Item Type: Journal Articles

This article highlights the prevalence, correlates, and adverse consequences of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) used by African American women. Efforts to prevent substance use and the nature and effectiveness of treatment are addressed. Several complex issues and limitations that relate to African American AOD prevention and the treatment are addressed including the misinformed assumption of the homogeneity of the African American population.

This article reports on qualitative research project, in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups of African American caregivers during a stressful time in their family development – caregiving at the end of the life – and the grieving through the aftermath. Results suggest that formal care is complicated by the distrust that many African Americans hold toward the health care system. The findings also highlights the importance of hearing from African American families to gain an understanding of what services, including family therapy, and other psychotherapy that families will need during this process.

This is an op-ed piece arguing for a critical traditionalist hermeneutic that avoids both literalism and liberalism in reading the biblical texts most frequently used to condemn homosexuality.

This article is intended to provide readers with an easily accessible overview of the concept of social memory, its roots in the work of Maurice Halbwachs, and the various ways that it is being used by biblical scholars to understand the history of the Bible and the nature of its contents.

In this article I lay out the contours of a Lutheran critical traditionalist hermeneutic that is ethically accountable while paying attention to the meaning of biblical texts and how they serve Christ‘s mission. I use this hermeneutic to critique Robert Gagnon‘s reading of Romans 1:18-32 and to offer an alternative reading of the same text.

This article explores the Didache as a written artifact of social memory documenting the socialization program of a particular network of Israelite Jesus people. Drawing on the work of sociologist Jeffry Olick, I demonstrate that the Didache establishes among non-Israelite recruits by incorporating a specific Jesus group memory genre, the sayings of Jesus, into a more widely known Mediterranean memory genre, the two ways discourse.

This article demonstrates how using cultural anthropological insights about ancient Mediterranean life enhances a contemporary reading of biblical texts. The interaction of Jesus and Mary occurs within the context of honor-shame cultures at the nexus of gendered space (ordinarily private space becomes temporarily public for a wedding), reliance on patronage networks for access to goods and services, and unique character of mother-son relations.

In this article I demonstrate the utility of the cultural anthropological models in the exegesis of a difficult text. Here the role of women in honor-shame cultures in which there is not only a gendered division of labor but also gendered space helps us understand and evaluate Paul‘s argument for the veiling of women who pray and prophesy in the assembly.