SBL funds new Society for Koranic Studies

An announcement appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week about the formation of a new scholarly society to "support scholarship and teaching about the Koran in its historical, religious, and cultural contexts."

This undertaking, headed by the Society for Biblical Literature, is supported by a $140,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

John Kutsko,  executive director of the SBL, is reported in the Chronicle as saying the intention for this new Koranic Studies society is that it be "independent," and he says he and his fellow organizers are eager to avoid being seen as presumptuous or as exhibiting a colonialist attitude. "We have no preconceived and presumed ways of reading," he reiterates.

You can read the full text of the Chronicle article here.

[The above was paraphrased from the Chronicle article, and should not be understood to represent original reportage.  Thank you to Professor Scott Newstock of Rhodes College for bringing the article to my attention.]

Report from the AAR pre-conference meetings

I arrived Thursday afternoon, and have been having a very fruitful set of discussions with colleagues as part of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning pre-conference plenary.

Peter Ochs, the organizer, has characterized the discussions as "the first Abrahamic revival meeting." Our sessions were divided between time spent doing SR around a collection of texts on music, and discussions of the future of SR practice in Europe and North America.

For the music study, we looked at several Suras from the Qur'an, a passage from Chronicles, and a passage from the Book of Revelation. What I found most fascinating (and had not known before beginning the study) is that there is no mention of music in the Qur'an. I found that incredibly surprising, but as time went on, that fact opened up an amazing discussion about the way in which interpretive traditions will insinuate and "read" things into texts that are not literally present, and the hermeneutic problems (and possibilities) that ensue.

This evening I will participate in a second (and unrelated) pre-conference symposium dealing with the upcoming edited anthology from the Liturgical Press's Rock and Theology project, to which I have contributed a chapter.

Exhausting day, but a really good day as well.

March 2011 Conference Update

This month I presented papers pertaining to Material Scripture at two conferences. They were well received, and the conversations that followed were fruitful. So fruitful, in fact, that I'm looking into expanding at least one of them into a journal article. Here's hoping I find the time!

The first paper is "Hidden Among the Leaves: Protestant and Catholic Battles for Theological Identity Across the First Pages of Scripture," which I presented at the SECSOR conference in Louisville, KY. This paper describes some of my findings from last Summer's visits to the Pitts and Concordia rare book archives. Listen to audio of the presentation here.

The second paper is "A Hospitality of Suspicion: Scriptural Reasoning and Material Scripture in the Tent of Meeting," which I presented in a panel on Scriptural Reasoning at the Mid-Atlantic regional meeting of the AAR, held in New Brunswick, NJ. Audio from the presentation is available here.

At both conferences I got the chance to tell folks about SCRIPT, and made good new connections with people interested in asking material questions about Scripture.

In May, I'll be heading to Syracuse to present in a panel on Iconic Books.