Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception

On Behalf of Holy Creatures: Hélène Cixous Reads Leviticus, or, la lecture immonde

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

This article performs a critical creative reading of several texts: Lev 11, Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H., and Cixous’s essay “The School of Roots”. Each of these texts seeks to understand the human relation to the animal. Cixous’s project in “The School of Roots” is, as Derrida does in L’animal, to interrogate and reinscribe the biblical text, so that another relation between the human and the animal might become possible. From the platform that Lispector and Cixous create, this reader seeks to open the biblical text to a counter-reading on behalf of the holy creature.

Can the Prophecies be Trusted?

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Translated with permission from chapter 4 of Vinciane Despret, Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2002).

On Making Fleshly Difference: Humanity and Animality in Gregory of Nyssa

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

This essay explores the theological stakes of differentiating humanity from animality in Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise De hominis opificio. Gregory’s conviction that the imago dei names an essential affinity to the angelic in human beings corresponds to his need to categorically differentiate humanity from animality. Yet, human affinity to God and the angels persistently threatens to collapse into beastly behavior and dispositions. Despite all Gregory’s efforts to shore up human uniqueness, human animality plays an indispensable (though disavowed) role in his theological anthropology.

C. S. Lewis, 2 Kings 19:35, and Mice

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

C. S. Lewis’s works are replete with animals of various kinds, offering both vivid and memorable characters and also objects of moral concern and theological value. He thereby anticipates what may be seen as a gradual turn toward the inclusion of animals in theological and ethical contemplation since his death in 1963. Although biographers have noted the important creative and religious influences of George MacDonald on Lewis’s work, this article highlights Lewis’s concern for animals as one of MacDonald’s more significant yet overlooked influences. Mice are arguably Lewis’ especial favourite, their small size and fragility offering pastoral, theological, and ethical lessons. In Lewis’s retelling of the Sennacherib story of 2 Kings 19:35, mice are shown to accomplish the work of angels.

What's an Ark?

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

An organism threatened with extinction is entrusted to safe storage in the hope that the conditions it needs to survive might one day be available to it again. The ark of Genesis has been widely used to imagine conservation projects of this kind. My paper circumscribes ark building as a conservation activity with other instances of ark building in contemporary culture, from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia to Lee Scratch Perry’s Black Ark. What is at stake when we decide that some form of life is, or is not, worthy of being set on its way to a life to come?

Peaceable Kingdoms in the Digital World

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through which to examine and contemplate the passion and fervor for interspecies friendship in the digital era. I argue that the digital medium of the animal video (more specifically, animal videos that document and record interspecies friendships) can be read as an alternate spacetime: one alleged to be outside of predation. But I also argue that, when we look closer at both the biblical context of this passage as well as visions of interspecies kinship that derive from, or resonate with, the biblical text, the dystopian underside of this almost utopian image can be rendered with more clarity. Perhaps, however, this biblical image—with its messianic undertones—can also help us to set in sharper relief the non-predational, creaturely, potentialities that might still emerge from these digital peaceable kingdoms.

Cerberus Bites Back: A Tale with Three Heads — the Syrophoenician and her Imitators

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

Exchanges about dogs operate rhetorically in the stories of the Syrophoenician women in Mark’s gospel, the Canaanite woman in Matthew, and the righteous Justa in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. The three stories are thus analysed with a focus on proverbial form, poetic features, and metre. The variations in the way the dogs are employed in the three stories reflect different periods and contexts within early Christianities, and are variously employed to convey abuse, voice, food practices, ethnicity, and gender.

The Politics of the Beast: Rewiring Revelation 17

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

Revelation’s Whore of Babylon and the hybrid animal upon which she rides provide a female-beastly assemblage against which is constructed the good sovereignty of the Lamb. Derrida’s thinking of animality and sovereignty indicates how the human political realm carves out its sovereign position in relation to the category “animal” and in reliance on a “reason of the strongest.” It is demonstrated that Revelation’s construction of a good and innocent sovereign Lamb—via contrast with the Whore-and-Beast—collapses due to the complexities of the two rival animalities. The importance of such a reading lies in the necessity to destabilise facile connotations and connections between animals and an “other” beastliness that must be violently conquered.

The Book of Exodus: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, edited by Thomas B. Dozeman, Craig A. Evans, and Joel N. Lohr

2018-12-21T10:00:55+13:00

The Bible Retold by Jewish Artists, Writers, Composers and Filmmakers, edited by Helen Leneman and Barry Dov Walfish

2018-12-21T10:00:56+13:00

Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals, by Anna Strhan

2018-12-21T10:00:56+13:00

If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right, by Christopher Douglas

2018-12-21T10:00:56+13:00

Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, by Giorgio Agamben

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A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, by Ward Blanton

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Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, edited by David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore

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Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible, by Jem Bloomfield

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Children's Bibles in America: A Reception History of the Story of Noah's Ark in US Children's Bibles, by Russell W. Dalton

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The High Middle Ages, edited by Kari E. Børresen and Adriana Valerio

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Reading the Bible in the Middle Ages, edited by Jinty Nelson and Damien Kempf

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Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse, by Ian Boxall

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The Bible and Art: Perspectives from Oceania, edited by Caroline Blyth and Nasili Vaka’uta

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John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, by Bruce Gordon

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Gender Hierarchy in the Qur'ān: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses, by Karen Bauer

2018-12-21T10:00:56+13:00

Matthew Chrulew, Transforming Biblical Animals

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