Teaching the Bible in Texas: An Archive Possessed? Posted on December 19, 2013 by Gregory CuéllarThree things are sacred in Texas, its history, the Bible, and football. Here the Alamo is a pilgrimage site, and High school football is almost equal in importance to Sunday church attendance. This past summer, I integrated Texas History and the Bible in a dream elective course titled, “A Borderlands Reading of Deuteronomistic History.” Central to the course was a reading of Joshua to 2 Kings side by side with Texas borderlands history from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. The primary topics of discussion were the intersecting themes of empire, conquest, exile, family, gender, and violence….
ACE Series Part IV: Writing ACE Commentary, or Everything I Need to Know About Arguing I Learned from Billy Madison! Posted on August 13, 2013 by Richard NewtonMy research deals with the scriptures people use to orient their lives. This interest may have begun in adolescence. Much to the chagrin of my youth group directors, my friends and I had a wider canon than the authorized version of any denomination out there. Our central text was the Adam Sandler film, Billy Madison (dir. Tamra Davis, 1995). To us it was a cult classic to be quoted chapter and verse. This movie made those awkward teenage years some how more bearable. For every situation, there was some line from the film available for application. And for whatever reason, when I think of ACE commentary, this film clip comes to mind….
ACE Series Part III: Good Evidence Must ACE the BS Test—It’s the Law! Posted on August 6, 2013 by Richard NewtonWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… Some of my students think that they are Thomas Jefferson. They will write paragraphs with assertions they hold to be self-evident. And while I laud their desire to write revolutionary words, they must first learn that no one, not even the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, can get away with offering evidence-less assertions. Mock academic politics all you want, but higher education at least claims the democratic notion of fair criticism. It’s a place where anyone should be able to call BS on an unsupported assertion at any time. And its participants should get the opportunity to challenge a point’s validity and qualify it with amendments—the 13th, 14, 15th, and 19th in Mr. Jefferson’s case….
Archive as a Context for Teaching the Bible Posted on July 23, 2013 by Gregory CuéllarAxiomatic in my teaching of the Bible is the notion that all texts are produced in a context. For most of my beginning students, such a notion poses little threat to their faith convictions. Even the “more controversial” claim of non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch wanes in intensity after a few lectures on redaction history. Their uneasiness, however, lingers not with arguments on a text’s particular historical context but with the claim that all readings of the biblical text are the outcome of historical processes. Said differently, no reading, informed or uninformed, takes place in a social vacuum.