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NEWS RELEASE: Tesco Plc Announces Expansion into University Market at Sheffield

17 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by The Dunedin School in Biblical Studies, Capital

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Biblical Studies, sheffield, Tesco

Tesco Plc has announced an innovative proposal, now in its “pre-planning” stage, in which the supermarket chain will expand into the University Humanities Sector.

TescoUniversity will open for enrolment in the 2014/15 academic year, with an initial branch planned in Sheffield and further branches planned in London and Cambridge.

Vice-President Kath Embers stressed the synergies which would result from the initiative. “While universities have attempted to become more market-oriented in their approach, only in the private sector do we find the supporting corporate structure and skill-set available to positively transform tertiary education into a fully fledged market-driven product.”

“Sheffield TescoUniversity promises to provide high-end user-driven results in this space, going forward together.”

tescobiblicalstudies

The announcement has met with a mixed response from academics. While existing university faculty members in the Sheffield area have expressed their “dismay” at the development, there was nothing but praise from recent recipients of honorary doctorates from TescoUniversity.

“It’s about time these ivory tower types earned an honest living by teaching something that everybody understands, rather than some high-faluting theory about feminizing or some sort,” commented the new Dean of Humanities, Dr Barry McFettrick, former Assistant Manager of Tesco Furniture and Kitchen.

The Humanities has been targeted by the company as the academic area which has “thus far responded least to the reality of the market in the modern world” and so “offers the greatest potential for positive growth and development.”

Ms Embers outlined some details of the proposal at a press conference held yesterday, in which the Humanities would be organised into a series of “aisles,” ranging from the more “meaty” disciplines such as Economics and Tourism Studies, to the less substantial “confectionary aisle” which would include “sundry items” such as Philosophy and Biblical Studies.

“But even in disciplines which have traditionally offered little of end-user value, such as Biblical Studies, we intend to offer a range of courses which reflect our market-driven approach. In fact, we are in the process of negotiating an exciting joint-venture which we hope should eventuate in the establishment of the L. Ron Hubbard Centre of Religion,” announced Ms Embers.

“For example, in Biblical Studies, we are developing a strategic staircase to reorient the field towards a profit-focus while retaining all the advantages of the traditional discipline. It is not our intention to make significant changes to what has for many centuries been a successful product venture, so in most cases the changes will be undetectable. For instance, the Introduction to the Gospels will still be taught, but will be rebranded as an Introduction to the Prosperity Gospel.

“Students are always asking us what good will these courses do them in the real world. But at Sheffield TescoUniversity, we hope to produce graduates who can ask precisely the opposite question: ‘What good will we possibly find in the real world following an education at Sheffield TescoUniversity?’”

Read Further:
Don’t shut down Biblical Studies at Sheffield Facebook Group
SBL Announcement
Save Biblical Studies
Sheffield Student Union

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Bible & Critical Theory Seminar 2012 -The Programme is Out

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies

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Auckland, bible & critical theory, Frankfurt School, Robert Myles

Robert Myles has compiled the programme for the 2012 Bible & Critical Theory Seminar.  More details at Auckland Theology, Biblical Studies, et al. All Biblical Scholars, or card-carrying members of the Frankfurt School are warmly welcome, for the price of lunch at the Queen’s Ferry.

Bible & Critical Theory Seminar, Auckland

Queens Ferry Hotel, Vulcan Lane

1 & 2 September 2012

Saturday

10:00 – 10:10              Opening session

10:10 – 10:45              Elaine Wainwright, Of Borders, Bread, Dogs and Demons: Reading Matt 15:21-28 Ecologically

10:45 – 11:20              Rebecca Lindsay, Overthrowing Nineveh with Postcolonial Imagination

11:20 – 11:30              Break

11:30 – 12:05              Kirsten Dawson, Gender and Violence in the Book of Job

12:05 – 12:40              Robert Myles, Homelessness, Neoliberal Ideology, and Jesus’ “Decision” to go Rogue

12:40 – 13:50              Lunch at QFH

13:50 – 14:25              Roland Boer, A Dead Spouse, A Vegetable Garden and a Cousin’s Field: On Private Property

14:25 – 15:00              Christina Petterson, Writing Death, Writing Life

15:00 – 15:35              Deane Galbraith, Interpellation Not Interpolation in Num. 13-14: The Non-Instrumental Ideology of Louis Althusser and Half-a-dozen Ways to Avoid a Death Sentence from Yahweh

15:35 – 15:45              Break

15:45 – 16:20              Holly Randall-Moon, The Secular Contract: The British Monarchy and White Diasporic Sovereignty

16:20 – 16:55              Yael Klangwisan, Gift and The Song of Songs

16:55 – Late                Drinks & dinner at QFH

Sunday

10:00 – 10:10              Opening session

10:10 – 10:45              Don Moffat, Ezra 9-10: A Split Text?

10:45 – 11:20              Caroline Blyth, ‘Whatever you needed…she had it’: Deconstructing the femme fatale in Judges 16 and Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely

11:20 – 11:30              Break

11:30 – 12:05              Julie Kelso, Irigaray’s Virginity

12:05 – 12:40              Niall McKay, A Political Reading of Luke 1:51-52 And 3:8-9 in the Light Of Ezekiel 17 – Inspired by John Howard Yoder and a Poststructural Intertextuality

12:40 – 13:50              Lunch at QFH

13:50 – 14:25              Debra MacDonald, John Gray’s Straw Dogs and Luke’s Satan: An Exploration into Human Nature

14:25 – 15:00              Mark Manolopoulos, Jesus on Wall Street: Overturning Temples, Tables, Empires

15:00 – 15:15              Break

15:15 – 15:50              Sarah Curtis, Considering the presentation of Magdalene by Luke and John: Neither fetish nor phallic but feminine

15:50 – 16:25              Tim Stanley, What Is This Strange Technological Thing Called the Bible?

16:25 – 16:35              Closing session

Complementarians and Martial Sex: The Jared Wilson / Gospel Coalition Saga

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by The Dunedin School in Biblical Studies, Christianity, Feminist Theory, Fundamentalism, Gender Studies, Theology, Violence

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

50 Shades of Grey, Complementarians, Denny Burk, Douglas Wilson, Egalitarianism, Fidelity, Gospel Coalition, Hard Complementarianism, intent, Jared Wilson, man penetrates conquers colonizes plants, marital sex, martial sex, psychoanalytic criticism, rape, Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Soft Complementarianism, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, What it Means to be a One-Woman Man, woman receives surrenders accepts

The scandal started with this post by author and pastor, Jared Wilson, on The Gospel Coalition website, which features a quotation from author and pastor Douglas Wilson including the following description of what he considers is good, biblical sex: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts”.

(The post was since grudgingly removed by Jared Wilson, after a load of complaints.)

And then, following numerous expressions of outrage, Jared Wilson posted a defence of his quote from Douglas Wilson (also since removed):

Jared Wilson is a “Complementarian”, a euphemistic term for a group of Christians who support a hierarchy between men and women which, unsurprisingly, is in favour of men. Among Christian evangelicals, there is a rigorous ongoing debate between “Complementarians” and “Egalitarians”, the latter group opposing gender hierarchy, to some extent. While the Complementarian-Egalitarian division is the basic line of opposition, there are also – as Michael Bird and others maintain – various degrees of Complementarians, ranging from “Hard Complementarians” to “Soft Complementarians”. So Bird (Soft Complementarian) opposes Wilson (Hard Complementarian) … to some extent.

I tried to make clear that I don’t think the Wilsons are malicious or deliberately trying to liken martial [sic] sex to rape. But I think these comments are incendiary, needless, hurtful, unbiblical, insensitive, and do not help the complementarian cause.
– Michael Bird, Sensitive Soft Complementarian, “Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Not TO my Wife: A Response to the Wilsons at TGC”, Euangelion, 18 July 2012

Let’s see, a man “penetrates”, “conquers”, and “colonises” a woman. I would make a guess that Douglas Wilson most probably sanctifies what many of us would refer to quite simply as “rape” as The Biblical View of Marriage. I truly believe that he is sincere in his belief; it’s just that Douglas does not begin to appreciate that his expression of divinely sanctioned sexual intercourse in fact condones and even advocates aggressive and violent sexual attacks on women. He just doesn’t see it. He undoubtedly also sincerely believes that what he describes would be what is best for women. But why stop with Douglas Wilson’s intent? Given Douglas Wilson’s use of a group of violent terms for sex (and despite his odd protests that the terms “penetrate”, “conquer”, and “colonise” can be used in really quite nice ways), it is obvious that we should read him with more than a little suspicion. For even though Douglas Wilson is speaking from ignorance, his words quite obviously do in fact liken marital sex to rape.

Or, to employ Bird’s malapropism from the quote above, what Douglas Wilson in fact advocates is “Martial Sex”. (Now there is the quintessential example of a Freudian slip!)

But Bird is not the only Complementarian stating that he disagrees with the Wilsons, while at the same time saying that we should really respect their honest intent. Here’s Denny Burk:

Egalitarians [e.g., McKnight, Held Evans, and Kirk] are out in full-force claiming that Doug Wilson, Jared Wilson, and TGC are openly supporting rape and abuse of women. If authorial intent means anything, then that is a slander. That is not what Doug Wilson meant, nor is it what Jared Wilson intended by quoting him. We can quibble over the language, but the false accusations need to stop.
– Denny Burk, Harder Complementarian, comment to “Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Not TO my Wife: A Response to the Wilsons at TGC”, Euangelion, 18 July 2012

Denny Burk, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, also wants to let matters rest with Douglas Wilson’s intent – which is, as noted, fairly much completely ignorant that what he is advocating amounts to rape. But whatever happened to critical reading? Surely an Associate Professor of Biblical Studies is capable of reading between the lines and … oh hang on, I see: “Southern Baptist Theological Seminary”. OK, well, then, I guess because Wilson said it, Burk believes it, and that settles it.

It is worth noting that Denny Burk makes the same Freudian slip as Bird, referring not to “marital sex” to describe Douglas Wilson’s views, but to “martial sex”. Ironically, this whole scandal first erupted when Jared Wilson got hot under the collar about the portrayal of B&D in the novel 50 Shades of Grey. But why is it that the (soft and hard) complementarians are the ones banging on about “martial sex”?

Yet I guess psychoanalytic criticism isn’t at the top of the teaching menu down at the local Baptist Seminary.

Further reading:

Complementarians
Bekah Wilson, “Them’s Fightin’ Words”
Nancy Ann Wilson, “10 Reasons to be Glad When Your Husband is Slandered”
Heather Linn, “A Note for Rachel Held Evans”
Douglas Wilson, “The Politics of Outrage”
Douglas Wilson, “Probably Not! She Thundered”
Douglas Wilson, “Cloacina, Goddess of Sewers”
Michael Bird, “Jared Wilson takes down TGC Post”

Others
Ryan K. Knight, “Doug Wilson on The Gospel Coalition: How Christian Patriarchy Turns Sex into Rape and Pregnancy into Slavery”
Grace, “Conquer, colonize, enslave: On redefining words and rewriting history”
Paul Burkhart, “The Gospel Coalition & Sex as Conquest: Jared Wilson, you’re better than this {1}”
Paul Burkhart, “The Gospel Coalition & Sex as Conquest: it’s still misogyny, however unintended {2}”
Rachel Held Evans, “Thank you, Gospel Coalition and Jared Wilson”
Rachel Held Evans, “Some final thoughts on The Gospel Coalition, sex, and submission”
Rachel Held Evans, “The Gospel Coalition, sex, and subordination”
Eric Reitan, “‘Benign’ Christian Patriarchy and 50 Shades of Grey: A Response to Jared Wilson”
Eric Reitan, “The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective”
Libby Ann, “Marital Rape? Doug Wilson on Dominance and Submission in the Marriage Bed”
Dianna Anderson, “The Writer’s Burden”
Scot McKnight, “Thank you”
Scot McKnight, “Take it down”
Eric Rodes, “50 Shades Of Circling The Wagons”
Sarah Over the Moon, “Rape: A Punishment for Egalitarians?”
Chaplain Mike, “Sex, Authority/Submission, and Remarkable Insensitivity”

Is there anything Tom Wright CAN’T do?! N.T. Wright sings Bob Dylan

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by The Dunedin School in Academics, Biblical Studies, Music

≈ 3 Comments

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Bob Dylan, dope shit, N.T. Wright, Robert Gagnon, Tom Wright, When The Ship Comes In

On 7 May 2012, freewheelin’ New Testament scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright treated his adoring fans to a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In”:
 
The Freewheelin' Tom Wright
Perhaps Tom Wright was inspired by Robert Gagnon’s rap of the New Testament book of Romans (17 May 2010)?
 

Soft Homophobia in Mainstream Biblical Studies

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by The Dunedin School in Academics, Biblical Studies, Queer, Sex

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ben Witherington, ex-lesbian, fluid sexuality, gay sex, Hard complementarian, Hard homophobe, Heath was far too young, homophobia, James Crossley, Michael Bird, perfect happy wife and mother, Soft complementarian, Soft homophobe

Unnatural Tintin 1

Unnatural Tintin 2

Unnatural Tintin 3

Unnatural Tintin 4

Unnatural Tintin 5

Unnatural Tintin 6

Unnatural Tintin 7

For context, see Ben Witherington the Third, Michael Bird, James Crossley, Michael Bird, Michael Bird (with some Robert Gagnon and Robert Gagbag).

Religion and the Media: A New Project from the University of Sheffield

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies

≈ 3 Comments

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Centre for Freedom of the Media, CFOM, James Crossley, Religion and the Media, sheffield

PWhat An Unholy Welcome to Britain!rofessor James Crossley, in association with the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) at the University of Sheffield, has commenced a website to examine what goes on at the intersection of religion and media.

The Religion and the Media blog “will be dedicated to updates, news and analysis of a wide range of issues relating to religion and the media”. The critique of the media’s treatment of religion is especially welcome in a country like the U.K., where liberal sneering or feel-good reductionism usually substitutes for informed commentary or analysis. 

In Religion and the Media’s inaugural post, from 24 January 2012, James Crossley explains:

This new blog is going to be dedicated to all things media and religion, usually with some connection to issues relating to media freedom, linked as it is with the Centre for Freedom of Media at the University of Sheffield. In addition to news and updates, there will be regular analysis from a variety of people both linked to the Centre in someway and guest bloggers.

Professor James Crossley, International Biblical Scholar, Vienna 2007

Professor James Crossley, International Biblical Scholar, Vienna 2007

James Crossley was recently appointed to a Chair in the Biblical Studies Department at the University of Sheffield. His title of Professor of Bible, Culture and Politics reflects his ongoing interest in the reception and effect of the Bible in society, in particular in late capitalism and under the global impact of neoliberalism. Among the books which he has authored or edited that reflect this particular research interest are Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century (BibleWorld; Sheffield: Equinox, 2008), Judaism, Jewish Identities and the Gospel Tradition: Essays in Honour of Maurice Casey (BibleWorld; Sheffield: Equinox, 2010); and Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology (BibleWorld; Sheffield: Equinox, forthcoming May 2012). Crossley also publishes widely in New Testament studies, including an important recent philological contribution concerning the semantic range of things able to be done with the human “fist”, in “Halakah and Mark 7.3: ‘with the hand in the shape of a fist'” (New Testament Studies 58 (2012), 57-68).

Bible, Critical Theory and Reception Seminar – Planned for Auckland, September 2012

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies

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2012, Auckland, Bible Critical Theory and Reception, Caroline Blyth, conference, New Zealand, Robert Myles

Caroline Blyth and Robert Myles

Caroline Blyth and Robert Myles

The Australasian sector of the global Bible, Critical Theory and Reception Seminar is coming to New Zealand in 2012.

Robert Myles and Caroline Blyth (University of Auckland both) have offered Auckland as the venue for BCT&R, which will probably be staged in August from 1-2 September 2012. More details to come when available.

The Bible, Critical Theory and Reception Seminar has been running in Australia and New Zealand for over a decade, and in the United Kingdom since 2011. The Seminar showcases the cutting edge in the study of Theory and Reception in relation to biblical studies. In a worthy attempt to short-circuit daytime and evening conference activities, the venue for each BCT&R Seminar is a local pub. Robert Myles, queer theorist and Jesus scholar, has promised to carefully investigate, over a course of some months, possible locations for the 2012 Australasian BCT&R Seminar. I put in my vote for upstairs at the Empire.

ANZABS (Aotearoa-New Zealand Association of Biblical Studies) 2011 Conference – Abstracts Available

19 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies

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ANZABS, Aotearoa-New Zealand Association of Biblical Studies

Derek Tovey has posted abstracts from the 2011 ANZABS conference at the ANZABS blog. The fourteenth annual meeting was held at Laidlaw College’s Christchurch premises, on 5-6 December 2011.

Next year’s meeting will be held jointly with The Systematic Theology Association in Aotearoa New Zealand (STAANZ), at Laidlaw College, Auckland, on 9-11 December 2012.

ETS is rather broad in spectrum rather than monolithic on the gender issue

12 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies, Feminist Theory, Gender Studies

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

AAR, American Academy of Religion, ETS, ETS is rather broad in spectrum rather than monolithic on the gender issue, Evangelical Theological Society, SBL, Snowy, Society of Biblical Literature, Tintin

“ETS is rather broad in spectrum rather than monolithic on the gender issue” – Michael F. Bird

ETS, SBL, and AAR – Qualitative Analysis

11 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Luke Johns in Academics, Biblical Studies, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

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AAR, American Academy of Religion, ETS, Evangelical Theological Society, SBL, Society of Biblical Literature

Qualitative analysis indicates that, even though only 1% of participants at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) annual conference are women, the level of sexual promiscuity among all participants is at much the same, relatively high, level as at the SBL and AAR annual conferences.*

* Results based on initial survey results. Final results may differ. Qualitative analysis is inherently subjective; results should not be accorded the sacred status of objective scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit) as is quantitative analysis. Amen.

Women at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting 2011

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by Deane in Academics, Biblical Studies, Feminist Theory, Gender Studies

≈ 15 Comments

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ETS, Evangelical Theological Society, Michael Bird, SBL, Society of Biblical Literature, women

Michael F. Bird (Evangelion) notes that, of 700 papers to be presented at this month’s Evangelical Theological Society Conference, he recognises that only 8 are by women. There may be a few other women’s names that Michael acknowledges he does not recognise, but let’s not quibble over details. That’s 1%!

How does the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting compare? Taking as a sample the first two pages of the Participant List, I get 40/137 on page one and 40/137 on page two. That’s 29%.

In most disciplines, that’s just below the percentage of women who are members of the faculty – and this with the inclusion of up-and-coming female students.

Why? Given the dominance of Christians at SBL, and the dominance of males in positions of authority within Christianity, is the percentage of women presenters a product of this demographic?

(And on a related issue: why is the local U.S. meeting considered the annual meeting of a purported global body, and not the international meeting?)

I prescribe a large dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for all attendees at ETS and SBL this year:

Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, Eschatology, Film, History, Language, Marx, Metaphor, Religion, Symbol, Texts, Violence

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Another Earth, Consumer Capitalism, Depression, Eschatology, Film, Hysteria, Lars von Trier, Marx, Max Weber, Melancholia, rationalisation, The Sirens of Titan, When Worlds Collide

Picking up where I left off, and continuing our exploration of cinema and/as exorcism – see also here (on Australian film), here (on District 9), here (on 2012), here (on the wretched Avatar), and here (on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) –  I want to branch out in new territory here and discuss the ways Lars von Trier’s utterly brilliant but utterly nihilistic new film Melancholia is being sold to the American public, a collective audience notorious – but not of course universal – for its dislike of moral ambiguity or philosophical complexity.

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Melancholia is von Trier’s best film, and by a long chalk.  It is also the most purely entertaining science-fiction defence of a nihilistic worldview since Kurt Vonnegut’s incomparable 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan.  While I have heard some (though not many) critics and fans pan the film for being too accessible and for lacking the blunt controversy of something like his 2009 film Antichrist, Melancholia succeeds in my book as no other von Trier film for no other reason that von Trier steps back from his usual strategy of rubbing the audience’s face in the depravity of humanity and simply allows the film to quietly and calmly make its points, letting the film’s preternatural stillness and its deliberate pacing tell the story far more effectively than the melodramatic mode of many of his previous films.  Melancholia, in the simplest terms, is the first von Trier film I have ever watched without feeling the need for a shower immediately afterwards.  The ability for a film to make the viewer feel literally, physically soiled is of course the mark of a true cinematic talent, and here von Trier, with his talent for evoking mood and tension to the point where it becomes palpable, can be counted among the ranks of such directors as Paul Schrader and John Hillcoat.  It is, however, infinitely refreshing to see someone as gifted as von Trier working in a different, less confrontational, and more formally Romantic mode.

For all its almost gentle touch, the film presents a view of the world – no, of the universe itself – that is bleaker and more final than anything in von Trier’s oeuvre.  Even films as stark and forbidding as Breaking the Waves or Antichrist are shot through with something resembling hope.  In Waves, Bess’ unshakable goodness and belief in love anchor a film suspended over an abyss, an abyss that von Trier, then a recent convert to Catholicism, chooses to ignore with his final – and in my mind, completely misguided – image attesting to the literal truth of Bess’ salvation.  Even the end of the determinedly repellent Antichrist offers a kind of redemption when the male protagonist, known only as He, leaves a metaphoric wilderness, having rejected his cold psychologist’s view of the world. (For a pdf of an intriguing scholarly article by Gitte Buch-Hansen offering a positive reading of the film from a feminist biblical studies perspective, follow this link; for two very good discussions of the film from a religious studies perspective by S. Brent Plate, see Religion Dispatches here and here.)


Melancholia first appears to be a riff on a theme that appears from time to time in science fiction, the collision of the Earth with another planet, but I think there is more to be learned in placing it next to the history of texts – again, most of them from sci-fi, which trace the impact of the discovery of previously unknown planets.  The best-known – and simply the best – of these stories is Isaac Asimov’s classic short story ‘Nightfall’, which first appeared in a 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  In Asimov’s spare and ultimately devastating tale, the greatest scientific minds of a complex society on the planet of Lagash discover on the very eve of its destruction that its society is doomed by the eclipse of one of its suns by a  previously hidden planet, an alignment of celestial bodies that happens only once every 2049 years.  Thrown into total darkness, unknown on the planet, which is lit by no less than six suns, the people of Lagash are driven to madness and to set massive fires to provide the heat and light that they simply cannot exist without, especially given that most of the population does not know that this is a temporary situation.  In the story, an intrepid band of scientists discovers the coming of the darkness, something that has been long predicted by the Cultists, Lagash’s dominant religious tradition, but are unable to convince the population to prepare for it.  Here we find not only the classic sci-fi conception of religion as bad science and poorly remembered history, but also a potent allegory for the futility of scientific knowledge when dealing with a fearful and undereducated public.  ‘Nightfall’ ends on a fittingly bleak note as Lagash’s society again, faced with the enormity of darkness and the devastating and sudden revelation of its own ignorance – the astronomers, working only in daylight, believed that the universe contained only six suns, but the darkness reveals that there are millions, quite unseating Lagash as the centre point of the observable world, a repeat of the Copernican revolution taking place in seconds rather than centuries – sets fire to itself and all that it has built over more than two millennia.

There are other, simpler entries into this rather obscure sub-category of sci-fi, including Philp Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s classic 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, made into a space opera-style film of the same name by Rudolph Maté in 1951.  In both, the Earth encounters not one but two rogue bodies in space, one of which destroys the Earth, though a small band of intrepid scientists and travellers manage to escape destruction and take up life on one of the new worlds, Bronson Beta, which shows clear signs of previous inhabitants.  While Wylie and Balmer’s slim pot-boiler of a novel has become largely neglected, Maté’s film is better-remembered both for its Oscar-winning special effects – including a still-stunning vision of the flooding of New York City – and for its wildly uneven tone, veering from melodrama to cheesy whimsy from one scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.  This is probably most obvious in the closing scene, played to rapturous, triumphant music and with blissful happiness from our intrepid astronauts, who are overcome with an uncomplicated joy when safely landed on the Technicolor wonder of Beta, despite the fact that billions of people have been obliterated and they are the only human survivors (this being the 1950s, they are apple-cheeked, white, healthy, and Christian survivors).  The final image says it all, really.

Interestingly enough, there is another film this year, Another Earth, which grapples with the existential questions raised by the discovery of an unknown world, this time an exact duplicate of Earth which may or may not have duplicate versions of each every person living, though this need not detain us here for long.  Where Another Earth ends on a New Age-tinged moment of self-realisation, and thus a note of hope, though not one so strident as that which concludes When Worlds Collide, von Trier’s Melancholia ends on an even bleaker note than Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’.  In ‘Nightfall’, at least, the reader is free to assume that the people of Lagash will rebuild, though this is tinged with the near-certainly that all of that newly built world will turn to ashes on that fateful night some 2000 years in the future.  Melancholia ends with the irrevocable and inescapable end of the Earth, smashed into rubble by the far larger planet Melancholia.

What is most interesting – in this reporter’s opinion, at least – is how thorough, and ultimately how brutal, Melancholia‘s social critique really is.  The film is essentially a character study of two sisters, the melancholic Justine (very nicely played by Kirsten Dunst) and the resolutely ordinary Claire (a surprising turn from Antichrist‘s Her, Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Each of the sisters gets a half of the film named after her, though, really, this is Justine’s story, and her perspective is the one the film champions in the end.  After a stunning Prologue of ultra-slow-motion images that comprise a series of vignettes of the end of the world, set very appropriately to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, the film’s narrative begins with the lavish and increasingly uncomfortable spectacle of Justine’s wedding reception, celebrating her marriage to the increasingly baffled Michael.  Von Trier stages this sequence, much of which is riotously if uncomfortably funny, as a piece of social-realist cinema, not unlike many of his other films.  Shot on an isolated but extremely luxurious golf resort in Sweden but set in an unidentified Anglo-American no-place, the first half of the film shows us Justine’s increasingly futile attempts to play the part of the happy bride that everyone around her (with the exception of the sisters’ acidic mother) expects her to play.  Justine commits the unpardonable sin of failing to pretend to be happy and satisfied and instead ends up rejecting not only Michael but her family and her smarmy boss, who has come to the wedding to offer her a promotion.

Claire’s section of the film is set months later as she struggles to care for the borderline catatonic Justine, who has come to live with her at the resort, and to prepare for the arrival of the rogue planet Melancholia, which experts tell everyone will miss the Earth and cause minimal damage.  As it becomes ever clearer that the planets will collide and that everyone and everything on Earth is doomed to a violent death, Justine emerges as the sanest of the characters.  Her reaction to the news of the destruction of the Earth is as much indifference as it is anything else.  While Claire fears for her son Leo and begins to fall apart psychologically, Justine has the one truly rational reaction in the film, that of resignation.  For Justine, the end of a world which is facile, inauthentic and meaningless is nothing to mourn.

Michael, Justine, and Claire in Melancholia

That the film takes Justine’s side is, of course, debatable, but I will lay out my case here: Justine works in advertising and is thus implicated in selling the world of wealth and privilege that she despises to a public that cannot afford it.  In this role, she becomes a representative of a consumer society that defines itself through a lie that it does not ultimately believe is possible.  Justine is the only one the film (again, aside from her mother) who is not buying what she herself is selling.  Everyone at the wedding is clearly invested in the mythos of comfort and happiness that such events of conspicuous consumption both celebrate and make normative, but Justine, try as she might, is unable to invest herself in the role that she and others have laid out for her.  Claire’s husband, John, the owner of the resort, is angry and bitterly disappointed in Justine, not because she is in genuine distress, but because she is a failed consumer, because she does not participate in the wedding passively, but questions its meaning at every turn, perverting the gathering with her unpredictability and her lateness, profaning such familiar ritual elements as the cutting of the cake and the reception dinner.

Ultimately, Justine is the film’s voice of reason and, oddly enough, its conscience.  Her rejection of the trappings of bourgeois respectability – and what is more bourgeois that golf? – is the film’s rejection of these trappings, especially the ever-more-pervasive discourse on ‘happiness’.  Indeed, the film is a coherent argument on the futility of the dream of happiness as an ineffective and ultimately hopeless strategy for keeping the problems of the world at bay.  In von Trier’s nihilistic universe, Justine’s choice to simply reject her role in a system of value and morality is the most rational choice and would be the most ethical one if the film had any real interest in right or wrong.  It is Justine who understands the world and the place of people within it and her heroism lies in the simple, honest, straightforward rejection of all of it.

As the film draws to its inevitable conclusion (the Prologue leaves no doubt as to what is going to happen), Justine is also the only one to show any true selflessness, distracting and comforting Leo with the task of finding and carving a set of ‘magic’ tree branches that she says will protect them from Melancholia.  Claire, who has bought into the fantasies that Justine makes her living selling, struggles against her fate and rails against the absolute meaninglessness that it reveals.  She is also unable to offer any comfort to her son and thus abdicates her final responsibility to the sister she has been unable to convince of the value of the life of luxury which she has built and in which she is has invested so much of herself.

In the end, then, given the utter finality of its situation, Melancholia is as damning a critique of contemporary Anglo-American-European values as can be imagined and as thorough a skewering of the consumer mythos of a never-defined ‘happiness’ lying just around the corner as has been committed to celluloid for years.  It is an articulate, clear-eyed, historically and culturally astute fable for a world and a closed system of value that is in the process of perhaps inevitable and irreversible decay.  A world as hollow and as lacking in conviction as this, the film intimates, is better destroyed, echoing again von Trier’s fondness for Nietzsche, to whom Antichrist is also deeply indebted.  To this world, literally nothing is preferable.

Melancholia‘s marketing, on the other hand, does everything it can to soft-sell the film, to exorcise it of its very real demons.  The marketing scheme chosen for the film is ingenious, consistent, and systematic.  In short, it runs something like this: Melancholia is a metaphorical film about depression.  Though this is a perfectly defensible interpretation, this is also the safest and most palatable way possible to read the film and its allegorical structure.  In the press kit issued for the film, both the studio’s voice and that of von Trier emphasise that Justine has the measure of the world only in a state of crisis, something the film nullifies by setting the first half of the film at a time when much of the world is unaware of the coming of Melancholia.  In a short promotional video released via the Apple Trailers site, Dunst underlines this, saying: ‘Justine is a very sensitive, creative human being that felt things maybe sometimes more than other people.  To me, her relationship with the planet turns into almost her being a representation of the planet’.

This gesture, to dull the edge of genuine (and almost always systematic) social criticisms by accusing the critic of insanity, is, of course, a common strategy in the mainstream media when dealing with acts of violence – often labelled selectively as ‘terrorism’, though rarely when such acts are committed by anyone other than a Muslim – whose political or economic subtext is uncomfortable.

While it is easy enough to understand why the film’s distributors would be interested in reading the film’s allegorical construction in the narrowest, most private, and thus least threatening manner, we, as viewers and critics, need not feel the same compulsion, given that we have no financial stake in the film itself.

For, lurking not far outside of this metaphorical reading of the film is a far more radical critique of contemporary Western societies.  As the film draws to its conclusion, it becomes apparent that it is not only the ludicrously elaborate and costly wedding reception that is hollow and ultimately empty; it is the whole of Claire’s bourgeois world.  When Claire invites Justine to wait out the end on the patio overlooking the golf course with a glass of good wine and some classical music, Justine’s refusal of this idea as ‘shit’ is more than a simple symptom of her state of mind, it is rather something more, an admission of the futility of Claire’s entire life and the entire world of privilege and taste that it represents.

Claire’s husband John, a stock von Trier character, the resolutely rational man who is utterly unable to make any sort of the sense of the world around him, which makes him something of a personification of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationalisation’, takes the only route that his character could possibly take: he commits a sad and sordid suicide in the stables, even robbing his wife and child of the painless poison that Claire was relying on as a last resort.

John, Melancholia‘s Weberian Fool

In the end, all that Claire, Justine, and Leo are left with are the sort of simple, intuitive magical lies that people tell their children.  In the indelible final image, as Melancholia looms ever larger in the background and begins to quite literally devour the Earth, we are left with the image of three lonely people sheltering under a tripod of dead tree branches, helpless in the face of the meaningless destruction of a meaningless existence.

It is in this final moment – and in the diegetic world of Melancholia, this is an absolutely final moment, the end of life in the universe – that von Trier makes his kindest gesture to date, that he allows the three last people on Earth to hold hands, to face the end together, even if it means less than nothing for them to do so.

New Binding of Isaac Game: Akedah for Mac and PC

15 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by Deane in Biblical Studies, Ethics, Games, Violence

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abraham, Akedah, bekorot, Binding of Isaac, Chad Sapieha, child sacrifice, Edmund McMillen, firstborn, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Genesis 22, Globe and Mail, Indie Game, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice, Sarah, Seder Olam Rabbah

The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac: The Akedah crossed with The Legend of Zelda

As I was perusing The Globe and Mail, this game review sort of leapt out at me:

In playing The Binding of Isaac, the latest effort from Super Meat Boy mastermind Edmund McMillen, one can’t help but wonder whether the award-winning game designer wasn’t somehow using his creation to cathartically deal with some serious mommy and religion issues.

This inexpensive downloadable game, which is currently available for $5 for Macs and PCs through Steam, begins with a boy named Isaac and his mother enjoying their lives together in their home. Then the mom, a fan of “Christian broadcasts,” begins hearing the voice of God, who commands her to strip Isaac of his possessions (including his GameBoy and pants), lock him in his room, and, eventually, to kill him. Isaac discovers his mom is coming to murder him and flees through a hatch into the cellar. This is where players take control.

… The Binding of Isaac is a creepy, gory, and challenging play that’s as much an homage to games of years past as it is a distinctly modern experience. It’s also an overt indictment of mindless religious zealotry (see: the story in the Hebrew Bible from which the game takes its name) and the impact it may have on children raised by those who practice it. Indeed, poor little Isaac turns one of the most sympathetic video game characters in recent years.

It is, in short, an essential play for fans of avant-garde interactive entertainment, and perhaps the best downloadable indie game of 2011.

– Chad Sapieha, “Review: Avant-garde indie game The Binding of Isaac inspired by Zelda, the Bible”, Globe and Mail Blog, 14 October 2011

The version of the Akedah (“Binding” of Isaac) in Genesis 22, of course has Isaac’s father Abraham hearing divine voices, whereas Isaac’s mother (Sarah) doesn’t have a very prominent role. The to-be-Israelite god, Yahweh commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, which he obediently proceeds to do, until Yahweh stops him on the grounds it was just a test. Sarah has more of a role in Seder Olam Rabbah, where Satan tells her that Isaac had actually been sacrificed by Abraham, and the news of it kills her. But, Sarah doesn’t take an active part in trying to sacrifice Isaac, as in Edmund McMillen’s game version of the Akedah.

As Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores in her book, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical distortions of historical realities (2004), child sacrifice was once a regular part of the worship of Yahweh in Judah, and is still a “live issue” in the writing of the biblical texts in the Persian period. After all, if your god guarantees you will produce many children, only for the sacrifice of a single firstborn child, then it’s a good deal, right? And yet, child sacrifice gets such a bad rap.

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