Two tables released by ResearchProfessional show the strengthened dominance of Durham in Theology and Religion. Proud to be part of this department and already working towards strengthening Durham's position in REF2020 with CODEC's work.
First the Quality Ranking Table:
And then the Power Ranking Table
By the way - if you have a good PhD research subject in the areas of John's Gospel, Biblical Literacy, Hermeneutics or Digital Theology, get in touch!
Pete
The following is reposted from the BigBible Project
There has been quite a bit of debunking about alternative learning styles and right brain/left brain stuff lately. And the other day I found myself querying whether our love affair with art means that everything has just become too subjective. After all, a simple arrow does indeed point the way, but more complex images can often just get in the way where a simple statement could have helped so much more. In the end, pictures hit so many buttons with us that we can end up overflowing with meaning.
So in November, we went to see the Tower Poppies. An amazing piece of art - each poppy representing a lost life. But is it a place of honour or guilt? A place of remembrance or mourning. A place of patriotism or shame? Of course, it's a place for every one of those feelings. For me the power was in seeing the ceramic poppies as drops of blood, ceramic clots of death, ceramic clots of life washed away by the horror of war. And of course that links to the Sainsbury ad and all the problems of associating war and commercialism. It's so much easier to stick with penguins. Although perhaps keeping it in the family is the best idea? See here for Miranda Threllfall-Holmes' reflection or the Independent's of the whole Christmas ads saga.
Pictures, images, values, interpretation.
So, then I saw the #ChristmasStarts campaign and the political leaders Christmas cards and wondered if I could pull them together. Let's see...
Here is the first - and check the whole campaign...
And then they add an amazing video about the meaning of Christmas to different people...
I was surprised with David Cameron's Christmas Card. Now, there is a power statement. But I did wonder how it related to Christmas. Indeed, how all the leader's cards related to Christmas? Christmas starts with remembrance of ages past? Christmas starts with granddad asleep in the corner? Christmas starts at Number 10? But surely that is a complete reversal of the Christmas message? I mean, #ChristmasStarts in a feeding trough in a stable in a rather insignificant (Micah 5:2 says) place in a backwater of the Roman Empire. It doesn't start at Number 10. #ChristmasStarts with poverty and weakness and risk. #ChristmasStarts with the generosity of God giving his own son. #ChristmasStarts with family and celebration and gift of new life. How does this picture pick up on those themes?
Nick Clegg, of course, is an avowed atheist and so it would strange for him to associate himself with the #ChristmasStarts theme at all. Instead, Mr Clegg pictures himself in a series of passport photos with his wife, Miriam Durantez. Of course, the first thing is the concept of the passport photo - reminiscent of the current debate about immigration and passport control. And, of course, Ms Durantez was born in Spain. And, of course, Mary and Joseph came from up north to Bethlehem - travellers dragged south by government decree. And, at least in one of the Gospel accounts, they become refugees to Egypt after the birth. Part and parcel of the immigration issue? Refugees because of God's meddling in their lives? #ChristmasStarts with problems of where we live, where home is, what nationality we own and inhabit. #ChristmasStarts with knowing who our neighbours are. So, intriguingly, Nick's pic picks up a huge theme - are Mr and Mrs Clegg part of a nativity play representing Mary and Joseph in their wanderings?
The Milibands have made use of a classic family picture. All so Messy Church in the Miliband household. Breathtakingly simple. But also daring for someone who has professed both his Jewish identity and his non-believing stance in previous years. An adoption of a country's heritage - sticking glitter and cotton wool onto a card. Sharing the call for a Merry Christmas which begins with family laughing together around the kitchen table/play table. #ChristmasStarts. I love the laughter on this card (although those scissors are too close for comfort - a sword to the heart of Mary, a memento mori???). But the parental laughter encapsulates, brackets, includes, the children's awe and curiosity. The role of creativity is both an unknown and a place of security and fun. Hence the whole phenomenon of Messy Church and Christingles which have become so important for helping families celebrate when #ChristmasStarts (although does Kate Bottley go too far?). A simple message which tells an interesting story of embracing the unknown, the uncertain, the moment.
What are the images around your own understanding of Christmas and what are those images opening up for us. What image would you associate with the hashtag #ChristmasStarts?
Of course, for me #ChristmasStarts and ends with the baby and with the amazing picture John paints in the words of the Prologue and so amazingly captured in the Lindisfarne Gospels...In principio erat verbum... In the beginning was the word... and you just can't put that amazing word into one picture at all.
Although, perhaps GoggleBox's very own Rev Kate Bottley manages to???
Pete
So, at the end of last week, I was approached by The Times to comment on an article that was being prepared about biblical literacy. This is what I wrote about the process earlier this week:
You may have also seen Dr Katie Edwards piece in The Times on Saturday exploring Biblical Literacy - sadly the link is behind a paywall. Katie believes that the 'ubiquitous" presence of the Bible in contemporary society means that biblical literacy is on the increase. Personally I think these are cultural echoes rather than evidence of biblical literacy. I am hoping I can write a piece of The Conversation sometime this week to make this point a little more clearly. If not, it will be on here.
Sadly, no hints from The Conversation that they are interested in the pitch but...I thought it would be good to come back to this since there have been some developments.
First of all, the article appeared on Saturday without any reference to the work which I had put together offering a different slant. The article included some very critical comments about the Church of England and it's "intellectual snobbery"; on Rowan Williams "persistently bemoan[ing] the scourge of Bible illiteracy that we are all apparently experiencing". Indeed, this "pandemic" is hitting academics, teachers and public figures such as Joan Bakewell and Andrew Motion. Instead Dr Edwards wants to assert that it is in the cultural arena, amidst the lyrics of hip-hop stars, Eddie Izzard and "pop culture" that the Bible is alive and well. Indeed, the article is a kind of advertisement for the book which is being published in February on this very issue, Rethinking Biblical Literacy.
I think Katie is setting up a whole army of straw men to knock down. The Church of England and its leadership is an easy target in contemporary society. An iconoclast in the grand tradition of Sheffield Biblical Studies (I did my PhD there and so I am aware of the tradition), Katie sets her aim to shoot across the bow of institutional Christianity - it's good fodder for the sensationalist press. I just dont think it matches the reality of this area of research where the Church of England has not been a major contributor. In fact, all of those cultural allusions and echoes of which Katie makes so much, are more likely to have been secured within the British psyche because of the work of the Church of England, because of the Book of Common Prayer, because of Cranmer's obsession with the Bible, further reinforced by the Evangelical Revival springing from the Church of England. I'm not an Anglican, but I think this is a sensationalist pot-shot rather than a valid critique of intellectual snobbery on their part.
Katie's final sentence is interesting: "Yes, the Bible matters for us all, not only Christians, because the Bible is used in contemporary culture to address the big social questions of our time." I'm not sure that I, or anyone else, would disagree with this. However, I would argue that what Katie is talking about is not biblical literacy. Literacy is about reading, about direct engagement with the text of the Bible, or about an awareness of the contents of that text. I'm not sure that those teaching English Literacy would be content with people recognising apples in the street - they would want them to be able to read the word "apple" as well.
Bad example perhaps.
But what Katie is correctly arguing is that biblical imagery, phraseology, motifs are part and parcel of English speaking social identity and cultural heritage. This is of huge benefit to those of us trying to engage people in the task of biblical literacy because they already know some of the basic building blocks. It's easier to teach biblical Greek if people know the Greek alphabet already! But, that's not to say that knowing that Greek letters are used as symobls in Mathematics means you know some Greek.
Those of us who are researching biblical literacy, rather than the intertextual and intersocial echoes of the bible in contemporary society, know that there is a problem with Bible illiteracy. And it is not the Church of England who are beating this drum on their own, nor indeed are they at all conspicuous in this argument. It is the professors of English Literature departments in the USA who wrote the Fairfax Reports almost a decade ago; the Bible Societies who have produced report after report on the decline; the Evangelical Alliance's Biblefresh project which queried the church's own lack of biblical literacy again based on the hard statistical evidence of decline.
It is true that more work needs to be done. CODEC needs to repeat the National Biblical Literacy Survey we carried out in 2008/9. We need to have a steady stream of comparative data to test the anecdotal assumption that biblical literacy is on the decline. We need a thorough look at what we actual mean by biblical literacy (and Katie is providing one side of that examination - I'm hoping to provide another).
But, in the meantime, we do need to be careful to ensure we are actually speaking about the same kind of thing - in the end Biblical literacy is about reading the Bible, engaging with the Bible. I remain convinced that the use of the Bible by the popstars is NOT about addressing the big social issues of the day but about subverting the biblical record and playing upon cultural echoes - certainly that seems to have been the obvious tactic of the Director of the recent Noah film, based more on apocryphal traditions of the Watchers than on the Biblical text about Noah - the Director set out to make the most unbiblical film of all time!
I have now been given the text of the online version of the article which does include some of the stuff I wrote in response to Katie's article and so, for the record, here it is. But I can see this going on for a while...
And lo, Lady Gaga’s Judas begat Kanye West’s Yeezus, and Kanye West’s Yeezus begat Lily Allen’s Sheezus, and together they went forth and offended the Church mightily.
Something like that. Study after study has shown that biblical literacy is on the wane, reduced to a casual plaything of the film and music industries.
Or is it? A new book tries to explode the Church of England’s “intellectual snobbery” about biblical references in popular culture and argue that the stories are reaching a wider audience than ever before.
Katie Edwards, lecturer in The Bible in Contemporary Culture at the University of Sheffield, claims that the prevailing pessimism about young people’s familiarity with chapter and verse is a nonsense.
She said: “The Church of England has a lot of questions to answer in this respect. Its leaders, including Rowan Williams [the former Archbishop of Canterbury], persistently bemoan the scourge of Bible illiteracy that we are all apparently experiencing.
“Worse still, it isn’t actually only the Church of England that seems to view biblical illiteracy as a pandemic — it is also academics, teachers and public figures, for example Joan Bakewell and the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, who assume that biblical literacy is in widespread decline.”
In Rethinking Biblical Literacy, due to be published in the spring, Dr Edwards talks to scholars who contend that scripture is flourishing as vigorously as ever — just not where you would expect. From Eddie Izzard’s riff on the flood story from Genesis — “I want an ark, with a big room for poo” — to echoes of Leviticus in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the academics claim that pop culture gives young people a new and complex way to engage with the Bible.
Dr Edwards, who calls Jesus “the biggest celebrity of them all”, said: “Jesus imagery is very common in hip-hop videos, and Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of Jesus, can be used in haute couture fashion — see the Jean Paul Gaultier Spring 2007 collection, which was inspired by the biblical Marys.”
Partly to prove her point, and partly, one suspects, to wind up critics, Dr Edwards commissioned the graffiti artist Kid Acne to spray a hip-hop nativity on the side of a Sheffield school for the city’s Festival of the Mind.
“At the heart of a lot of these discussions , I think, is intellectual snobbery,” Dr Edwards said. “Yes, the Bible matters for us all, not only Christians, but not because I think that to be considered ‘truly educated’ or ‘sufficiently cultured’ you should be familiar with certain cultural products like the KJV Bible [King James Version, 1611], as Michael Gove and various public figures suggested during [its] 2011 anniversary, but because the Bible is used in contemporary culture to address the big social questions of our time.”
Studies suggest that the way people consume the Bible is changing. A national survey carried out in 2008 by the University of Durham’s Centre for Biblical Literacy and Communication found that two out of five people knew the story of the Good Samaritan, while only a fifth could tell the researchers anything about Abraham.
On the other hand, half the respondents had seen the 1956 film The Ten Commandments and a quarter had seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Peter Phillips, the centre’s director, said that biblical references in film and music were “cultural echoes” and different from grappling with scripture first-hand.
“A colleague pointed out to me that he hears people every day using phrases from the book of Ecclesiastes, but without knowing that such a text even exists,” he said. “There have now been over ten surveys from both Christian and secular projects which point to a decline in biblical literacy in both the UK and the USA.
“All of the reports point to a statistical decline in biblical knowledge both within the Church and in society in general. Not one report has argued for an increase in knowledge - not even from those with a vested interest in saying biblical literacy is on the increase.”
A month ago, I was asked to go on UCB Christian Radio and discuss ebooks and Bible reading with the presenter Paul Hammond. It was a good interview and I've just been able to get hold of the interview in MP3 format and have linked it below. Hope you enjoy it.
You may have also seen Dr Katie Edwards piece in the Times on Saturday exploring Biblical Literacy - sadly the link is behind a paywall. Katie believes that the 'ubiquitous" presence of the Bible in contemporary society means that biblical literacy is on the increase. Personally I think these are cultural echoes rather than evidence of biblical literacy. I am hoping I can write a piece of The Conversation sometime this week to make this point a little more clearly. If not, it will be on here.
Pete
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