Conference: Christianity and Freedom

This Thursday I will be flying to Rome to participate in a conference on Christianity and Freedom, sponsored by Georgetown University as part of the Religious Freedom Project. The sessions will be streamed live on the Internet; those who are interested can watch it here: http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/conference-on-christianity-and-religious-freedom-coming-up-this-weekend-5785956066000896. My colleague Duane Alexander Miller and I are on the panel called "Religious Freedom in the Lion's Den?" and it starts at 4:30 p.m. on Friday. The agenda for the entire conference can be found here: http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/rfp/events/christianity-and-freedom-historical-and-contemporary-perspectives. What we say will be based on our experience of living in Israel and field work carried out in the West Bank in 2013. The research will then be published in the ensuing conference volume.

Bibliography for Arabophone Christianity in Israel-Palestine

I have just spent the past eight months working at Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary. One task I set myself was to compose as exhaustive a bibliography as possible on "contextual Palestinian theology." On closer analysis this category turned out to be too vague, so I renamed it "Bibliography for Arabophone Christianity in Israel-Palestine." It's published in the seminary's journal Mary's Well Occasional Publications and can be downloaded here: http://nazsem.blogspot.co.il/2013/08/bibliography-of-arabophone-christianity.html.

I've already started working on a revised edition. Please do share anything that I have missed. I would particularly welcome material in Arabic and Hebrew. Please read the introduction, however, in order to understand the parameters I have set myself.

Forthcoming article: The Coherence of Psalm 24

JSOT have accepted an essay of mine for publication. Here's the title and the abstract:

The Coherence of Psalm 24

Abstract

Psalm 24 is often seen to be a ‘baffling’ psalm due to the juxtaposition of what seems to be thematically and structurally disparate material (creation, vv. 1-2; torah and sanctuary vv. 3-6; divine warrior and sanctuary, vv. 7-10). Most unusual, however, is the juxtaposition of the final two stanzas, for they seem to cancel each other out. In vv. 3-6, human beings desire access to God within the sanctuary, whereas in vv. 7-10 God himself is about to access the same location. Various poetic clues indicate that these two entrance scenes have been intentionally brought into parallelism with each other, yet no satisfactory answer has been presented as to the meaning of this manoeuvre. In this article, a poetic analysis is proposed that goes beyond those proffered thus far by looking at the way in which the ‘poetic function’ creates a degree of ‘narrative’ self-referentiality within the psalm, in particular through its representation of time and space. The conclusion is that the Psalm is a recalibration of liturgical material in terms of a grasp of the structure of the divine economy.

Key words: Psalm 24; Hebrew poetics; tradition history; theological interpretation; divine economy; synchronic/diachronic; creation; torah; eschatology