Dossier on the Seminar

In the first issue of this journal I wrote of the journal’s immediate context, the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar. Although one might think, on first attending such a gathering, that the seminar is merely a poor excuse for a pub crawl, the seminar has been and continues to be crucial for the intellectual life of quite a number of us in Australia and New Zealand. This year we meet for the tenth time, in a pub, in Melbourne, at roughly the same time as this issue of the journal goes live. Last time in Melbourne it was the Rainbow Hotel, the home of live music in Melbourne, but some of the other pubs have included the Settlers Arms near Sydney, the Captain Stirling in Perth and the Ramsgate in Adelaide. And the beers varied as much as the pubs – from Tooheys Old Ale at the Settlers Arms to Dogbolters at the Captain, from Coopers Sparkling at the Ramsgate to a VB at the Rainbow. So also the papers, which have ranged over high theory, the intricacies of Hebrew and Greek, to politics and the new world disorder, to name but a few of our interests. Above all the agenda has been to cover the full extent of the engagement between biblical studies and the developments in literary criticism and philosophy. That biblical studies has always interacted with its sibling disciplines is as obvious as it needs to be said again. That biblical studies also tries all too often to seal itself off from such interaction is equally as obvious as it needs to be said, again. I must admit that for a time, not so long ago, I thought the seminar might have run its course, that its task was done and that it was time to fold it up and store it somewhere. But the enthusiasm and vibrancy that surrounds the seminar convinced me it was well worth continuing, in fact that it is one of the more important things in which I am involved. The papers gathered in this issue, Dossier on the Seminar, attest to that vibrancy. Each is a sample of a longer project, a passionate engagement with the intersections between critical theory and the Bible. Each paper was presented initially at a gathering of the seminar over the last two years, one in Melbourne and one in Perth. They give us a sample of what we have been studying, writing, presenting and discussing at the seminar. We dive straight in with James Harding’s sombre assessment of the extent of what is called ‘porno-prophetics’. Engaging a hermeneutics of suspicion, he argues that some of more pernicious texts are not the ones that explicitly parade and abuse Israel-as-a-woman (such as Hosea 1-3). Rather, they are the rousing, beautiful texts such as Isaiah 40:1-2. Traditionally taken as the first words of Deutero-Isaiah with their call for comfort to a troubled Israel, Harding argues that its inspiring language is precisely the abusive trap. The bulk of the essays focus on the New Testament, marking a shift from the earlier days of a heavy focus on the Hebrew Bible for innovative biblical studies. Here we find essays circling around the gospels of Luke and John, and Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This is where the similarity stops, for while Anne Elvey makes use of eco-feminism, Christina Petterson draws upon postcolonial and autobiographical theory, while Gillian Townsley touches base with Judith Butler’s queer theory. Anne Elvey’s essay on Luke assumes an eco-feminist base to engage with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy on the question of touch and death. If we look at the gospel in that light, what happens? Christina Petterson found herself in the situation of being dissatisfied with her initial paper at the seminar, so here she sets about investigating what that sense of dissatisfaction implied. It EDITORIAL