Reading the Bible as (Non)Fiction 2: A Brief How-to

Hey everybody.  Here's hoping we'll see you at campmeeting and can continue the discussion in person.  But for now, a new podcast, as promised (sorry about the delay, yesterday was a little crazy).

This week we take up with our previous discussion about Reading the Bible as (Non)Fiction.  We thought the last discussion might have remained a little in the abstract, so in this podcast, we try to outline some basic strategies for reading the Bible as nonfiction.  We focused on two particular techniques: close reading and contextualization.  Of course, the discussion ranges from that point.  Enjoy.  We'll be back in a few weeks with some more podcasts!  Yay!

Reading the Bible as (Non)Fiction 2: A Brief How-to

Truth, Reality and Science

So, we're more or less still on hiatus.  Hopefully next week we will have a new podcast, but no promises.  :)  In the meantime, as noted at our facebook group, I've been reading and discussing widely on the topic of "Postmodern Apologetics."  My studies have been interesting and provocative.  There is so much more to learn...

Anywayz, today I started digging up info on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another French thinker exploring questions of knowledge and experience.  I found this short recording particularly interesting and resonant with my own thinking in this area.  I look forward to reading some of his work.  Apologies for the strange format, but unless your French is far better than mine, the subtitles are immensely helpful.

God as Other: Why so Complicated?

Well, in Dale's absence, I've managed to find a podcast we recorded a while back but haven't released yet.  I think this is a good time for it.  Our discussion starts with a question: "If God is real, why doesn't He make himself known in a way that is obvious and unmistakable?"  This ties back into our discussion about reading the Bible as non-fiction, "Made for the Story", and my thesis.  This is a common question grounded in some assumptions about God and language and faith that don't make a lot of sense.  God wants a relationship--as such, he approaches us in ways that allow us to ignore or reject him.  He does not force himself upon us, and he speaks and appears in ways that require a response, without dictating a particular response.  That responsibility is vital to faith and life.  Ultimately, God appears as the "Great Other" who challenges our self-conceptions and doesn't always act in ways that are either comprehensible or desirable from our perspective.  But that is the great difficulty of loving another rather than yourself--different choices, different actions, different words.

Enjoy.

God as Other: Why so Complicated?

Hopefully, next week we will continue our discussion of the Bible as Nonfiction with an exploration of practices of good interpretation.

Reading The Bible as (Non)fiction: Why Interpretation Matters

Well, for those who said they don't always have time to listen, we're late this week.  It's been a busy and crazy couple of days, so I apologize for the late post.

This week is the first of a set of podcasts exploring the Bible as nonfiction.  This particular podcast grew out of discussions I have had on Reddit about reading the Bible.  When I was writing my thesis, I had to wrestle with the concept of nonfiction and the common idea that "nonfiction" can be opposed to "fiction" in the way that "true" is opposed to "false" or to "lie".  Some thinkers go so far as to argue that nonfiction is always fiction to begin with.  The point is not that there isn't a difference, but that nonfiction, like fiction, is a creative expression, rather than an actual reproduction of events.  For my thesis, I was interested in nonfiction as a story which demands recognition for the particular way it orients itself to a shared reality.  In other words, there is something different between merely telling a story and saying this story happened to me (or someone I know).  The latter demands a different kind of response.

So, this week, we take up questions some of our awesome listeners have asked about objective truth and the use we make of the Bible.  I realize this may be a little difficult for some of you to grapple with, but I hope you will bear with us at least through this week and the next as we explore what this means in terms of Bible study and interpretation.  How we understand the Bible makes all the difference and is shaped by our own experiences.  Imagining things to be otherwise denies our experience and stories (our testimony), leaving us in a frighteningly lifeless place.

Enjoy:

Reading the Bible as (Non)fiction: Why Interpretation Matters

Next week, we will look at some practical ways of applying this orientation to the Bible and life.

Freedom as Responsibility: David's Thesis Part 2

Well, the week has flown by.  Here's the second part of our discussion of my thesis, picking up with "the contest for meaning."  Our central question this week is how do we speak our stories and listen to others without simply looking to win?  This is a huge driving question for me.  Our discussion drifts through Idle No More, Butler and Spivak's "Who Speaks the Nation-State?", and the relationships between language, identity, culture and nationhood.  Enjoy.  And please comment!

Freedom as Responsibility Part 2

Freedom as Responsibility: David's Thesis Part 1

Release fail.  I apologize.  I've been sick and largely incapable of useful thought for the past few days, so the release is late.  Sorry.

This week is the first part of a discussion Dale and I had about my MA thesis.  If you're interested in reading it, let me know, but I will warn you that it is a dense 100 pages of critical theory.  This is the much simpler version.

In my thesis, I explored three wilderness nonfiction books: Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Peter Gzsowski's The Sacrament, and John and Jean Silverwood's Black Wave.  My question was "what is at stake in these stories that they each operate, at least partially, in an apologetic (explanatory) mode?"  My summary statement was that I was exploring "freedom as responsibility grounded in a recognition of mutual vulnerability and enacted as a contest for meaning."  The project allowed me to work through and articulate a number of ideas I've been wrestling with for the majority of my adult life, as such, it is probably my clearest articulation of the importance of story, the role it plays in our lives, and the importance and meaning of our engagement with it.  This ties back into much that we've discussed so far.

This first part ends with a question about why there must be a contest for meaning.  Part 2 answers next week.  Enjoy.

Freedom as Responsibility: David's Thesis Part 1

If anyone is interested in undertaking the reading of my most significant work thus far, it is available through the UVic Library website, here.

Part of the podcast is here.

Lines: How we travel - how we live

When I go out my door and begin travelling, how do I view what I am doing? I can be starting a journey from point A to point B, or going for a walk, or a drive, or maybe even both. According to Tim Ingold, in his book "Lines: A Brief History", the way in which we view these journeys can correspond to the way in which we view many other aspects of our life, as well as how we live and remember our lives.

In this podcast, David and I tell stories about our own experiences with lines, and present, discuss, and argue about the question of transport versus wayfaring, or put another way, how we conceive of lines, and how that impacts our lives.  We also relate the question to our own lives, and to questions we encounter as Christians, or as simply humans.

So how do you view your daily commute, or your walk to work? And what does this viewpoint tell you about the rest of your life?

Lines: How we travel - how we live

This podcast ties in to, and builds on the ideas begun with our podcasts "The Truth about Stories" Part 1 and  Part 2. 

You can listen to this podcast on Spreaker as well at this link.

The Truth About Stories, Part 2

Three weeks ago we started a discussion of how stories impact and interact with our lives, looking particularly at Tom King's book The Truth about Stories. Here is a continuation of this talk, looking at the same situation from a different perspective.  We talk about the power of stories to grab us, to promise us a future, and to disappoint us horribly.  Specifically I talk about the story of the triumphal entry, and the story of the Romanian revolution of 1989. We then ask ourselves what is the story of Christianity, and begin a much larger discussion of God's relationship with stories.

The Truth About Stories, Part 2

And on Spreaker

Responding to Violence: Security, Responsibility and the Nation-State in Light of the Boston Bombings, Part 2

As promised, here is part 2 of our discussion of responding to violence in light of the Boston Bombings.  The first part didn't seem adequate and raised questions that both of us continued to think on.  We decided to address some of those questions in a second podcast.  It's not enough to say "forgive" in the face of sustained violence--we must find a way to respond that limits future violence without simply escalating force and violence.  If our only response to violence is escalating use of force and power, we do not address the problem.  However, we have to go deep to change this perspective.  Our response to violence is grounded in a number of stories about individuality, community, morality, freedom and God.  Our final question is does God merely do security theater as some contend?  This week, we try to explore some of those issues a little further.

Responding to Violence: Security, Responsibility and the Nation-State in Light of the Boston Bombings, Part 2

In the future, we are aiming for Monday releases so we have time to prep the recordings over the weekend.  Sorry about the late podcast this week, but Muskwatch is hard at work revising his thesis after a successful defense.  Next week, we'll be back with The Truth About Stories, Part II.

Responding to Violence: Security, Responsibility and the Nation-State in Light of the Boston Bombings, Part 1

Well, we had planned to release The Truth About Stories Part II this week, in which Dale explores a story about story that is particular meaningful to him.  That will be up in a few weeks.  However, it seemed more relevant to post a discussion we had about the recent Boston bombing.

First, I must express our sympathy for the people and communities impacted by this tragedy.  Life is not meant to contain such horrific pain and loss.  However, the stories we tell about loss and in response to loss are especially powerful and thus especially worthy of attention and consideration.  Too often, in our pain, we speak stories which only immortalize and extend the pain we have suffered rather than grapple with it and resolve it in any meaningful way.  As such, I must clarify that my sympathy also extends to the two young men involved, as well as their communities and to those involved in other less widely spoken stories, including the explosion in Texas and the Rehtaeh Parsons story.  We live in a broken and often brutally painful world and our response to that pain matters immensely.

This podcast focuses on the question of how we respond to vulnerability and loss, especially in terms of the stories set in motion by the nation-state and its representative authorities and authoritative speakers.  These are not easy questions and our exploration may prove unsettling to some, but I ask you to bear with us.  Given the complexity of these issues, we recorded a second podcast which, as per the poll results, we will release next week.  In the meantime, here you are:

Security, Responsibility and the Nation-State in Light of the Boston Bombings, Part 1

Or alternatively:

the same podcast on Spreaker

The Truth About Stories, Part 1

One of the most influential books for me, giving shape to how I view the world, was Tom King's book The Truth about Stories - which he gave as the 2003 Massey lectures.  In his book he starts with a creation story, looking at how the story impacts how we view the world, and how the story shapes how we view stories themselves.  Among everything else in this wonderful book,  he states that "the truth about stories is that that's all we are." In other words, what we are as people, is the nexus of all the stories that we live in, our relationships, and our developing ideas.  In part 1 of this two-part podcast David and I try to explain how this idea impacts our thinking, starting an exploration of what the stories of our culture are, and some of the implications for how we give meaning to our lives.

The truth about stories discussion, part 1

And if you prefer, the same, but on "Spreaker"

If you enjoyed this discussion, we return to it from a different angle in The Truth About Stories Part.

Made for the Story?

One of the ways to start talking about something is to, well, start talking about it.  To that end, here is the first in a long series of podcasts! Unfortunately I pulled out the mic when we were already a little bit into the conversation, so here's an intro.

We were talking about Jacques Ellul's book On Freedom, Love, and Power in the context of a discussion about how we use stories, especially in a culture where we have stories that can tell us what to do in every decision.  Do we view our myths and stories as boundaries, boxes, that we must live in, or do are they less boundaries and more guides?  Do we have a mixture of the two?  Our discussion is here:

     Were we made for the story, or the story made for us?

     And a second link via Spreaker with it's own forum for comments

And an addendum - here are links and citations to some of the texts and stories referenced in the course of the the discussion.

     Brown, Wendy. States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Vol. 120. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

     As it Happens interview with Tariq Ali on the death of Hugo Chavez

     Ellul, Jacques. On Freedom, Love, and Power. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

     Ingold, Tim. Lines:: A Brief History. Routledge, 2007.

     Selmanovic, Samir. It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian. Jossey-Bass, 2009.

     The Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus, a presentation by Nehemia Gordon, a Karaite Jew

     Choice: a podcast from Radiolab.

Many of the other stories referenced, The Bible, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption, The Hurt Locker, and The Hobbit you'll have to find for yourself, as well as the two works by Joss Whedon referenced, Firefly and Angel.

Why this forum?

Over the past good while myself and a a friend have been in the process of writing a book - or to be more accurate co-writing.  To be more accurate still would be to say that we've spent several hours each weak discussing everything that we want to write about, but very rarely writing.  This blog will be a way of giving us a forum to write in, to post some of our discussions, and to give others a chance to tell us how ridiculous we are.

The subject matter will vary across a few disciplines, but will always be linked back to one question - why?  If that's too broad, I could narrow it to the domains of critical theory, religion, love, narrative, story, friendship, language, and hiking.  Even narrower, subject matter will almost always be relevant to our own lives, and the stories that we interact with regularly - urban vs rural, academia vs "normal", Adventism, the outdoors, television, gaming, and board games. If that's too broad, you'll have to either read later things that I've written, or listen to the podcasts that I think we'll be posting in the near future.

Finally - the title of this blog.  I originally wanted to go with -ee-apachitayaan ninagataweyihchigan, which translates as "as I am using my mind" and is in the Michif language, one of the unifying tropes I use across my blogs.  On second thought (after being reminded that it's not really that easy to remember [only 14 syllables!]) I went with Taanshi, meaning Hey! or How's it going?, also in Michif, but roughly twelve syllables shorter.

The main reason I chose it here is because it seems that most blogs dealing with this sort of subject matter go for Latin names referring to some sort of religious concept, and I think it's silly.  Unfortunately the convention is so well established that I can't really think of an English title that I could use! So my act of rebellion has been to reject Latin in favour of a language that is the beautiful bastard child of French and Nehiyawewin, preserving many of the strengths of both, and differing most significantly from Latin in that it is not friendly to metaphysics of any kind, as in its syntax, morphology and culture it tends to ground discussion in bodily action, and concrete implementation.  I'll probably talk about this at some point.

Finally, please interact! If you post interesting questions here, and we find them interesting, we'll probably try to find our own answers to them and post them either as posts or as podcasts.

update: we have a new title! "Storying Life" so although I still love "taanshi", it's going to be the url, not the title from here on in.