What Are You Reading? Part VII

The final week of summer is upon us! Our incoming students will soon be arriving for orientation and our returning students are settling back into their apartments and dorms. As a new academic year prepares to begin, we also say goodbye to another summer and to the "What Are You Reading?" series for 2011. Our final post features Dr. G. Brooke Lester, Director of Emerging Pedagogies and Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scripture, and Dr. Barry Bryant, Associate Professor of United Methodist and Wesleyan Studies.

Dr. Lester:
Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Petersen (Society of Biblical Literature: Atlanta, 2009).
Method Matters is a collection of some 28 essays on the current state of a range of approaches to the Bible (e.g., form criticism, anthropological approaches, gender analysis, theological approaches, historiographical approaches, Latin American approaches). I was attracted to it for two reasons. First, as I make revisions to my dissertation for publication, I have “one eye open” for ways to expand or sharpen my research interests in ancient literary allusion. Second, as a teacher, I am all too aware that we can teach form criticism (for example) more or less the way we learned it from our teachers, which may (in a worst-case scenario) be more or less how they learned it from their teachers. Such datedness is especially unforgivable in a cross-disciplinary age when interpreters might combine the latest in source criticism with ideological approaches, form criticism with homiletical approaches, redaction criticism with gender analysis.

Dr. Bryant:
Chomsky, Noam and Ilan Pappe.  Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians  (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2010). 
On December 28 of this year I will lead a tour, “Outrageous Hope: A Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation Immersion in Israel and Palestine.” In addition to visiting Christian holy sites, the purpose of the trip is to engage Israelis and Palestinians who are working for a just and reconciled peace. [The trip is open to all. For more information email barry.bryant@garrett.edu.] This book is part of my regular reading on the Israel/Palestine conflict.  Noam Chomsky (born to Jewish parents in Philadelphia) is a noted philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ian Pappe (born in Haifa, Israel to German-Jewish parents) has been described as "Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian" and teaches at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (U.K.).  Together they have written an explanation of the situation in Gaza.  It begins by giving a critical analysis of the founding of Israel, the contribution that the Christian theology of dispensationalism made to Israel’s start, and how American foreign policy has been shaped by a Zionist agenda. Chomsky’s contribution is significantly influenced by his deceased friend and colleague, Edward Said, the Palestinian American who is often regarded as the father of “post-colonial” theory.  Pappe includes some of his most controversial work in which he documents that there has been a policy of “ethnic cleansing” regarding the Palestinians from the start.  It is a dissident narrative to the one most Americans are accustomed to hearing, told by two noted Jewish intellectuals.  Gaza has gained a great deal of international attention over the past year.  This would be a good book for those who have heard but do not understand the historical and political background to what is going on in Gaza, but even more so for those whose understanding has been primarily shaped by mainstream American media.