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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Michael Hemenway

Michael Hemenway

RJ Online - 0 views

  • RJ focuses on the victim as the core element in the process, whether it is an individual, group of people or indeed the community as a whole.  Victims are not left outside of the process feeling little control – it places them at the centre.  It seeks to heal the responses and implications of crime and wrong-doing by meeting the needs of victims, offenders and communities.
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      This section could be used for church organization, etc.
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    I really like this one.
traci_shahan

Queer Theory - 34 views

queer theory
started by traci_shahan on 15 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    This question about language is important. queer can simply be used to mean anything non-normative, but in this context, it typically relates to sexual identity and practice. The advantage of a term like queer is that it is non-gendered, unlike gay and lesbian. As Traci noted in her summary, I think attention to the power dynamics related to social construction of gender and sexual identity is a major contribution offered to biblical studies by queer theory.

    Sterling and Marcus, I am curious to hear more details about why you think the biblical text does not support such a theoretical approach? Does it seem too anachronistic? Does it seem to you that the bible is so heteronormative that it has no chance of supporting queer sensibilities?
Michael Hemenway

Cultural Memory and the Bible - 17 views

memory cultural bible summary
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Cultural Memory, also known as collective memory or social memory, refers to the ways in which a group of people selectively remember their shared past. The relationship between the past, history, memory and meaning is central to cultural memory studies. Sites of cultural memory can occur in many forms, such as texts, monuments, and rituals. How and what a community chooses to remember and forget about their past can offer a great deal of insight into their self understanding. Cultural memory shares some theoretical similarities with reception history.

    Gospel studies have utilized cultural memory theories to explore the diverse appropriation of jesus traditions in the gospels (see http://bit.ly/9RX5BW ). Comparing and contrasting the memory of the Sinai event in Exodus and Deuteronomy is another example of cultural memory theory applied to the biblical text (see Smith, The Memoirs of God, 140ff - http://bit.ly/bY25kK ).

    Representative Scholars (Jan Assmann, Mark S. Smith, Tom Thatcher, Yosef Yerushalmi)
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Sterling, you are absolutely right. cultural memory theory is indebted to oral tradition studies and this is how cultural memory initially came to be applied to the biblical text as a means of understanding the divergent uses of jesus traditions in the gospels.

    many of the writings in the bible involve cultural memory, in fact, depending on how we use the term memory, all of it could be considered as such. The gospels are a major site of cultural memory in the Bible, but so is Acts and much of the Hebrew Bible commonly known as the historical books. Cultural Memory theory might not make much of a distinction between chronicles of time and the oral tradition of the tribes you describe.
Marcus Carlson

Canonical Criticism - 31 views

canonical criticism
started by Marcus Carlson on 16 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Marcus, great summary. Aaron, I too am fascinated by the "canonization" process. Questions about what was included and excluded are important and can tell some interesting things about the communities that attempted to put firm boundaries around these collections. Even if I don't find any of the present Christian or Jewish canons restrictively authoritative, I do find it valuable to have an approach that asks questions about what we might learn from the final form of a collection of texts viewed as sacred by a community.
suesaldin

Postcolonial Biblical Criticism - 10 views

Postcolonial
started by suesaldin on 16 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Sue, this is a marvelous summary of a complicated approach. thanks. Dube is a marvelous read!
Sterling Field

More than One way to Read a Book - 8 views

Deconstruction Derrida Critique
started by Sterling Field on 15 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Sterling, are there a few biblical scholars you found that apply this approach well?
Michael Hemenway

Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher (washingtonpost.com) - 1 views

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    An interesting article about Derrida reporting on his death.
Aaron Pope

Psychoanalytic Criticism - 28 views

Psychoanalytic Criticism
started by Aaron Pope on 17 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
Mary Price

Reader-response Criticsm - 24 views

Reader-response
started by Mary Price on 16 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
Schawn Kellogg

How To Read Bible Stories - 10 views

narrative stories story-telling
started by Schawn Kellogg on 11 Feb 10 no follow-up yet
  • Michael Hemenway
     
    Schawn,

    Perhaps you could save yourself some work by simply bookmarking these websites (e.g. worldcat), rather than starting a topic and including the website in your topic. If you just browse to http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40882743, bookmark it using diigolet and select sharing with our group, it will show up in our list.

    Is diigolet not working correctly for you?

    michael
Michael Hemenway

A tentative answer to the question: has civil society cultural memory? | Social Researc... - 2 views

  • cultural memory is embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner; meanings to be shared. They can be texts (such as sacred texts), chronicles, or poetry. They can be monuments, such as buildings or statues, or any material signs or memorabilia erected as reminders. In addition, cultural memory is embodied in regularly repeated and repeatable practices: festivals, ceremonies, and rites. Finally, cultural memory--like individual memory--is linked to places.
  • Cultural memory constructs and maintains identity. As long as a group of people maintains and cultivates a common cultural memory, the group continues to exist. Yerushalmi (1982) shows that Jews consciously cultivated identity through remembrance. The frequency of the injunction "Zachor!" (Remember!) in the Jewish Bible is a case in point.
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    This is a nice article on cultural memory.
Michael Hemenway

Universe of the mind: a semiotic ... - Google Books - 1 views

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    Great paragraph on the relationship between language, text and memory (18).
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    Section 3 of this work is dedicated to the question of cultural memory and its relationship to history.
Michael Hemenway

Moses the Egyptian: the memory of ... - Google Books - 0 views

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    Assmann is an important figure in cultural memory studies. This book describes his idea of mnemohistory.
Michael Hemenway

Memory, tradition, and text: uses of ... - Google Books - 0 views

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    Cultural Memory has been applied to NT studies, particularly Gospel appropriation of jesus traditions, for a while. This book collects some good studies in this area.
Michael Hemenway

Cultural memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 3 views

  • Crucial in understanding cultural memory as a phenomenon is the distinction between memory and history. This distinction was put forward by Pierre Nora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history and memory. Simply put, memories are the events that actually happened, while histories are subjective representations of what historians believe is crucial to remember. This dichotomy, it should be noted, emerged at a particular moment in history: it implies that there used to be a time when memories could exist as such — without being representational.
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      This is am important discussion. Though I may not agree with Nora here, this is a common depiction of the relationship between history and memory, with memory being the raw material for histories.
  • Either in visualized or abstracted form, one of the largest complications of memorializing our past is the inevitable fact that it is absent. Every memory we try to reproduce becomes – as Terdiman states – a 'present past'. It is this impractical desire for recalling what is gone forever that brings to surface a feeling of nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life but most specifically in cultural products.
  • German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis",
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    Nice, generic introduction to the field of cultural memory studies. Nothing particularly related to Bible, except the mentions of Jan Assmann, who writes extensively on history, memory and the bible (Moses the Egyptian).
Michael Hemenway

CCM_Home - 0 views

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    Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM) - new collaborative centre housed at University of London School of Advanced Study
Michael Hemenway

Remembering Abraham: culture, memory ... - Google Books - 1 views

    • Michael Hemenway
       
      p. 6 offers a nice short description of Hendel's view of history in the Hebrew Bible - "more a midrash on the times than the times themselves" (6)
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      "shared memory of a collective past" (8) - remembering the Exodus story became a central site of cultural memory and identity for the people of Israel and remains so today.
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      genealogies are often sites of cultural memory that are loaded with identity markers. If we read genealogies in light of cultural memory, we might get a better sense of the selectivity of the list and the agenda at work in composing it.
  • ...1 more annotation...
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      p. 100 has a nice discussion of Hendel's understanding of cultural/collective memory and its relationship to myth and history.
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    Another good resource for exploring the role of memory in biblical history.
Michael Hemenway

The memoirs of God: history, memory ... - Google Books - 1 views

    • Michael Hemenway
       
      Halbwachs summary (pp. 127ff.) is very useful. Three main contributions: "the opposition between memory and history; the role of physical location in collective memory; and the importance of social power in cultural memory" (127). I agree with Smith and others (Yerushalmi, Assmann), that history and memory do not operate in an oppositional binary as Halbwachs seems to suggest. The relationship between the past, history and memory is more complex than this.
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      His summary 138 is very useful. He speaks about the relationship between remembering the past and affecting the present.
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    The last chapter of this book offers a nice summary of some of the important early theoretical work in cultural memory studies, particularly by French scholars. Smith also offers some examples of how the Sinai event is remembered differently in the Bible.
Michael Hemenway

The dissemination of the centre - University of Copenhagen - 0 views

  • The Old Testament was created in periods of globalization, in the Persian and the Hellenistic-Roman period. The writings is a piece of memory work meant for creation of national or local identity and particularity in a global world, in the 1st millennium b.c.e. In a globalized world, counter-activity is always present, which focuses on the local, small tradition, the particular narrative, which creates its own way of coherence. The notion of "cultural memory" is used both in the humanities and in social science. Cultural memory appears as overwriting (palimpsests) and re-use of material artifacts, such as buildings, monuments, and texts, and of ritual practice. Memorization can be conscious or unconscious, incorporated in the body, and become visible material culture and monuments. The notion of landscape plays a crucial role in memory work, representing a special challenge in the project. People are never alone, but always relate to place, education, nation, family, religious and political groups, and so on. These collectives are the frames that direct people's comprehension of reality. This is the human context from which one also should look upon  memory and remembrance.
    • Michael Hemenway
       
      This paragraph highlights the essential relationship between memory, identity and social location. The Bible is merely one site of cultural memory in antiquity.
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