Every contemporary theological interpreter must come to terms with the fact that every interpretation is local and informed by context. Every interpretation carries with it some ideological marking because no interpretation is, finally, disinterested.
Books
Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators
This extraordinary volume is among the first in a new series of commentaries from Eerdmans that invites attention to the history of church interpretation of the Bible in precritical modes.
There are now scores of books dealing with the right-wing takeover of the church in the United States—enough that my editor suggests that they form an identifiable genre.
Books
Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology
The current conversation concerning science and religion is urgent, but it is neither obvious nor easy. On the surface, that conversation is vexed by shrill advocates on both sides who contribute nothing to the conversation and are not really interested in serious engagement.
Recently Senator John Kerry suffered yet another self-inflicted wound with a clumsy joke. Regardless of his several subsequent explanations, he gave the impression that he believes that the military is for losers who can’t make it in mainstream society.
Editor’s note: In a new Theolog endeavor we’ve asked Walter
Brueggemann to share some talking points on the Sunday lectionary for
the next six weeks. These are meant to be the sort of observation one
member of a lectionary group might make to another, or fodder for
thinking and reading in advance of Sunday.
For complex historical and religious reasons,Americans have found it easy to view the U.S. as the “new Israel,” the carrier of God’s mandates in the world. This view has led to an expansive notion of the nation’s “manifest destiny” and to all manner of initiatives under the general rubric of America’s exceptional character and mission.
Books
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
Jon Levenson has established himself as the foremost theological interpreter of the Hebrew Bible from a Jewish perspective in a way that contributes to the larger theological discussion.
Books
God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition
Add this book to the spate of recent publications that reflect on the new U.S. dominance in the global economy and the political-military muscle that reinforces that dominance. Here is a voice of “critical realism” that sounds like an echo of Henry Kissinger—much more realist than critical.
Books
The Jezebel Letters: Religion and Politics in Ninth-Century Israel
Eleanor Ferris Beach
Reading the Bible with the Damned
Bob Ekblad
Song of Songs
J. Cheryl Exum
A Moral Creed for all Christians
Daniel C. Maguire
Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics
Jacob Milgrom
The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1
J. Richard Middleton
The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament
Rolf Rendtorff
Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice
Johanna W. H. van Wijk-Bos
God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation
With a clever convergence of biblical texts, ancient Near Eastern literature, archaeology, and fictive imagination that is not fictitious, Beach weaves a new account of Jezebel and Ahab from the perspective of Jezebel.
Books
Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel
William Dever invites the reader into the contentious discussion under way in Old Testament studies around issues of method, history and theological claims.
I have been thinking about the ways in which the Bible is a critical alternative to the enmeshments in which we find ourselves in the church and in society. I have not, of course, escaped these enmeshments myself, but in any case I offer a series of 19 theses about the Bible in the church.
Commentators in the media have often invoked the term biblical to describe the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which has gone beyond our imagination and our explanatory categories. The term has not been used with any precision—it seems to mean simply vast or awe-inspiring. What would it mean to view the catastrophe in genuinely biblical terms? Four biblical themes inform my own pondering.
