Exciting Bible and Critical Theory Seminar Programme! Are you coming?

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b&ct, Badiou, Bible and Critical Theory, Christina von Braun, Dale B. Martin, Eco-feminism, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Gramsci, Irigaray, Judith Butler, Kaupapa Māori, Kevin Rudd, Last Temptation of Christ, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Marx, Monstrosity of Christ, open texts, Passion of the Christ, Queer, submission, timespace, Umberto Eco, Zelophehad, Žižek

Update: Monday Afternoon’s programme has two added features, one from a leading New Zealand Job scholar and one on the Gospel of Judas and Gnostic cosmology from the world’s leading expert on the Odes of Solomon (see below) …

 

The final programme is now here.

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Final Conference Programme – Towards a Unified Science of Religion

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Dunedin, Towards a Unified Science of Religion

Here is the conference programme for the upcoming Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference, 12-14 February 2010, University of Otago.

Click to open pdf: USR-Programme

The registrations were to be in by 20 January, but they also said that the conference programme would be out by the end of December, so just email jonathan [at] psy.otago.ac.nz to register in the next cuppla days or so, if you want to attend. Full price $250; unwaged $100.

As a special offer, there’s daily pass at $80 for academics, $40 for students. Email jonathan [at] psy.otago.ac.nz in the next couple of days or so, to register.

Registration form here.
The Philosophy Department is physically located on Union Street East near the intersection with Clyde Street, and their P.O. Box is P.O. Box 56, Dunedin.

Word Biblical Commentary Series now includes Apocryphal Books!

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Phililppians, Philippians, Word, Word Biblical Commentary

The evangelical Word Biblical Commentary series was once renowned as a bulwark in the defence of the divine revelation of (Protestant) Scripture against the slings and arrows of its modern critics.

But all this has now changed.

The Nashville-based commentary series (previously of Wacko, Texas) has released a commentary on a hitherto unknown apocryphal pseudo-Pauline epistle: The Epistle to the Phililppians*! What is the world coming to?

Word Biblical Commentary: Phililppians

* Note: the name “Phililppians” only occurs on the front of the book’s jacket. Inside the book, they try to pass it off as a commentary on Philippians. A sheep in wolf’s clothing, to be sure.

Socrates and the Fat Rabbis

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Daniel Boyarin, Greek dialogues, Michael Bakhtin, Plato, Socrates, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Talmud, Yigael Tumarkin

This looks innovative:

“What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their unique combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond the typological parallelism between the texts, arguing also for a cultural relationship. In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin suggests that these dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin’s notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually monologic in spirit… “

– blurb for Daniel Boyarin’s Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Yigael Tumarkin (יגאל תומרקין) - 'Abava Doheket et Habbasar' (frontispiece to Daniel Boyarin's _Socrates and the Fat Rabbis_)

I don’t know what’s inside, but the great title and striking talmudic frontispiece – not to mention the author’s name – are enough to put it on my reading list. I expect it will provide an explication if not a complication on the relationship between Greek and Hebrew literature, and of the nature of dialogical and monological texts. But who knows what really lies inside? Exciting, isn’t it?

Random Question of the Week (one)

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shortest post ever

A question that has been puzzling me for too many days now: Is modern European secularism a refigured and (partially) demythologised restatement of Christian supersessionism?

I know that it will never only be this, but is there anything to the obvious historical continuities between the narrative strategies of supercession and modernity?

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Stars & Constellations and Potential & Actualized Meaning: Wolfgang Iser

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constellations, determinate meaning, implied reader, indeterminate meaning, join the dots, Stanley Fish, stars, wolfgang iser

 

Wolfgang Iser sums up his theory of textual determinacy and indeterminacy with an analogy to stars and constellations:

 “… two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The ‘stars’ in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable.”
(The Implied Reader, 1974: 282)

Not bad – especially if you let the analogy extend a little, and note that even the stars will look slightly different to two different people, or to the same person in two different places, and recall that the stars are gradually moving apart from each other over time. For even the relative stabilities are somewhat unstable.

Not chaotically so, however. Against Fish, but loosening Iser’s distinctions a little, the success of Iser’s theory (more broadly conceived than does Iser) does not really “crucially” depend on an absolute distinction between determinate and indeterminate meaning, but on the degree of instability allowed for in the different modes of meaning-production. Stars may move, but do so in rather predictable fashions. The joining of stars is rather less predictable, if you’ve ever tried to work out how a group of stars could ever look like a ram, or how anybody ever came to the conclusion that a group of stars not only represented a woman but that the particular woman was a virgin!  

Against Fish, again, these two different modes of in/stability are not “just as variable” as each other, because they are fundamentally different in function. The ‘instability’ in the joining the dots between stars is nothing like the instabilities of the movement of the stars themselves or the changing nature of the star-gazer. Now, Fish’s criticism of Iser was quite valid on its terms (that is, Iser’s analogy about stars really does declare they are “fixed”). But a more charitable reader of the indeterminate gaps in Iser’s theory might have concluded that the basic distinction was also valid. There is something in the text which delimits meaning.

New Zealand Troops Armed by Fanatical Religious Terrorists (Inc.) – Killing in the Name of

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ACOG, Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, Afghanistan, crusade, George W. Bush, gun sight, I am the light of the world, Iraq, Jn 8:12, Jn8:12, John 8:12, M16, Major Christian, Major Kristian Dunne, rifle, rifle sight, Trijicon, Wayne Mapp

According to today’s news reports, the United States – the leading force in a criminal invasion of Afghanistan – is supplying New Zealand, British and other fellow invaders with rifle sights which have each been stamped with a citation from the Bible. The Advanced Combat Optical Gunsights (ACOGs) are designed by Trijicon Inc. for the M16 rifle and M4 carbine, and are supplied to the U.S. Government under a $660m long-term contract.

The raised lettering on the rifle sights includes a stock number, which is then followed by the reference, “JN8:12”:

Trijicon Inc. ACOG gunsight stamped "JN 8:12"

“JN8:12” is the standard abbreviation for the Gospel of John chapter 8 verse 12, which reads:

“When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'”

The gunsight’s makers have used Jesus’ statement that he is “the light of the world” because they believe that Jesus will help soldiers see their enemies so that they can kill them:

“How many times have you lost your target because it was too dark? Or misidentified a friend for a foe? Never again, thanks to Trijicon. The Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight™ (ACOG®), one of several models now standard issue for all Special Forces units, provides “instinctive” target acquisition and increased hit potential in all lighting conditions. In a close-quarter combat situation, or a firefight across a field, our revolutionary self-luminous reticle is clearly visible against your fast-moving target — in even the lowest light… The combination of fiber-optic and tritium illumination provides the ultimate in fast, transitional aiming — regardless of the lighting condition.”
– Trijicon website

Trijicon make a direct link between Jesus proclaiming that he is “the light of the world” (in Jn 8:12) and the “self-luminous” Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight. So it is quite clear that the embossing of the Bible verse was no accident. In fact, Trijicon Inc has a history of mixing Christian love and efficient killing, sponsoring a radio ministry for Christian hunters, called “God’s Great Outdoors“. The phrase in John 8:12, “Jesus is the light of the world” has long been a popular biblical quotation by Christians. So it is understandable that such a biblical passage would come readily to mind for a rifle sight-producing Michigan-based company. Moreover, Trijicon proudly affirms its “biblical” morality as part of its corporate values:

“We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.”
– Trijicon’s Values, Trijicon website

And, apparently, there ain’t nothing more biblical than the killing of unbelievers. What is more, if you’re a keen Christian hunter or Crusader, you can collect the whole set of biblically encoded rifle sights. Here’s one with 2 Corinthians 4:6:

Trijicon Reflex scope with "2Cor4:6" - Jesus lights 'em up; you shoot 'em down!

“For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”
– 2 Corinthians 4:6

As reported in the New Zealand Herald, the company have acknowledged that they included the Bible citations deliberately:

“Trijicon admitted to ABC News that the codes were deliberately added to the sights. Spokesman Tom Munson said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said the company has done nothing wrong or illegal by adding them.”

And then Munson went on the offensive. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian“. Trijicon thinks that the problem will go away if it is pointed out that it only offends whinging unbelievers – whose opinions, obviously, are worthless.

When the biblical citations were brought to the attention of the New Zealand army, they produced their spokesperson – a man named “Major Christian”. Yes, really. Major Kristian Dunne was quick to realize that the biblical citation was a tactical error. Religiously motivated invasions should, after all, be much more covert:

“It’s put us in an uncomfortable situation. We can see how they would cause offence. We are unhappy they didn’t make us aware of it… They didn’t violate any policy but we consider them inappropriate. Everyone has freedoms of religious belief … It also could be used against us by other religions.”

Uncomfortable, huh? I’m guessing probably not as uncomfortable as a round of bullets from a M16 ripping through an Afghani body, guided by the light of Jesus. But Defence Minister Wayne Mapp merely echoed similar weasel words, describing the biblical citation as “undesirable” as they could be “easily misconstrued”: “They send the wrong sort of message. They cause the same problems as putting slogans on bombs,” he said. “We should not be doing anything that might give opponents any propaganda leverage.”

“Propaganda”? “Misconstrued?” Jeez, Wayne, when you pander to the U.S. and send trained killers to support and condone their illegal invasion of Afghanistan – an invasion which the former President and war criminal George W. Bush described as a “Crusade” – don’t you think that the other side might be “construing” the message just fine?

God for Clods

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Aaron's rod, Chambers Slang Dictionary, comparative religion, Eve's curse, God for clods, Jonathon Green, zounds!

I noticed this while reading the Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008), by Jonathon “Mr Slang” Green. The slang phrase “God for clods” was allegedly used on U.S. campuses in the 1970s to describe “a course in basic comparative religion”.

Now that offers some groovy rebranding possibilities for RELS 101.

The Chambers Slang Dictionary provides more than a few entries with biblical allusions, most of them sharing a markedly Rabelaisian flavour. It all begins on the very first page, with “Aaron’s rod” (i.e. the penis, a term derived from Aaron’s blooming woody in Num 17.8) and extends through to the archaic “zounds!” (defined as “a euph. excl. lit. ‘God’s wounds'”).

One of the more visceral and memorable slang phrases containing a biblical allusion – of the ones I noticed in this engrossing dictionary – plays on the common and misogynist “menstrual interpretation” of Genesis 3:16, i.e. “the curse” of Eve. Here’s the delightful phrase:

“close as God’s curse to a whore’s arse [late 18C–early 19C] very close”

… yes, very close, indeed.

James Jacques Joseph Tissot - 'God's Curse'

Shocking News of the Day: Hollywood Makes a Decent Film About Islam

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2012, Avatar, Hollywood, Islam, Morality, Traitor, Violence

International Poster for Traitor

‘I’m a free man?  This doesn’t feel like freedom to me …’

In what is easily the most surprising piece of cinematic news I’ve heard in a while, and the most comforting (especially given that James Cameron has just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture for the racist Orientalist manifesto Avatar), I’ve just stumbled on Traitor, an American film from 2008 that treats Islam, Muslims, and political violence with sympathy and a  remarkable level of respect for moral ambiguity and religious difference.  Not only is the film a taut, decent little thriller, but it manages also to give a morally nuanced and complex portrayal of a Muslim protagonist.  This in itself is, sadly, still extremely rare, as Muslims are still dominantly represented as violent, backwards, and misogynist Arabs (though only 20% of the world’s Muslims are Arabs).

That the film manages to do this in a narrative that grapples with violence, patriotism, economic oppression, and serious questions about the ethics of sacrifice in the modern world is nothing short of revolutionary.  In the film, the viewer gets to see Islam as a part of everyday life for people in all walks of life in many parts of the world, not as a monolithic and misguided irrationalism held over from the Middle Ages (incidentally, this persistent stereotype about Islam ignores the crucial role that Muslim scholars played in helping Europe itself escape from the religious and cultural torpor of its medieval period).  More importantly, the film addresses the often-ignored fact that there are many different kinds of Islam, that not all Muslims believe the same things about their faith and what it demands of them as moral agents.

It’s a shame that the film was given a fairly modest release and limited advertising in 2008 (did this ever play in Dunedin?), as opposed to the gigantic wave of publicity that accompanies bottom-feeding dreck like 2012, but tonight I’ll take solace in the simple fact that Traitor exists in the first place.  So, cheers to writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Paramount Vantage – the short-lived ‘independent’ arm of Paramount Studios – and anyone else who got this film made.

In the film, a devout Sudanese-born American Muslim named Samir – beautifully played by Don Cheadle – plays a dangerous game with a group of Islamist extremists.  Other than that, I will say nothing else about the film so as not to spoil it.  So, strike a blow for intelligent cinema and for more reasonable representations of Islam and track down a copy of Traitor.  And while you’re down at the video shop, strike another blow for sense and steal or destroy a copy of Navy Seals, True Lies, or any of the countless Hollywood films that perpetuate anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.

At the end of Traitor, we even get to see that Samir is wrestling with the consequences of his own actions, and wrestling with them honestly from within the structure of his own complex understanding of his faith.  As Zamir and an American FBI agent part at the very end of the film, the agent wishes Zamir salaam and Zamir delivers what is possibly the best last line in recent cinematic memory, one that many people still need to hear:

‘And you shouldstart the conversation with that’.

Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference Programme

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Dunedin, experimental method, Polynesian religion, quakerism, science, the soul, Towards a Unified Science of Religion

Jonathan Jong, Conference Secretary

Conference secretary, Jonathan Jong has revealed titillating details of the programme for the upcoming Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference, 12-14 February 2010, University of Otago.

The conference boasts:

• Three keynote speakers giving overviews of the field (David Sloan Wilson, Harvey Whitehouse and Jesse Bering)
• Three papers on the philosophical implications of science
• About half a dozen papers on the applications of theories to specific religious movements (e.g., Quakerism, Polynesian religion)
• A paper on the evolution of the soul
• A paper on experimental method

Full details will appear later this month on the conference website.

Note: registration is due by 20 January 2010. Full price is NZ$250; students and unwaged at NZ$100.

Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian

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christian, Fundamentalism, gay, The Onion

LOUISVILLE, KY—At first glance, high school senior Lucas Faber, 18, seems like any ordinary gay teen. He’s a member of his school’s swing choir, enjoys shopping at the mall, and has sex with other males his age. But lately, a growing worry has begun to plague this young gay man. A gnawing feeling that, deep down, he may be a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian… [full news story on The Onion, 12 January 2010 ]

Uchronia’s Cock-Shaped Jerusalem Temple

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Anne Sexton, Charles Renouvier, Chronicles, cock, Joseph Gelfer, Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, phallus, Roland Boer, temple, The Fury of Cocks, Uchronia

Thanks to Roland Boer, who introduces me to this term: Uchronia (think u-topia, but in terms of time, not place: Merry Arthurian England, The Early Church, Solomonic Enlightenment, Primitive Communism, post-Revolution but pre-Terror, etc, etc…). Apparently, according to one fairly reliable source, “It was coined by Charles Renouvier as the title of his 1876 novel Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être.”

“Uchronia” has great applicability in the study of the Hebrew Bible, and Dr Boer makes use of it in “Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4.1 (2010): 19-31 (that is, in Australian-based Joseph Gelfer’s spectacularly successful journal).

At the (spatial) centre of Chronicles’ uchronic vision stands “the priapic temple” itself:

“It is a massive phallic tower, a high-rise temple for Solomon, like some angular cock raised to the heavens with its balls on the ground. Commentators on Chronicles are keen to cut down this phallus: the unanimous agreement is that 2 Chronicles 3.4a is—of course!—corrupt. It could not possibly mean a massive tower of 120 cubits. However, I suggest that this text is a telltale sign of the text’s masculine economy, for it is the image par excellence of the overwhelming if desperate effort to assert a male-only world.”

But flaccidity accompanies this “stiff” male hegemony. Have a read. It’s historical criticism at its finest. And read Anne Sexton, who also understood the limits of cock-temple power:

The Fury Of Cocks

There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
Once more the day’s light comes
with its immense sun,
its mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering in with all
its awful power.
That theater.
Today it is tender,
a small bird,
as soft as a baby’s hand.
She is the house.
He is the steeple.
When they fuck they are God.
When they break away they are God.
When they snore they are God.
In the morning they butter the toast.
They don’t say much.
They are still God.
All the cocks of the world are God,
blooming, blooming, blooming
into the sweet blood of woman.

A Parallel for the term Parallelomania

The tendency of philologically minded scholars to collect and note comparative materials to excess was termed “parallelomania” by Samuel Sandmel in the Society of Biblical Literature Presidential address of 1961.

“We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarities in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.”

Now that’s a loaded definition. Sandmel claimed he had obtained the term “parallelomania” from a French book of about 1830, whose name he had forgotten. However, Sandmel also cites the term’s use in P. Menzel, De Graecis in libris כהלת et Σοφια [sic] vestigiis (Halle: C.A. Kaemmerer, 1888), 40. The book was republished the following year as Die griechische Einfluss auf Prediger und Weisheit Solomos (Halle: C.A. Kaemmerer, 1889) – so noted in Steven D. Fraade, Aharon Shemesh, Ruth Clements, eds, Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic literature and the Dead Sea scrolls. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 7–9 January, 2003 (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, 62; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 19.

But the English translation of Italian Gian Biagio Conte’s Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario (Einaudi Torino, 1974), The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poetics, tr. Charles Segal (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1986) uses a parallel term for “parallelomania”: “comparisonitis”.

“Comparisonitis … collecting for the sake of collecting.” (23)

I wonder: do you know of any other parallel terms which have been used for “parallelomania”?

And is it possible to trace the use of “parallelomania” back before P. Menzel?