Sewanee's School of Theology chosen as one of six sites for project exploring the function of the Bible in the worldwide Anglican communion

[Posted originally on the University of the South alumni webmail, here]

The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South has been chosen as one of six sites worldwide to host a regional group working on a major new project of the Anglican Communion. The School of Theology will host the North American group that will be part of a new exploration of the ways the Bible functions in the life of the Church.

The Rev. Robert MacSwain OGS, instructor of theology and Christian ethics at Sewanee, has been named the coordinator of the regional group, which will organize the project’s case study work within Canada and the United States.

“The Bible in the Life of the Church” project was launched by the Anglican Communion late in 2009. It aims to explore how Anglicans in different contexts actually use the Bible by exploring Scripture together and reflecting on the encounter; to produce resource materials for use at all levels of Christian education; and to re-evaluate the ways in which Anglicans have heard, studied, and received Scripture.

This major three-year project was mandated by the Anglican Consultative Council at its Jamaica meeting in May 2009. It has been described by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a “serious examination of how the Bible is used in our [the Anglican Communion’s] worship and decision-making.”

While much of the project’s work will be prepared by the regionally-based groups and brought to a Communion-wide coordinating group, local groups within each region will take part in the project by contributing to and testing the material that emerges from the work of the regional groups. MacSwain says, “In this way, the project will involve wide grassroots
participation from around the Communion, as well as draw upon the work of academic biblical scholars and theologians.”
Other regional groups are based around theological education institutions in East Africa, Southern Africa, South East Asia, Oceania, and Britain.

The Very Rev. Dr. William S. Stafford, dean of the School of Theology, says, "With our faculty, who all think hard and care deeply about the Scripture's use in the church, and with Education for Ministry spreading particularly effective ways for adults to reflect on the Word and their lives, Sewanee is a natural site for a project such as this. We are honored to serve the Anglican Communion in this way."

Information about upcoming Glasgow Conference, "Re-Writing the Bible"

The following is available online here

Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue

14th-15th June 2010


University of Glasgow


Keynote panellists include Michael Schmidt, Michael Symmons-Roberts,
Kei Miller, Sara Maitland and Michelene Wandor.



“…there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”

- Terry Eagleton



A recent exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art consisted of a bible, laid open alongside a supply of pens, with the invitation, “If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please feel free to find a way to write yourself back in.” The comments scribbled in the margins—and the very notion of ‘writing in the Bible’—became the subject of a widespread controversy, resulting in the gallery’s decision to place this bible inside a perspex cube, effectively sealing it off and protecting it from what might be deemed ‘undesirable’ commentary. Visitors were still invited to write comments, but now they were written on sheets of paper that were then selected by gallery staff and inserted between the bible’s pages.


In light of this very present debate, Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue invites poets, writers, and scholars to engage with interdisciplinary questions surrounding the phenomena of retellings or revisions of Bible in creative writing. These retellings have a heritage that, arguably, starts within the books of the Bible itself and stretches across many literatures and traditions; poets and writers in every age filter biblical themes and images through the
focus of their own period and practice. Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Yeats, Owen, H.D, Plath, Kinsella, Hill; the list is long, diverse, and continues to grow.


This symposium asks why contemporary writers have chosen to rework this particular source text, and what stances they have taken towards it: faithful, using creative writing as a means of prayerful reflection or theological exegesis? Or furious, a railing against the Bible’s injustices and absences? Or a mixture of both, a sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful kind of dialogue? If every reading is also a re-writing, then it follows that every re-writing is also a reading, and for this reason many biblical scholars are fascinated by the literary ‘afterlives’ of the scriptures, the ways in which the Bible is sustained by creative imaginations in cultural settings and times very distant from its own writing and compilation.


We are seeking 20-minute papers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including but not limited to: literature, theology, biblical studies, critical and cultural theory, history, politics, and so on. We will consider papers on all forms of ‘creative writing’: poetry, novel, short story, sermon, liturgy, prayers, songs, political writing, theatre, and so on. Our emphasis is on twentieth and twenty-first century works, but we will also consider abstracts on rewritings from other periods. We would be particularly interested in papers looking at spaces that often go unexplored by research in retelling and revisioning, such as biblical romance novels, evangelical speculative fiction, biblical archetypes in autobiography, contemporary liturgy, or popular music. There is the possibility that proceedings will be published.


Please send abstracts (approx. 200 words) to rewritingbible2010@gmail.com, by no later than 19th April 2010.

The Derridean Mark

A favorite pastime of mine involves eating and browsing at the Alektor Cafe and bookstore, which is a great little place run by an Orthodox priest and his wife here in Nashville. One of the things I love best is the front room, full of various icons from across the globe.

A few weeks back, I discovered the icon to the left here, and bought it. It reminds me very much of Jacques Derrida's much-lauded tome, The Post Card, in which - among many other subjects - Derrida meditates on an image from a postcard showing Plato standing behind Socrates. The implication is that Plato is dictating to Socrates, who is seated at a writing desk -thereby reversing the traditional assumed "order" of things (namely, that Plato was transcribing and recording the spoken "events" of Socrates' life).

So imagine my joy in finding this icon, in which St. Mark is seated and transcribing the opening lines of his Gospel (see detail below). The "original" he is copying is a text, open on a strange lectern sitting atop a twisting, vine-like pole. The text on the lectern reads, The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God, as it is written ~~~.

Mark's copy, wonderfully, is slightly different. It reads, The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

My first enjoyment of this icon was in the very Derridean play it is making, through its visual arrangement, with the assumptions about the order of the Gospels. In much of current scholarship, Mark's Gospel is thought to be "first," meaning it predates the other Gospels and, along with other, unrecorded sources, serves as the font for the Gospels that follow.

Yet here, Mark is seen to be copying from some prior source. We can ask from whence this source comes - form the Holy Spirit? Perhaps. Or perhaps Mark is here presented as copying from some other Gospel, which precedes his, thereby reversing scholarly assumptions of Markan primacy. I have no idea what the icon writer actually intended with this image, but it definitely got me thinking.

(I should note in passing, as well, all the visual anachronisms involved in these words appearing before us in English, as opposed to Koine or Aramaic, as well as the fact that the writings are occurring on what appear to be folio and quarto codices, and not scrolls or parchment.)

Now that I own the icon, I have looked at it even more closely, and was struck by the differences I mentioned above between the writing on the lectern copy and the writing Mark is making. As he is copying the page, he is modifying and changing it. The words are the same, but the punctuation is altered. A comma is inserted between "Jesus Christ" and "the Son," and then a full stop is placed after the phrase "the Son of God."

This full stop, moreover, truncates the full phrase from the lectern copy, which concludes with the phrase "as it is written ~~". Mark (who is writing a copy), is omitting the phrase which refers explicitly to the writing preceding his writing, by adding the full stop in his copy.

In our current Bible versions, of course, these phrases are even more altered, with "As it is written" referring to the writings of Isaiah. But even here, these writings referred to are rewritten by Mark, who reads Isaiah's words as an explicit reference to John the Baptist.

This icon sits on my desk in the office, and I find myself returning to it often during the day. I like how succinctly it plays with my assumptions about where things come from, and what things say, and I like how it reminds me to pay attention to very mundane material matters like the visual represenation of media (codex vs. scroll), and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), can yield some interesting hermeneutic insights.