Jeremiah, by Kathleen M. O’Connor

It is a truism that the questions we ask of the biblical text determine in some great measure what the text will yield. Or in more critical terms, it matters decisively which allied discipline scripture is read through. For a very long time it has been universally accepted that the proper allied discipline for scripture interpretation is history, and history of the most positivistic German kind. Predictably that alliance has focused interpretation on the questions “What happened?” or “Could it have happened?” Many quarrels about the Bible, and historical-critical solutions to those quarrels, have turned on those questions.

Only since the last decades of the 20th century has the hegemony of history been challenged and broken, largely through the work of liberationists, feminists and, more recently, postcolonial interpreters. In that recent time, the allied disciplines that have given method and theory for interpretation are the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. Given this shift in allied disciplines, the question has shifted to: “What is the text doing?” It is now widely recognized that the texts are not reports (as in “What happened?”), nor are they innocent theological representations. They are, rather, acts of leverage that intend to do something in terms of social power, social ideology and social meaning.

Amid the broad array of social scien­tific perspectives, Kathleen O’Connor appeals in this extraordinary book to trauma and disaster studies, which now have a well-defined body of learning about the characteristic ways in which people respond to disaster. The quartet of topics that O’Connor takes from that body of theory concerns fragmented memories of violence, a breakdown of language that destroys the capacity to speak meaningfully about the disaster, psychic numbness and a loss of emotional capacity, and loss of confidence in meaningful structures related to God, the world and other people. These responses recur in disasters that “overwhelm nearly everything.”