Category: Biblical Studies

Lectionary reflections on John 1 and a psalm.

Suggests that arguments within biblical-heritage religions are often between those whose greatest fear is fall into chaos and those whose greatest fear is oppression from tyrannical forces. The Bible reflects corresponding arguments within ancient Israel and the nascent church. The use of biblical texts often functions to fuel those arguments rather than to resolve them.

The article traces the history of Lutheran women’s Bible studies in the United States back to the late 1800s, reports reflections of contemporary Bible study authors and participants, and analyzes the role of biblical critical methods and Lutheran theology in such studies. With Susan McArver and Diane Jacobson.

In response to McVann’s “Reading Mark Ritually: Honor-Shame and the Ritual of Baptism,” this essay summarizes McVann’s application of Victor Turner’s ritual model and assesses support for McVann’s thesis about Jesus’ status transformation in Mark’s gospel, while raising larger questions about the functioning of ritual in relation to boundaries and the experiences of reading and hearing narrative texts.

Drawing on personal interviews with six Arab Christian women living in the United States, the article reinterprets the Luke 15 parables in light of the women’s own responses to the parables and their experiences of life in the modern contexts of Egypt and Lebanon.

This article is an expansion and updating of the chapter described in The Daemonic Imagination edited by Detweiler and Doty.

The essay answers the question of how and when biblical critical methods can be used in combination and ways in which the texts themselves encourage shifts from one method to another. The particular test case is George Kennedy’s rhetorical analysis of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7.