Reading from Cultural Spaces

Reading from Cultural Spaces

The Difference that Culture Makes in Biblical InterpretationReading from Cultural Spaces

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BackgroundThe Flesh and Blood Reader

Fernando Segovia. Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of Otherness and Engagement. Pages 1-35 in Reading From This Place. Volume I: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States. Ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

The Culture ExerciseThree Questions:

What is your culture?In what ways do you reflect or resist your culture?How does your culture influence your reading of the biblical text?

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Performing Culture

Marlon Esguerra

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Culturally ContextualBiblical Interpretation?

Culturally ContextualBiblical InterpretationWhat is CULTURE?The concept of culture I espouseis essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.~Clifford Gertz, The Interpretation of Culture

Culture is a system of discriminations and evaluations it also means that culture is a system of exclusions~Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic

Culturally ContextualBiblical InterpretationWhat do we mean by CONTEXT?

Three spheres or worlds of context:

World behind the textWorld of the textWorld in front of the text

Culturally ContextualBiblical InterpretationWhat is BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION?

Question(s):What makes for good biblical interpretation?What are our assumptions?What is our criteria?Who decides?

What role does culture play in the questions above?

Mark 7:24-2824From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre.* He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27He said to her, Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the childrens food and throw it to the dogs. 28But she answered him, Sir,* even the dogs under the table eat the childrens crumbs. 29Then he said to her, For saying that, you may gothe demon has left your daughter. 30So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

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Readers Reading Abraham/Sarah/Hagar (Gen 16 and 21)Genesis 16 and 21

Readers Reading Genesis 16 and 21Gerhard von Rad: 20th C. German scholar, Lutheran pastorPhyllis Trible: late 20th C. first gen. feminist biblical scholarDelores Williams: late 20th C. Womanist theologian


Readers Reading Genesis 16 and 21Gerhard von Rad: 20th C. German scholar, Lutheran pastor

a fainthearted faith that cannot leave things with God and believes it necessary to help things along.




so conceived in defiance or in little faith cannot be the heir of promise.




so conceived in defiance or in little faith cannot be the heir of promise.


Readers Reading Genesis 16 and 21Gerhard von Rad: 20th C. German scholar, Lutheran pastorPhyllis Trible: late 20th C. first gen. feminist biblical scholar

Yet she experiences exodus without liberation, revelation without salvation, wilderness without covenant, wanderings without land, promise without fulfillment, and unmerited exile without return.


















The story of the Egyptian slave and her Hebrew mistress is hauntingly reminiscent of the disturbing accounts of black slavewomen and white mistresses during slavery.









Kevin, Interfaith Youth Core, When Ishmael Comes Home

Documents

Reading from Cultural Spaces