As featured on the Oxford College Library blog.
An update on the course from Dr. Gowler’s blog (Jan 23, 2015)
The original post is found here.
Honors Seminar update
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I am delighted to have such outstanding students qualify for and enroll in my Honors Seminar, “Chorus of Voices: The ‘Afterlives’ of Parables.” The first two weeks of classes (we meet on T/Th) have been fantastic.
Our class has been given the privilege of meeting in the Special Collections Room of the Oxford College library (it’s not really a classroom). It’s a perfect location for our seminar, and the resources we need are either at our fingertips with online materials or just a short walk away in the stacks.
The seminar is really a “working group,” because it is a collaboration. The students are each working on a semester-long project, and I am working on a similar project (this book).
So far, students have picked the parable on which they want to work the entire semester. They will explore the reception history of “their” parable in different eras, perspectives, media, and so forth.
Students have picked the following parables on which to focus:
- The Final Judgment—Sheep/Goats (Matt 25:31-46)
- The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)
- The Talents (Matt 25:14-30)
- Workers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1-16)
Each week every one of us will report (e.g., give a paper) on our progress. The students have already found some very interesting things–many of which I had not seen/heard before–so we are already learning a lot from each other
We started the class by establishing what “doing” reception history means, and we are accomplishing that primarily in a “Ways of Inquiry” (distinctive to Oxford College of Emory University) approach.
We started with Thomas Hart Benton’s Prodigal Son lithograph, talking about our initial observations/thoughts and then discussing what they needed to do/know in order to do a “reception history” of this image.
I won’t discuss those matters in detail, but in the other class periods, we examined other receptions of the parable of the Prodigal Son: (a) Chartres Cathedral (stained-glass window), (b) Antonia Pulci (play), (c) Albrecht Dürer (engraving), and (d) Robert Wilkins (blues song; we also talked about blues music in general and some other blues songs about parables).
Students have now read and critiqued the sections of my book on “The Parables and the Blues,” Albrecht Dürer, and Antonia Pulci. I am amazed at how quickly they have picked up essential elements of reception history (they work on the image, play, text, etc. itself before they read about it). They also have been extremely insightful about my book drafts, and they have already made significant contributions toward making the book better.
Starting the week after next, once students get going on their projects more fully, we will devote equal time in class to all projects–mine will merely be one of the five projects.
We are primarily focusing on the receptions themselves: we worked careful and extensively, for example, on both reading the lyrics of the blues songs we discussed, but we also spent a significant amount of class time listening to various versions of those blues songs–from the “original” version to more recent “redone” versions (Blind Joe Taggart, among others, deserves more “hits” on YouTube).
We are doing another of other things, but perhaps I will write about those aspects later.
Initial Announcement and Description of the Honors Seminar (Sept 20, 2014)
The original post is found here.
Honors Seminar on the Reception History of the Parables
I have been selected to teach an honors seminar in the spring semester. At Oxford, faculty members who wish to teach an honors seminar submit proposals to the Honors Committee, which selects the three proposals they think would be best (we have only three honors seminars per year).
The three honors seminars that we will offer in the spring are (1) an economics course, “Happiness Economics” that will be taught by Boris Nikolaev; (2) a religion course taught by Jill Petersen Adams, “Writing the Disaster: Witnessing, 1945,” which “explores legacies of loss by addressing issues of catastrophic suffering in the contexts of the Holocaust/Shoah and the atomic bombings of Japan”; (3) my religion course on the Reception History of the parables, “A Chorus of Voices: The ‘Afterlives’ of Parables.”
Every honors seminar has to be interdisciplinary, writing-intensive, and one of our signature “Ways of Inquiry” courses. Here is the description of the course that I included in the initial proposal:
Jesus’ enigmatic and compelling parables have fascinated their hearers since he first uttered them, and during the intervening centuries his parables have produced a multitude of interpretations, ones that are found in a variety of forms, sources, and perspectives. This course will explore the “afterlives” of parables: their use, impact, and influence through the centuries. Students will choose the parables they wish to explore throughout different eras, perspectives, and media. Examples will come from art (e.g., Rembrandt, van Gogh, Sadao Watanabe, He Qi), music (e.g., the Rolling Stones, Hank Williams, Blind Willie Johnson, Kontakia), literature (e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin), science fiction (e.g., Octavia Butler), plays (e.g., Antonia Pulci), poetry (e.g., George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling), film (e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Son of Man, from South Africa), politics (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Jordan, Elsa Tamez), and ethics/religion/philosophy (e.g., Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard).
This course will be interdisciplinary, and it will introduce students to the dialogues between biblical traditions and the cultures and communities who received and interpreted them. These explorations span two thousand years, and they are found in literature, visual art, music, plays, and other modes of interpretation. This class will thus explore in inter and multi-disciplinary ways all sorts of voices—secular and scared, influential and marginalized, “orthodox” and heterodox (including unusual or distinctive), ranging from the fairly famous to the fairly obscure.
This writing-intensive course is taught in a Ways of Inquiry (INQ) approach, one in which students not only learn important concepts, principles, assumptions, and terminology of Reception History, but they also actively learn and practice why and how scholars approach these texts the way they do. The focus is on exegesis: the multidisciplinary endeavor to understand these interpretations in the context of history, culture, religious practice, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social values. An INQ course begins with the interpretations, the questions and issues that result from reading/seeing/hearing them carefully from more than one approach or perspective. In other words, we will “start from scratch” and proceed step-by-step to build competencies in interpreting these interpretations of the parables.
I am delighted that the timing of the course overlaps with the visit of Chris Rowland, one of the foremost scholars in the Reception History of the Bible. He is coming in March as the Pierce Visiting Scholar, a faculty exchange program between Oxford University and Oxford College of Emory University that is one of the programs of the Pierce Institute. One of the things Chris will do while here is teach one session of the honors seminar. He also is giving a public lecture at Oxford College, and we are arranging an additional lecture at All Saints Episcopal Church in Atlanta. If you are in the area, you will want to come hear Chris. He is fantastic!
I won’t include all of the details from the honors seminar proposal, but two aspects of the course may be of interest. The first is how the course is structured, because students will develop their interpretative abilities in activities that build upon each other:
- Students will have writing assignments or in-class writing in almost every class. We will begin in the very first class with students doing elements of Reception History. We will focus on individual elements (i.e., students will begin by exploring one single aspect of exegesis) and use those exercises to build (by mid-semester) into a full-fledged Reception History analysis of one parable. These short papers will begin with the foundational “close reading/viewing” of details in the interpretations. Then students will move to additional short (one-page) Reception History investigations of their own, building upon their initial “close reading/viewing” and incorporating other elements of Reception History, such as key biographical elements, other works by the author/artist that affect interpretation, historical and cultural contexts, ethical implications, and so forth.
- Also at the beginning of the semester, students will write critiques of existing reception history essays (e.g., sections of drafts from my book). Since students have much to accomplish as they learn how to do Reception History explorations, we will start with examples of Reception History studies on the parables. Students, however, will not assume that these examples are necessarily the way to proceed. They will critique the essays to discern the essays’ strengths and weaknesses and begin to form their own methodological approach/perspective.
- The heart of the project: Reception history analyses of one parable. Students will do four or five of these explorations of interpretations in diverse media, eras, and perspectives, and they will complete a portfolio, which also will involve more than one medium.
- The “capstone” of this milestone project is a reflective paper of the insights students have gained through their investigations, including the similarities and differences between exegeses of interpretations in diverse media.
The milestone project that is mentioned above will be a portfolio that includes (four or five, I expect) student explorations of the use, influence, and impact of one parable from the New Testament Gospels. Requirements for the project include explorations:
- From different eras.
- From varying perspectives
- Involving different media in which the interpretations are found
- Involving presentations in at least two media; one must be a formal paper
- Involving interpretations that interact with one “scene” of a parable (e.g., a work of visual art)
- Involving interpretations that interact with multiple “scenes” of a parable (e.g., a song, a stained-glass window with many scenes, a play about the parable, etc.).
- Of the inter and multi-disciplinary insights that arise through these diverse modes of interpretation.
I envision that students would create a portfolio of their reception history investigations in various media and from various perspectives. The “capstone” of this milestone project is a reflective paper of the insights students have gained through their investigations, including the similarities and differences in exegetical approaches that different media require (e.g., the similarities and differences between visual and textual exegesis). In addition, a “public display” of this portfolio could be accomplished by creating a class blog or (with students’ permission) by posting students’ work on this blog.
I want to give students as much flexibility as possible, however, so beyond the parameters in the bulleted items above, other details of the milestone project will be subject to negotiation and will primarily be based on their interests.
I am looking forward to teaching the course. I think including drafts of selections from my book will prove to be mutually beneficial for the students and for the final version of the book.
Initial thoughts as posted on Dr. Gowler’s blog
These initial thoughts are from August 18, 2014:
The Blog so Far, and Honors Seminar on the Reception History of the Parables
I am nearing 100 posts on this blog, so perhaps a bit of assessment about what has been accomplished so far would be in order.Reception History occupies a small niche in the study of the New Testament. Reception History of the parables, then, is a small niche within that small niche, so I realized starting out that the audience for this blog would be a relatively small one. All in all, though, I have been surprised by the number of hits on the blog and the variety of countries around the world represented in those hits (over 70 countries Blogger tells me).
The total number of hits since I began the blog is less than the most popular biblioblog receives in one week (Jim West’s blog), but I knew going in that the audience would be very small even after the blog became established, as it were. I decided, also before starting the blog, that it would be worth it even with that very small audience for the following reasons:
- It would help me write the book. That sounds odd, since writing a blog obviously takes time away that I could be spending in researching and writing the book, but it has helped. Most of all, it has helped me keep the audience for the book in mind. I need to write the book so that college-level students could understand and appreciate the Reception History of the parables. So I have tried to explain the complex in simple but not simplistic ways.
- When I have posted material that eventually will become sections of the book, I have revised those sections a fair amount before I posted them to the blog to make them clearer to a public audience. The process made me realize better how I need to revise sections of what I had written. After doing so for the blog, I then went back and revised sections of the book draft accordingly. So the book will become more readable and more clear, I hope, because of what I have done on the blog. The same thing happened with my lecture at Oxford University: Although preparing and giving the lecture took time away from the book, in the long run it will make the book better, because I have revised those sections of the book significantly in the process.
- I also have been able to include things on the blog that I won’t be able to include in the book, such as a number of examples from visual art (e.g., several examples from Millais instead of just one or two). I also will include things that probably won’t make the “cut” for the book. For example, I will write soon about some sculptures I saw at St. James Church in London a few weeks ago. Truly amazing. Only about 60 items can make the “cut” for the book, so the blog allows me to share publicly additional interesting interpretations of the parables.
So the blog has taken a little bit of extra time, but that has been helpful for me in thinking through what I wanted to write in the book, and I hope it has been helpful for the relatively small audience that reads all, some, or just one of the posts.
I am wondering whether, after the book comes out, I should continue this blog and expand it to the Reception History of the Gospels. We’ll see.
Also, I received word a few weeks ago that I have been chosen to teach one of the three Honors Seminars at Oxford College of Emory in the spring semester (2015). My proposal was a course on the reception history of the parables, so I am hopeful that I can give parts of the book a “trial run” during that course. It should be fun. Once again, I hope that this course, like the blog, can help both the book and the students who read it.So those are a few observations about what the blog has accomplished so far. In the next post, I will write about the people/interpretations that I have covered so far in chapters 3, 4, and 5.
