My Writing Plans for this year (or part thereof)

After completing The Criticism of Heaven and Earth a month ago, taking a mental holiday and thoroughly enjoying the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar, I’ve decided give staid and stuffy scholarship a bit of a shove this year. So I am going to submit a series of essays to prudish journals and watch them squirm:

1. Hittites, Horses and Corpses: On Bestiality and the Bible. Maybe for Vetus Testamentum or the Australian Biblical Review.

2. Jacob’s Nuts, or the Yarekh Handshake. Perhaps for the Catholic Biblical Quarterly or Pacifica.

3. Hooker Hermeneutics. This one has got to go to the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.

4. Too Many Dicks on the Threshing Floor, or, How to Organise a Prophetic Sausage-Fest. Journal of Biblical Literature.

Needless to day, they will probably reject them in righteous indignation, claiming that they are not ’serious’ scholarship, that the language is ‘inappropriate’ etc etc. And so I plan to use the referee comments as the basis of a sustained critique in another study, which I will then send to one of aforesaid journals.

 

Breakthroughs at the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar

By the second morning we were looking more and more like DaVinci’s Last Supper – with a Dunedin twist:

I challenge anyone to come up with a better backdrop to a biblical studies paper than this one. Here’s Judith McKinlay framed by a full bar:

As is Elaine Wainwright, obviously pleased by the prospect, or her paper (which was great) or both:

However, in the midst of all this intense study of the sources and reports (here, here and here) – note the careful attention to original texts – we were able to produce at least three breakthroughs:

1. After Robert Myles’s paper, we realised that the Greek term for ‘fishing’ should include a lexical entry under ‘cruising’ (in Mark 1:16-20). After all, what does ‘fishing for men’ mean but cruising?

2. After Elaine Wainwright’s paper a further lexical discovery was made. Not only is John known as ‘the baptiser’ or indeed ‘the immerser’, but he should also be known as John the Amphibian.

3. After desperately searching for the title for a paper on prophetic masculinity I need to present later this year, I drew on a range of great minds to come up with: ‘Too Many Dicks on the Threshing Floor, or, How to Organise a Prophetic Sausage Fest’.

Despite having a hand in the third insight, the two anchors of the Dunedin School were hard to please:

But James Harding (who rounded everything out with a scintillating discussion of David and Jonathan) was much more taken with them:

 

First glimpses of the Dunedin Bible and Critical Theory Seminar

An upper room, smuggled grog, plots and intrigues to undermine the university system, a surprisde visit by ‘Tutus on Tour’ and the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar was off. Along with a few intrepid Australians and one Brit (John Barclay), a good bunch of kiwis gathered in the upper room of The Bog in Dunedin and were treated to a feast of papers. More on that when I have a bit more time, but here we are:

Two firsts for the 13th year of the BCT (apart from meeting in Dunedin): there was no registration since the room was free – as long as we drank their grog – and they had table service for those who needed coffee and other refreshments:

Some of the locals did find the wait for beer o’clock a little tedious:

But it did arrive at last:

 

Does anyone know the seat tube angle on a Gazelle Fuente Trekking bicycle?

Strange question, I know, but anyone? You see. most bikes have an angle at about 73.5 degrees, but I need one at about 71.5. Here’s this beautiful beast:

 

Bible and Critical Theory Dunedin

Here at last, after a drug-induced crossing of the ditch and snoozy naked bus. Time for the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar at the Bog pub. I won’t repeat the program here, but send you to the The Dunedin School and thereby increase their traffic. Any critical theorist in town – send me an email so we can meet up tonight (Saturday, Waitangi Day, 6 Feb …)

 

With whom do you argue when tired?

When I am out on a long bicycle tour, I usually get a little weary at some point – say on the last kilometre of that massive climb, or when I have been too long in the saddle. The best warning sign of impending weariness is that I start to have imaginary arguments with those who annoy me. It used to be my father (first up), but now that he is dead I have few, if any, arguments with him. My memories of him are very different now, usually calculating how old he was at a certain time and how that relates to my life. Every now and then it is an ex-partner or two, who for some reason or other suddenly starts arguing with me over some matter. But they are less frequent (the exes and the arguments) these days. Yet there is always someone to take the place of those who have retired, usually an authority figure, usually someone who has pissed me off. You can even pick a trace here or there in my blog posts.

 

The uncanny tendency to describe one’s foes in terms of oneself

The ideology instigated by these two figures is fuelled by dreams of a prior [Christian] golden age. [Radical Orthodox] sympathizers avidly read European fascist literature and pursue religious ends via atheist methods. Recruits to the cause are not the excluded uneducated poor, they are intellectuals with a radical critique of Western society and its impact on [Christendom].

OK, I’ve made a few minor editorial adjustments. Now here’s the original text:

The ideology instigated by these two figures is fuelled by dreams of a prior Islamic golden age. Al Qaeda sympathizers avidly read European fascist literature and pursue religious ends via atheist methods. Recruits to the cause are not the excluded uneducated poor, they are intellectuals with a radical critique of Western society and its impact on Islam.

Uncanny is about the best I can come up with for the likeness? But who are the ‘two figures’? Maududi and Qutb? Or the authors of this piece, Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst?

 

Biblical erotica: the bestiality issue (sensitive viewer alert)

For some strange reason, artists have shied away from verses like Exodus 22:19 or Leviticus 20:15-16. Grim verses, I must admit, with both animal and human being put to death for the dastardly deed. Although they may also be read as a rare moment of gender and species equality, for man, woman and animal are all in it together.

Our good friend at The Brick Testament has not shied away from these wholesome biblical verses …

Nor indeed has that stalwart program of family values, the Simpsons

As you can see, zoophilia is more for a snigger than serious art.

Unless of course you happen to be an ancient relief sculptor:

But … there is one moment of animal-human sensuality that often slips under the radar, so to speak. Artists have found that there is more than meets the eye in the encounter between Eve and the serpent.

You can always trust William Blake on this one:

But it gets better …

Until we just return to crassness:

 

Looking for the holes – new blog by Elaine Kelly

Worth a look, repeatedly. Great post on hybrids and hummers in the USA, where Elaine spends a good deal of time these days.

 

RT = BB + VI

A small thought as a couple of us work up a paper on Red Tory economics – what there is of it – and a full broadside. Given that ‘localism’ is big on the RT agenda, with local tomatoes and eggs and whatnot being the solution to our economic woes, and given that I grew up in such wholesome local communities, I would like to suggest the following formula:

RT = BB + VI

In which RT is obvious, BB stands for bucolic bliss, the perspective of the outsider who happens to roll into a quaint village, and VI designates … village idiocy. I’ve seen too many lantern jaws, dull eyes, towns full of ‘cousins’, and some of the most eye-popping sexual experimentation (usually involving animate beings) to be persuaded by any such localism. And you can’t have BB without VI, believe me.