomorrow should be better.
Seasonal Hermeneutics
On an “offering-uptake” model for hermeneutics, the hermeneutical problem becomes a problem of information design, an exercise in communicative strategy and tactics. Your communicative expression unfolds not solely in the words you choose (though those remain very important), but in the inflection with which you express those words, the gestures that accompany them, and so…
Don’t Forget
I haven’t seen anyone link to wood s lot recently, and I wanted to rectify that in my own tiny way. Mark has been keeping at his cataloguing, linking, distributing his distinctive flavour of brilliant Web browsing for years and years. The megasites claim too much of our time these days, while humble wood s…
Seeing It Opposite-wise
Up to now, we’ve been moving from non-verbal, non-glyphic communicative modes and trying to see how verbal communication functions as a remarkable, powerful, precise extension of gestural, visual, aural (etc.) expression and apprehension. As gestures, sigla, tones, even patterns of smell and texture become familiar and eventually routinised with very particular associations and expectations, so…
Where Meaning Stands
Rules do not prevent bad interpretations. No one really supposes that they do, I hope; do we imagine a scene in which Dan Brown considers writing a megablockbuster novel, but then realises that his interpretive background for the novel and its claims that “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel…