(Ir)religiosity

This is the text of a sermon I will give later today in one of my classes. It is based on Ezekiel 37:1-14.

Do you believe in ghosts? I remember being asked this question often as a kid. My and my friends used to go on camping trips during the summer and we would stay up all night telling each other spooky stories. And when we finished we would sit for a while in silence around the campfire and inevitably someone would always ask, “So, do you believe in ghosts?” Then we would proceed to have this detailed, in depth metaphysical discussion — okay, so maybe we didn’t know it was metaphysical at the time — about whether or not ghosts existed, until someone would pop out of the woods and scare us half to death. It didn’t much matter if we actually believed in ghosts. What mattered was that we were able to be scared by something, to be disturbed by something even if it was just one of our friends with a bed-sheet over his head.

In this passage from Ezekiel we are confronted with a ghastly and disturbing scene. Ezekiel enters a valley that is littered with dry, brittle and bleached bones, the remains of bodies that were slaughtered in the Babylonian exile. As surprising as it may seem, scenes like this weren’t out of the ordinary for Ezekiel. Israel had been conquered by what was at the time the world’s largest superpower.[1] The Babylonians took them captive, sacked their cities and led them away from their homeland as slaves with chains around their necks. Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple razed, and the Davidic kingship lost. To say that this was period of oppression and tyranny is almost an understatement. Under this exile people were living at the extremity with no hope and no sense of the future. It seemed as if history had come to an end. Image the most vivid and graphic cataclysmic movie or novel you can think of and you may have a sense of Ezekiel’s context. This is as post-apocalyptic as it gets. For all intents and purposes the world had come to an end. It is within this context that Ezekiel was a prophet — a prophet to a people without hope, to a people experiencing a deep collective trauma in the loss and fragmentation of each other and their communal identity.[2] Read the rest of this entry »

It would be easy for me to rattle off a list of people who have influenced my hermeneutics from the worlds of theology and religious studies.  So I thought I would make it a bit more interesting and list several thinkers from outside the religious world (more or less) who influence my interpretation of not only the bible but literature in general.  Of course any “list” is always incomplete and unfinished.  There are many people who have indirectly influence my interpretive approach; I’m limiting this list to those that are more direct and most recent in time.  So here is my “hand” of 7 (in no particular order).

• Jacques Derrida - for deconstruction and différance
• Paul Ricoeur - for symbolism/myth and a hermeneutics of suspicion
• Judith Butler - for gender/sexuality identity and social construction
• Stanley Fish - for the importance of  interpretive communities and the downfall of foundationalism
• Emmanuel Levinas – for “ethics as philosophy” and the presence of the Other
• Michel Foucault – for the importance of history and power relations
• Cornel West - for “prophetic pragmatism” and the Socratic imperative

That’s my blend at the moment.

Who are a few of your non-religious and non-theological influences?