What are you Reading? Part 5

In anticipation of summertime reading, we recently asked our faculty to tell us what they have been reading and the answers may surprise you! Throughout March and April we will be sharing their book recommendations on the seminary's blog.

This week's entry comes from Brooke Lester, Director of Emerging Pedagogies and Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scripture, and Nancy Bedford, Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology.

Dr. Brooke Lester
Director of Emerging Pedagogies
Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scripture

David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart and The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005 and 2011 respectively).

In these works, David Carr examines the apparent role of memory in the life of the ancient Near East’s professional scribal classes. In this view, to “study” a text was to have committed it to memory, and scribal education involved memorization of the culture’s body of “canonical” texts. He then examines the implications for any theory about the composition of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), with its clear and repeated evidence of manuscript collection, redaction, and revision.

As an educator in Hebrew Bible, I am excited that all of our field’s composition theories (from “JEDP” to present) are vulnerable to constructive critique under Carr’s thesis. As a special student of inner-biblical interpretation, I am intrigued that all theories of inter-literary allusion in the Bible—how biblical texts “read” (or recall?) other biblical texts—likewise require reassessment in light of Carr’s insights into “scribal culture” in the times and places that produced the Hebrew Bible.

Dr. Nancy Bedford
Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology

I’m reading…

Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America, 2008). I always have a book of poetry nearby, and this one includes some very beautiful writing. All the connections that Bishop had to South America make her of particular interest to me.

Augustine, De Trinitate. I usually also always have one of the classic treatises in theology on hand. In the last couple of years I have been thinking a lot about Augustine’s influence on the Western or Latin tradition, and how best to retrieve its liberating possibilities.

Finally, in the matter of mystery fiction/detective novels (always a must for me), I continue to savor the books about Sicilian Commissario Montalbano by Andrea Camilleri. Another series I like is by P. L. Gaus,  focussing on Professor Michael Branden. They shed light on many aspects of Amish and Mennonite communities in Ohio and their relations with the “English.” I recently also re-read Gaudy Night, the classic by Dorothy L. Sayers.