Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship

Call For Papers: For the 2020 Annual Meeting, the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship unit will convene 3 sessions. The first is an open session for which we solicit proposals on the topic of the political use of the Bible in the 21st century. The recent resurgence of political evangelicals and their alignment with state power around the world has seen the Bible emerge as a potent symbol. How does the Bible function in political spaces? Does its substantive content influence that function? Or is its operation in such contexts strictly iconic? What opportunities are there to disrupt or complicate its adjacency to state power? Finally, how does the political invocation of the Bible and biblical language more generally influence recent debates on secularism? Continuing our concern to foster spaces in which the past and future of the SBL may be addressed, and its institutional commitment to inclusive scholarship may be furthered, we will convene a second panel on the subject of “Justice in the SBL.” Our focus will be to sponsor a forum in which recent, organization-led efforts toward addressing marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ scholars, will be discussed. We will also convene an invited panel to discuss Richard Newton's book Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox 2020). This panel focuses on Newton’s critical reexamination of the category “scriptures." How might we envision alternatives to presuming the intrinsic importance of familiar, historical canons? How does an expansive conception scriptures challenge our understanding of the relationship between culture and text?

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