PRECIS OF RESEARCH

Working with Walter Brueggemann, I wrote my masters thesis on Franz Rosenzweig, focusing particularly on the questions Rosenzweig raised about the act of translation and the "invisible effect" of Jerome's Vulgate on Luther's Bible.  A portion of my thesis was revised and became the chapter "Rosensweig and Derrida at Yom Kippur," which was included in the 2005 Routledge edited volume, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments.

I entered my doctoral program at Vanderbilt with the intention of writing a "suspicious hermeneutic of lexicography" as my dissertation.  Over my years of study in the program, however, the project shifted to become an examination of the profound theological influence the process of editing and publishing has over the production and reading of Bibles.  The dissertation, entitled The Covert Magisterium, argued the thesis that in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the vacuum created by the rejection of Catholic interpretive tradition was filled by the "unseen hands" of editors and publishers, and not (as is so often argued) by freedom of the reader's conscience or the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  The dissertation identified the rhetorical mechanisms by which this "covert magisterium" exercises its influence over reading communities, and explores the ethical implications for present-day worship communities in light of this unacknowledged influence.

The completion of the dissertation did not settle these issues.  Rather, in its wake I saw for the first time the distant horizons that lay beyond my initial insights.  I set about learning all I could about the field of Book History, and spent the summer of 2010 visiting rare book archives in Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, New York City and Atlanta to explore incunabular Bibles and to examine first hand a variety of examples from the early days of Bible publishing.  Drawing heavily upon the neo-Marxist methodologies of "cultural materialism" developed by Raymond Williams, Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, I began to imagine what it would look like if biblical criticism included the tangible and paratextual aspects of an individual, physical copy of scripture as part of the "text" it interpreted.  Louis Althusser and Slavoj Zizek are among the theorists who have asserted that our cultural ideologies take their form in our most ubiquitous commodities.  Taking this insight seriously, we can use the utter explosion of variety of Bibles being published in the past several decades as a starting point for a sustained critique and investigation of the theological and ideological commitments of Christian communities in the North American context (and perhaps other contexts as well).

To describe and delineate this emerging methodology, I have adopted the term "material scripture."  For the past four years I have been developing this methodology through a series of conference presentations, and in an online forum of the same name.  As I have become more clear what is, and is not, encompassed by this method, I have identified a growing number of conversation partners, from across various disciplines.  My work with Material Scripture has brought me into contact with practitioners of Scriptural Reasoning, the Iconic Books project at Syracuse University and the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at Claremont Graduate University.  More recently, I have discovered a small group of scholars in the Modern Language Association who are pursuing questions very similar to my own, and we have begun a very fruitful exchange of ideas. 

I am still not fully sure what "Material Scripture" actually is.  In admitting that, however, I can confidently claim that it has a distinct trajectory, an increasingly stable methodology, and an enthusiastic core of interlocutors to help answer that question.