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Contemporary Culture

COVID-19 Lockdown Interview Series: Simon Phillips

by Simon Phillips on

I am Simon Phillips, Community Engagement Officer at West Yorkshire Police, responsible for strategic engagement with hard-to-reach and minority communities. This includes faith communities and migrant communities, and I have been, and continue to be, involved in work in the area of domestic violence and abuse.


I have been working from home a few days a week anyway for the last 5-6 years, although the Coronavirus pandemic has meant that I am now working from home completely. As a result, little difference has been made to my working pattern, although a lot of my normal work has been put on the back burner due to various pieces of work connected with the crisis – notably monitoring community tensions and producing information on police powers and engagement in other languages.


My wife is also working from home alternate days. She is an optometrist, and needs to go into the practice every few days to see patients who might otherwise need to go to A&E for eye-related issues. So, she is reducing the demand on the NHS.


It’s actually been amazing spending so much more time with her, although I appreciate that lots if women (and men) aren’t as fortunate and I really worry about victims of domestic abuse during the lockdown. 


I suppose what I’m missing is human contact in terms of face-to-face meetings. Skype, Zoom and WhatsApp are great, but I miss being in the office. Mind you, I must be saving on fuel costs! 


I also worry about what the future holds. 


So, for victims and potential victims, I would remind people that if they call 999, they can just type 55 into the phone and the police Contact Centre will know that it’s a silent call and that the caller is unable to speak. I would also recommend the Bright Sky app. This is a free app, which looks like an app to look at the weather forecast. However, behind the front screen is a wealth of information relating to recognising and reporting abuse.

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COVID-19 Lockdown Interview Series: Deryn Guest

by Deryn Guest on

These days, most of us will be having to live such different lives than we are used to – keeping self-isolated, working from home,juggling commitments to our family, work, and research, as well as caring for the health and wellbeing of ourselves, our friends, and our loved ones. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be asking some of our Shiloh members and supporters how they are dealing with this “new normal”way of life. We hope this helps to keep our community connected with each other, and can serve to inspire us, reassure us we’re not alone, or even distract us a little from everything else we are dealing with right now.

Our series kicks off with one of the greats of biblical studies, Deryn Guest. Deryn teaches Biblical Hermeneutics in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham and is a trailblazer in the areas of gender theory, queer theory, and psychological theory as these relate to the Hebrew Bible.

Co-editor of The Queer Bible Commentary (SCM, 2006), co-author of Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation (SBL, 2016), and author of Beyond Feminist Biblical Studies (Sheffield Phoenix, 2012), all of which break new and important ground in the discipline, Deryn has published extensively on the book of Judges in particular. At present, Deryn is writing an Earth Bible Commentary (Bloomsbury) on Judges. Deryn’s is a totally distinctive voice, blending whip-smart scholarship and integrity and never compromising on either.

So, what’s up, Deryn Guest?

Gosh, even introverted home birds miss social contact. Such was my realization as the morning work schedule kicked in during week one of lockdown. I was no longer filling up my kettle at the water cooler with office staff and colleagues, chatting about moments of hilarity on the Great British Bake Off, or the over-crowded commute that morning, or, of course, the perennial topic of the weather. Bonhomie at the water cooler – a convivial, social start to the academic day.

I rely now on my usual pre-commute morning ritual: a lit candle, a steaming cup of tea, some quiet moments of contemplation. After that, I’m ready for organizing the day into varied activities that keep the body oiled as well as the mind. A couple of hours on research, break for half an hour gardening, answer emails, take exercise, create some online teaching material, skype supervisions for postgrads. And I’m bearing up well. The quietness of being at home is good for my soul. The office of choice is the garden where I am accompanied by the chatter of birds communing socially at their own water coolers based at strategic points in the garden.  When wet, I work in the kitchen where I can see the garden through the patio windows. Either function well for writing an ecological commentary on the Book of Judges, which is the current project.

Fresh in my mind as I work on the story of the abducted women in Judges 21 is the capture of the Yazidi women taken into sexual slavery against their will by ISIS soldiers, dislocated from their place of home and family. Warfare, ancient or modern, always has severe consequences for the bodies of women. Writing ecologically, I think of how the land can act as witness to atrocities; how the sacred energies of a place are desecrated; how, in Judges 21, the pulsing, whirling of girls’ feet was suddenly felt no more, leaving the earth bereft of its place in the dance.  Being in the garden, watching the birds, listening to their singing and scolding (of cats), I wonder what the sounds of the places called Shiloh and Sinjar were in usual times, what were the sounds during the abduction, and then, with sadness, I ponder the sound of the aftermath.

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The #MeToo Reckoning: Book Review

by Johanna Stiebert on

Reflection on and review of The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church’s Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct, by Ruth Everhart (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020).

This is not the kind of book I usually pick up – but I’m glad I did. Why might I not have picked it up? The author, Ruth Everhart, is a Presbyterian pastor, and she writes of Jesus as a presence and of the Bible as instrumental in addressing sexual abuse and misconduct in today’s churches. I am not drawn to church, and for me, doing something ‘because of Jesus’ (the title of one sub-section early on in the book), or treating the Bible as a kind of how-to for protecting the most vulnerable (signified by ‘the little ones’ of Matthew 18), as much as I applaud Everhart’s purpose, is utterly unfamiliar. Like humanizing one’s pets, or talking to the dead, I see nothing wrong in theory with believing in Jesus’ active presence, but at the same time it’s just not ‘me’.Moreover, I’ve tended to see the Bible as more part of the problem in matters sexual abuse than part of the solution.

Some of Everhart’s writing struck me as too ‘churchy-preachy’ to warm to. Hence, I almost put the book away when I got to, ‘[Jesus’] love changes everything. He is the divine one who came into this world via vagina. To Jesus, women’s bodily experiences matter. To Jesus, all humans bear the image of God equally. To Jesus, the voices of victims crying out for justice is a beatitude sung by a chorus. Stop and listen. Push past the fear. Unleash the energy. The Spirit is here’ (p.15). But I pushed past, persevered, perhaps in part, because Everhart had said at the outset that the book was addressed to victims, survivors, allies of victims and survivors, pastors, lay leaders and also to non-Christians. 

I had ordered Everhart’s book, because I came across it as forthcoming while researching my own book on rape culture and #MeToo. In my book I make much of the enduring influence of biblical texts, particularly in faith communities. And yet, can I really say this with authority, given my own remove from such communities? I preordered Everhart’s book and began to read it soon after it arrived, hot off the press. It is a book that – much to my own surprise – engaged me; a book I admire and warmly recommend. It has taught me much and given me some insight into new perspectives. Here are a few things I particularly like about this book.

Everhart knows what she is talking about and sticks to what she knows 

Everhart is a rape survivor. She has written a memoir about her ordeal, when she and her roommates, all young students at a Christian college, were held at gunpoint and raped by two intruders. The memoir is called Ruined(Tyndale House, 2016), because this word captured her perception of herself following the rape. Feeling ruined can be traced back in part to the purity culture in which Everhart was raised and immersed. Her intimate understanding of both purity culture and of trying to understand rape against the backdrop of faith in a loving God also contributes to her acutely sensitive and empathetic depiction of the stories of others who have encountered sexual abuse and mistreatment in church settings: like Melissa, raised and home-schooled in a conservative Christian culture that deprived her of the language to disclose or speak about rape; Stephanie, the pastor who had to recognize and resist the sexism that was creating a rape-supportive environment in her own faith community; Kris, the young man exposed to a sexual abuser who was protected by church structures and secrecies.

Ruined follows Everhart’s spiritual journey moving through and past rape, past feeling ruined, and her choice of remaining in the church and following her calling to become a pastor. I have not read Everhart’s memoir, only her allusions to it in this book. Like other first-person accounts of rape, Everhart’s albeit brief descriptions stay with me. The two book-length autobiographical accounts of rape I have read – and yes, sadly, rape memoirs are a genre –  are Jill Saward’s Rape: My Story (Bloomsbury, 1990) and Joanna Connors’ I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her (Fourth Estate, 2016). 

With both of these accounts, as with Everhart’s, the victim is easily identified as ‘innocent’. Of course no victim of rape is anything other than blameless; rape is always a dreadful crime, regardless of who the victim is. But it is no revelation that not all rape victims receive sympathy or support. Instead, some victims are blamed – on account of being drunk, or being perceived to have been sexually provocative, for instance. There exists a hierarchy of respectability with some victims deemed ‘more innocent’ and ‘more undeserving’ and others as‘rapable’, their violation ‘understandable’, occasionally even deserved. 

This hierarchy is amply infused with perceptions regarding purity, as well as with racism and other forms of discrimination pertaining to class, for instance. Moreover, it is affected by the identity of both victim and perpetrator – and Everhart is well aware of these toxic dynamics. Early on she alludes to the inequalities of rape, including those pertaining to race (pp.7-8), which she returns to repeatedly (e.g. p.49, pp.222-23). Everhart also unpicks the subtle workings of purity culture and its intersections with rape culture (pp.108–32) and the multiple vulnerabilities of class-based inequalities (passim).

Everhart, Saward and Connors’ accounts are all by white women. Everhart and Saward were both very young at the time of their rapes and both were devout Christians – Everhart a student at a Christian college, Saward a vicar’s daughter. In all three cases the rapists were strangers, in two (Everhart’s and Saward’s) there was more than one rapist and the rapists were armed intruders. In both Everhart and Connors’ cases the rapists were black men. All of these factors – that the rape victims were young, white, Christian, and the assailantsviolent, armed, black, strangers – serve to render the victims ‘more innocent’ in terms of the hierarchy of respectability and the rapists ‘more deplorable’ in the hierarchy of perpetrators than if the victims had been black, sexually experienced, older, or sex workers, for instance, or if the rapists had been their victims’ husbands, acquaintances, or famous, handsome, white. 

This is due to networks of rape myths and how theseshape stereotypes, expectations, prejudices, values and it explains why some rapists – such as good-looking, or wealthy, white men, boyfriends or celebrities – are more likely to get away with rape and why black victims, or sex workers, or disabled victims while, according to statistics especially vulnerable to sexual violence, more often than not do not get a hearing, let alone justice in court, or even representation or acknowledgement of their disproportionate suffering in popular culture.

Everhart comprehends this fully and reflects this in her writing. She chooses, however, wisely in my view, to hone in on the rape culture context she knows and understands best. As she writes, ‘Because I have become a progressive Protestant, this book focuses on stories within that world. I feel a call to clean the dirt in my own house…’ (p.9). Everhart makes no bones about who she is – ‘a rape survivor… a former “good girl,” … a radical feminist’ (p.6) and she takes a clear-eyed look at the church to which she belongs and feels indebted but which she also recognizes as ‘the culprit… the place where culpability hides’ (p.4).

The book contains a variety of stories and gives insight into the complex reasons why abuse is common in churches 

This book is substantial in length and demonstrates considerable narrative agility. It combines accounts ofEverhart’s personal experience, stories of others who have encountered church complicity in sexual abuse and misconduct, news reports (including about the testimony of both Anita Hill and Christine Blasey-Ford), excerpts from written correspondences, and careful examinationsof a wide range of biblical texts: among these, Leviticus 15 (detailing the menstruation purity laws), Numbers 27 (about the daughters of Zelophehad), 2 Samuel 11–13(the stories of Nathan’s parable and the rapes of both Bathsheba and Tamar), Psalm 55, the book of Lamentations, Matthew 10 and 18 (about Jesus and the children, or ‘little ones’), Mark 5:21-43 (the stories of two daughters – Jairus’ daughter and the woman healed of a continuous discharge), Luke 18 (the story of a persistent widow – a text I hadn’t known about prior to reading Everhart’s book), and 1 Corinthians 12 (on theinter-dependent body of the Church).

Everhart is superb at telling and at connecting stories that show in multiple ways that churches foster environments in which sexual misconduct and abuse thrive. She tells her own story, of working in a new congregation and of the inappropriate attentions of a church leader, culminating in his forcibly kissing Everhart. She talks of her efforts first to forestall and then to address this incident and of the many obstructions she encountered. She speaks of how this revived past trauma and also, how her past trauma was used against her.

Alongside this, Everhart tells others’ stories that have been entrusted to her. Some of these describe cases of severe physical abuse (Melissa’s rape by two men, one a stranger, one a trusted friend from church; Kris’s violent assault by a church-assigned chaperone), others of apparently less serious encounters (the misogynybrewing in Stephanie Green’s congregation). Skillful and effective here is how Everhart constructs a church-specific picture of a rape culture pyramid, in which it isclear that the serious crimes that happen in church settings (and which have begun to make the news with horrible regularity) are under-shored by networks and tributaries of rape-supportive attitudes, complicities and suppressions. As Everhart argues persuasively, none of these, even if seemingly small or jocular, are harmless and – if left unchallenged – transpire in the protection of abusers and the multiplication of victims. Atmospheres where sexist jokes are accepted as ‘banter’ diminish and silence women; small sexualized transgressions when dismissed can embolden perpetrators. Everhart tells of the sexualized ‘jokes’ of Big Joe, which go on to influence a vulnerable attendee of his soup kitchen, who then begins to stalk Stephanie, and of Ginni, who is tooready to forgive a sexual predator in spite of his not taking accountability or accepting any punishment. Everhart’s stories are vivid and familiar – even to those not part of a church community. This is because the church setting she describes is a microcosm that, for all its distinctive features, echoes broader social patterns. 

Everhart’s examinations of biblical texts are also compelling – and here I feel on more familiar ground. I, too, have interfaced biblical texts with contemporarycontexts. Everhart describes her approach as hearing stories of the Bible and the present ‘in tandem, the twin halves of a double helix’ (p.11). She uses the Bible as an inspiration for seeking justice: Jesus’ advocacy for ‘the little ones’ calls her to speak for victims and survivors and to heal the church; she appeals to David’s exposure of guilt, as well as to his acknowledgement of fault and acceptance of punishment to act as a model for seekingperpetrators’ accountability.

But Everhart is not uncritical of the Bible by any means. Hence, she notes, for instance, David’s mourning for his sons, Amnon and Absalom, but not for Tamar, his daughter: ‘David’s silence speaks volumes: Tamar’s life is not equal in value to those of her brothers. How painful to be confronted with the sheer expendability of females in Scripture – yet this is our religious heritage’ (p.34). Everhart finds inspiration in the Bible – for women’s solidarity in the story of Zelophehad’sdaughters, and for persistence in seeking justice in the parable of the widow and the judge – but she is not blind to the Bible’s misogyny and she is aware of how it has been used against women. 

Everhart has clearly studied and reflected on the Bible in considerable depth. I have too – but I learned from Everhart. I found her reflection on the ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable insightful, for instance. Hence, Everhart suggests that the man’s affection for the lamb might point to a particularly tender relationship between Uriah and Bathsheba. I did not know and agree with Everhart that it is meaningful, that Bathsheba, though not named here, is referred to as the wife of Uriah in the New Testament (Matthew 1:6). I also concur that the image of the lamb emphasizes Bathsheba’s youth and vulnerability: Everhart asks, ‘Due to stark disparities in status, power, and age, was meaningful consent possible in the story of David and Bathsheba?’ (p.144) We are agreed that the story is one of rape. 

Everhart’s adept and lively narration of stories – both personal and biblical – makes this book enjoyable to read. Her careful analysis of texts from the Bible is balanced with vividly related accounts of actual people from her own circle. The parallels between the two make the Bible stories relevant and alive but without obscuring their toxic potential. As Everhart recognizes ‘Scripture says many things, including many contradictory things. … We must be aware of the temptation to “baptize” what feels good and right because it’s known and comfortable’ (p.36). Everhart avoids this temptation and delves into much that is uncomfortable and painful.

Ruth Everhart

The book not only identifies and explains problems but offers hope and church-compatible ways and incentives to resolve them

Everhart is clear where she stands: she is in the church and intends to remain there. She recognizes the church’s potential for facilitating abuse and wants to be part of the solution for bringing this to an end. She is motivated by feminism and enthusiastic about #MeToo, identifying it as a time to speak up and to bring the church into a movement for positive change. 

Among the problems Everhart identifies and seeks to resist are Christian complicity ‘in championing a patriarchal masculinity that marginalizes women and protects abusers’ (p.11); the manipulation of turning the willing sacrifice of Jesus into the exploitation of self-sacrifice, or into sacrifice of the truth (p.35, p.204); the prevalence of a purity culture and a conservative view on sexuality, which can prepare a seedbed for driving sexual abuse underground; the church’s ‘tremendous pull toward institutional self-preservation’ and the ‘intricate web of relationships within the church’ (p.53); and disciplinary processes that do not acknowledge, let alonehonour harms done (p.90ff., 104–06). 

Over and over again, Everhart, while drawing on discrete examples, agues that these problems lie not with a few ‘sick individuals’ but with systems (e.g. pp.80-81). She advocates for transparency and speaking out (p.106) and for making churches ‘safer and braver’ (p.212). Hence, rather than holding meetings about abuse behind closed doors or foregrounding privacy and anonymity, Everhart advocates for public laments, in line with the large-scale, public strategies of #MeToo. Shame, she points out, lies not with victims but with perpetrators and resisting sexual abuse is not a women’s issue but a human issue. Without active resistance, she warns, churches will lose all the remaining trust they still have and go under. 

Everhart’s book ends on a note of hope, optimism and activity – with a list of strategies for effecting positive change within congregations.

I was left, after reading this book, feeling sombre but also more knowledgeable, and very grateful for people like Everhart and others, including several who have featured on this blog – Jayme Reaves, Rosinah Gabaitse, Musa Dube, David Tombs, Megan Robertson, Laurie Lyter-Bright, Helen Paynter, Joachim Kuegler, Gerald West, Ericka Dunbar, Joyce Boham, Jo Sadgrove… – for fighting the fight in the churches. 

I hope many of you will read this book, whether you are Christian, church-going, or not.

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Q&A with Helen Paynter

by Johanna Stiebert on

Further to the announcement of the publication of Helen Paynter’s book Telling Terror in Judges 19: Rape and Reparation for the Levite’s Wife, the second in the Routledge Focus series ‘Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible’, here is a Q&A with the author herself!

Tell us about yourself, Helen. How does your book relate to your work as a whole and how did this book come about?

I am a Baptist minister, serving in Bristol; and a tutor in biblical languages and Old Testament at Bristol Baptist College. The main areas of my research are into the interpretation of biblical violence and the ways in which the Bible is weaponised against people. I have been troubled by the dreadful story of Judges 19 for a long while, but felt dissatisfied with both the traditional commentators, which tend to write the woman’s suffering out of the text; and with many of the modern feminist interpretations, which view the text as irredeemably misogynistic. I then came across the reparative hermeneutic of Eve Sedgwick, and thought that it might provide a helpful hermeneutical lens to apply to the text. I hope my readers will agree with me that it does.

What are the key arguments of your book?

I’ve begun to outline them above. I use the work of Sedgwick, and also use affect theory and Judith Butler’s concept of grievability to try to discover the levels of communication within the narrative. I argue that the raped and murdered woman has surprising subjectivity in the narrative, and ‘speaks’ powerfully at a number of levels – in many ways she is not obliterated at all.

What do you hope your readers will take from this book?

I hope they will be disturbed by the appalling sexual violence it portrays, and the many modern situations that parallel it. And I hope that they will gain a fresh appreciation for the way that the biblical story is quite powerfully critiquing such actions. If my work should prove persuasive enough to inspire other scholars to approach other texts with the same methodology, I’ll be delighted.

Give us one quotation from the book that you think will make a reader go and read the rest.

‘Beli-Fachad is given voice in moral critique of the nation. She is, perhaps, the book of Judges’ other female prophet, or one of its only true judges.’

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A second volume in the Routledge Focus series ‘Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible’ is out today! Congratulations to Helen Paynter!

by Helen Paynter on

From the Routledge site…

Telling Terror in Judges 19 explores the value of performing a ‘reparative reading’ of the terror-filled story of the Levite’s pilegesh (commonly referred to as the Levite’s concubine) in Judges 19, and how such a reparative reading can be brought to bear upon elements of modern rape culture. Historically, the story has been used as a morality tale to warn young women about what constitutes appropriate behaviour. More recently, (mainly male) commentators have tended to write the woman out of the story, by making claims about its purpose and theme which bear no relation to her suffering. In response to this, feminist critics have attempted to write the woman back into the story, generally using the hermeneutics of suspicion. This book begins by surveying some of the traditional commentators, and the three great feminist commentators of the text (Bal, Exum and Trible). It then offers a reparative reading by attending to the pilegesh’s surprising prominence, her moral and marital agency, and her speaking voice. In the final chapter, there is a detailed comparison of the story with elements of modern rape culture.

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Daniel in the Homophobic Lion’s Den

by Johanna Stiebert on

Here’s a post by Shiloh Project co-director Johanna Stiebert about her second research visit to Nairobi, where she participates in a project with Ugandan LGBTQ+refugees. The project has the title “Tales of Sexuality and Faith: The Ugandan LGBT Refugees Life Story Project”and is funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. Its lead investigator is Adriaan van Klinken. 

The project is focused on stories: life-stories, stories of the Bible, and stories that combine the two. At its heart and centre is a group of refugees, a collective called The Nature Network. Johanna talks about the project and its intersections with Shiloh-relevant themes, such as religion and vulnerability to violence, in an earlier post. Here are some of her reflections on the project’s recent developments. 

Stories and Lives

Stories matter. In my life certainly stories and story telling have played a major part since as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I was the youngest member of a multi-generational household and even before I learned to read stories, stories were told and read to me. I loved folk stories and fairytales but I especially liked stories about me, set in the-time-before-I-could remember. I loved the stories of when I was very small, about the funny or naughty things I did. 

I demanded to hear such stories of my earliest life over and over again. I demanded details and eventually heard multiple versions, with different embellishments (and probably some exaggerations and inventions). Those stories somehow linked me to the protagonists of other stories; they made me feel important, an agent. They linked me to the past, to a bigger, world-connecting meta-story. I like stories to this day.

My academic work focuses on the study of the Bible. It was the stories that first drew me in but also the people I met through studies and teaching – and their stories. Approaches of biblical interpretation have become more honest about how our identities and experiences shape our interpretation and increasingly, life stories and Bible stories have been coming together for me.

Nairobi Stories

Adriaan has been travelling to Kenya, making friends, hearing stories, making stories, and gathering material for his publications for some years. When he and the people who move into and out from The Nature Work developed ideas around life stories and Bible stories, I was eager to get involved. By then, I had also become involved in a number of other projects, all of them relevant to the Shiloh Project, that explore the use of stories and images derived from the Bible to open up discussions about gender-based violence. Because the Bible – while variously interpreted in different settings – is a shared text, it has been an effective medium for connecting me with people whose identities, lives and experiences are very different to mine.

I have only been to Nairobi on two short visits – the second was last month, in January. My impressions of the city are a succession of little snapshots – of bustle and crazy traffic, but also of sweeping parks with leafy trees; of roadsides displaying an array of wares, from potted plants to double beds, playground items to beaded bracelets; of colourful roadside fruit and vegetable markets and little enterprises selling cut flowers or grilled corn on the cob. We drove several times through Kibera, Africa’s largest urban slum, which is highly concentrated with busy-ness – washing drying, wood being cut, tiny shops crammed together selling everything from cellphone units to clothes alteration. Sometimes, such as in the large malls, I could completely forget where I was – other times, in Kibera, or seeing grazing warthogs by the roadside, marabous perched on monuments, or monkeys on the walls of residential buildings, you knew you were definitely in Kenya.

But back to life stories. When something sharp happens in our lives, when we are, for instance, accused of something we haven’t done, then the telling of our stories becomes more carefully constructed. We choose our elements with care, so as to recount vividly and persuasively what really  happened. This also happens when we are treated unjustly in other ways – and many of the stories we heard at The Nature Network reported being accused of ‘recruiting’ minors, of being willfully deviant, of choosing depravity to dishonour family and community and religious affiliation. The life stories collected as part of this project were invariably told with vividness and fluency. The refugees were used to telling their stories – they were often telling them for survival, including as part of their efforts to secure resettlement with UNHCR. 

The stories told featured rejection, threat, violence, vulnerability, condemnation from family and community and church representatives. Sometimes there were stories of a painful past and of a present in which the story was turning towards more hope. New families were formed within The Nature Network, families not of blood ties but of ties of love and solidarity and acceptance. New religious networks were established, with prayers that bonded together and with a God who loved unconditionally – a God who created queer and whose image was therefore queer. 

The Story of a Project: Tales of Sexuality and Faith

The first stage of the project consisted of collecting life stories of refugees associated with The Nature Network. The majority of this was conducted by two members of the Network one of whom, Raymond Brian, is its co-founder. During interviewing, contributors were asked about the role and presence of religion in their lives and whether they had a favourite Bible story. Some interesting things emerged here. Many stories – from all over the Bible – were sources of inspiration. Jesus was repeatedly identified as an ally – as someone who embraced those on the fringes of society and who spoke out against condemning others. One interviewee mentioned identifying with David in the story of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17). The reason was that the interviewee felt small and up against a Goliath of mighty and imposing challenges in day-to-day life. Like David they had little to work with – a small stone, metaphorically-speaking. But that small stone could be utilized to achieve something bigger and assert their rights and be vindicated. A second story that popped up was Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Daniel 6) – because the interviewee this time identified with the threat all around but simultaneously with a strong sense, too, that like Daniel they had done nothing to justify such threat and hostility. It was this story that seemed like a good one to draw on more.

Daniel in the Homophobic Lions’ Den

Before Adriaan and I arrived in Nairobi, the members of the Nature Network spent time reading the story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den and discussing it in groups. By the time we joined them the story was quite familiar. Now it was time to relate it to personal experience.

On 12 January we all gathered at the Network’s main venue, on the outskirts of Nairobi.

We shared breakfast and introduced ourselves and each other; we discussed expectations for the day – which ranged from the practical (to receive a refund for travel expenses) to the experiential (to learn, be entertained, and form connections and new friendships) – and rules (to respect one another and listen, and to all participate). 

Next, Chris gave a summary of the earlier meeting – where the text of the Bible was read and discussed in focus groups. A decision was made to read the text again – this time with the specific plan to try and make the story relevant to the present.

In our groups, as soon as we sat down with the biblical text, printed out on paper, to read it aloud together, a mood of seriousness descended. I think this is discernible in the pictures.

When we all got together to pool what had taken place in our groups, the discussion got very lively. We looked together at the characters and at the events of the Daniel story – who and what could these be in the present setting?

In the Daniel story there is a king, King Darius, who is somewhat sympathetic to Daniel but none the less submits to his governors who remind him of the laws. Who is this king today? Who are the governors?

Suggestions came in thick and fast: the king is the government of Uganda, or the President of Uganda. The governors are oppressive elements of African culture and pastors using the Bible to condemn, as well as members of parliament. Daniel is the LGBTQ+ community – being unjustly persecuted. The lions are maybe family members who are sometimes harmful and obstructive but not always, or enemies within the LGBTQ+ communityitself who sometimes deny their sexuality, or who choose to blackmail others when it suits them to do so. The den is identified as Kenya and as prison… Some spoke up to say they found the punishment of the governors’ wives and children wrong, others saw this as collateral damage, or as the punishment of those who didn’t speak up but benefited from their powerful family members’ privileges. 

After some discussion, a play was put together, performed and recorded. This all happened very quickly– from discussion to completion of the recording took no more than 3 hours. The idea of weaving stories together and of transporting an ancient story into the lived present was quickly embraced and vividly imagined and reenacted. There were some fabulous spontaneous ideas and there was much articulate expression both of condemnation encountered and liberation desired.

The King is the President of Uganda. (In this reenactment he has a consort.)

The governors are members of parliament and representatives of churches, as well as a mufti from an Islamic congregation. 

Daniel is a representative of the LGBTQ+ community.

The den is prison.

There are also in this reenactment members of the police force, of the press and supporters of Daniel.

God’s voice can be heard at the beginning and end.

Here is the recording, ‘Daniel in the homophobic lion’s den’. Enjoy.

It was a real joy watching the play at each of its various stages. The strength of feeling and the power of story telling really come across. There is a new immediacy and resonance to the old story of Daniel. I, certainly, will never read this story again in the same way. And when we all watched the completed recording together everyone was very engaged and delighted with the end result.

In time, we – members of the Network, Adriaan and I – hope to publish a book about the project. 

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Let Him Romance You: Rape Culture and Gender Violence in Evangelical Christian Self-Help Literature

by Emily Colgan on

Last year Dr Emily Colgan (Trinity Theological College, New Zealand) visited the UK and gave papers at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. For those who missed them, you can catch up by listening to the recording below.

Emily is an active Shiloh Project member and will be publishing a book with our project series Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible with Routledge Focus. Emily’s research on Christian self-help literature and gender-violence is published in the Christian Perspectives volume of the Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion series edited by Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan and Katie Edwards (Palgrave, 2018).

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“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate’” (Gen. 3: 12): Shifting the blame in the story of The Fall

by Sara Stone on

Sara Stone (@wordsfromastone), University of Glasgow

Kate Millet (1970: p. 53) declares that the myth of The Fall is “designed in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female.” With this in mind, I will use a literary perspective to investigate the link between The Fall as told in Genesis 3 and the existence of a victim-blaming culture in the Hebrew Bible. Specifically, I will explore how the case surrounding Jephthah and his unnamed daughter in Judges 11 echoes the blame-shifting attitude we see in Genesis 3. By “victim-blaming culture,” I mean a society that places the blame for a crime or act of violence (whether sexual or otherwise) onto the shoulders of the victim rather than the perpetrator. In other words, the victim is held entirely, or partially, at fault for the harm that befell them.

The Bible is an influential book that holds great significance, both historically and in contemporary society. Therefore, by investigating the notion that the very first book of the Bible exhibits harmful attitudes and highlighting how these attitudes are reflected in narratives that come later, we can recognise a pattern of toxic traits held by those in higher positions within biblical power structures. Regarding the relevance that this has today, I suggest that the presence of victim-blaming in the opening book of the Bible has paved the way for the same victim-blaming to take place historically as well as from a narrative perspective. Victim-blaming is part of the wider phenomenon of rape-culture, which describes a culture whose prevailing social attitudes normalises, or trivialises, sexual assault and abuse (Gay, 2014). By recognising the blame-shifting attitudes that exist in biblical texts, we can challenge them and recognise these same attitudes as they materialize in contemporary society.

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The events of The Fall in Genesis 3 are integral to the story of humanity’s creation (Genesis 2). After discovering Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, God asks Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen. 3:11). In his response to God, Adam attempts to shift the blame onto both Eve and God: “The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I [subsequently] ate’.” (v. 12). Verse 12 suggests that Adam only ate the forbidden fruit because the woman whom God had created gave it to him, implying that if Eve had not been present then Adam would have kept the command that God prescribed him in Gen. 2:17. Moreover, his words “The woman whom you gave me” implicates God in the blame too. Everybody but Adam seems to be at fault for the actions that Adam himself did. However, we are able to hold Adam accountable for his actions for a number of reasons.

First, as Eryl Davies (2003: p. 102) notes, to claim that Eve was ultimately responsible for the events of The Fall is a complete misunderstanding of the narrative. For, the serpent addresses the woman with plural rather than singular Hebrew forms in Gen. 3:1–5. Therefore, the original Hebrew suggests that the man was indeed present with the woman when she was being seduced by the serpent. If that were not evidence enough, Gen. 3:6 explicitly tells us that, after taking a bite of the fruit herself, Eve gave some to the man, “who was with her.” Eve was not alone in the initial disregard of the command in Gen. 2:17.

Second, in Gen. 3:6, Adam took the forbidden fruit from Eve without question and therefore denies his own individuality. Yes, Eve did initially take the forbidden fruit. However, Eve was not told directly by God to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil because Gen. 2:16–17 only addresses the man; woman was not created until after this command from God. Therefore, the responsibility to uphold God’s command was arguably left in the hands of Adam. Indeed, it can be speculated whether or not Eve could hear God’s command, as at that point, she was still a rib in Adam’s side. However, we know that Adam was undoubtedly present and had the ability to hear God’s instruction.

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Nevertheless, Eve herself is not entirely irreproachable in this blame-shifting scenario as she attempts to relocate the blame that Adam gave to her onto the serpent: “The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I [subsequently] ate’” (Gen. 3:13). Indeed, Gen. 3:12–13 demonstrates that neither man or woman are taking responsibility for their actions and the subsequent harm that will befall them in Gen. 3:16–19. Instead, the couple both project their guilt onto someone else. Notably, both Adam and Eve blame others that are below them in the perceived power structure; Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent. Thus, both Adam and Eve are illustrating a blame-shifting mentality at the very start of humanity. And, as parents to humankind (Gen. 3:20), they are setting an example for their descendants to follow.

Regarding contemporary society, similar acts of blame-shifting are still very prominent, both in cases of sexual assault and otherwise. For example, during the sexual assault case involving Brock Turner, Turner was characterised as a promising student and “champion swimmer” by the media, whilst the woman he attacked (Chanel Miller) simply became known as the “drunk girl at the party,” strongly suggesting that she was responsible for the harm that Turner perpetrated against her (Brockes, 2019). In a similar act of victim-blaming, Jacob Rees-Mogg made comments whilst doing a radio interview claiming that the Grenfell Tower fire victims did not use their “common sense” and leave “the burning building”; according to Rees-Mogg, they should have ignored the advice given by the fire department to “stay-put” (Proctor, 2019). Both examples illustrate the way that people can shift blame from themselves onto victim(s) whom they perceive to be lower than them in the power hierarchy, in a similar way to how Adam and Eve blamed those whom they believed had less power than them.

The story of The Fall thus suggests an inherent propensity for a perpetrator to shift the blame onto their victim; this allows us as readers to recognise the existence of a blame-shifting mentality in our own social context. If we fail to recognise and challenge this mentality, then we allow for the dangerous rhetoric of victim blaming to continue. The victim-blaming culture illustrated in Genesis 3 is also echoed in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, and I turn now to the unnamed daughter of Jephthah who appears in Judg. 11:34–40. When the elders of Gilead are being threatened by the Ammonites, they turn to Jephthah and appeal to him to be their commander (Judg. 11:5–6). Jephthah agrees after being enticed by the promise that he will become the leader of “all the inhabitants of Gilead” (Judg. 11:8–9). Jephthah subsequently turns to YHWH for a guarantee of success by vowing that he will sacrifice “whoever comes out of the doors of my house [first] to meet me” if his success is assured (Judg. 11:31). Jephthah proves to be successful in battle, however his rejoicing is short-lived when it is his daughter that comes out of his house to greet him, and therefore it is she whom Jephthah needs to sacrifice in order to fulfil his vow to YHWH (Judg. 11:34).

Jephthah remains committed to his vow and yet blames his daughter for his misfortune: “When he saw her, he tore his clothes and said ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble for me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow’” (Judg. 11:35). Arguably, this is a mournful cry from Jephthah, and the tragedy of this affair is emphasised in Judg. 11:34, where we are told that his daughter is his only offspring. This deepens Jephthah’s conundrum as the eradication of a linage was one of the worst fates that could befall any person in biblical Israel (Frymer-Kensky, 2002). The shifting of blame from Jephthah onto his daughter indicates his sense of horror and tragedy at the situation he has found himself in. Arguably, Jephthah’s anguish is a disguise for his self-centred expression of self-pity; he is only distressed because of the loss he will face, rather than feeling guilt or lamenting over everything his daughter will lose as a result of his vow. Jephthah’s daughter has unknowingly dealt her father an unavertable blow simply by being the first to greet him after his return home.

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Yet, while Jephthah vows to YHWH that he will sacrifice the first to come out of his house, the nature of said sacrifice is unclear. Phyllis Trible (1984: p. 97) notes that the masculine gender of the terms used is standard grammatical usage in biblical Hebrew, which on its own does not indicate either the sex or species of the promised sacrifice, and thus a certain vagueness prevails. Did Jephthah intend for a male or female human sacrifice? Perhaps he expected a servant, or even an animal. The horror Jephthah expressed in Judg. 11: 35 confirms that he was not expecting his only child to come forth. Yet, Jephthah does not question why it is his daughter that came out first. Instead, he immediately expresses his horror and straightaway blames her for what he subsequently needs to do in order to keep his vow. Jephthah’s narrative thus echoes sentiments from Genesis 3; particularly, the fact that Jephthah does not question his daughter’s actions echoes Adam’s own failure to ask Eve why she chose to eat the forbidden fruit in Gen. 3:6.

Jephthah does not attempt to argue with God or his daughter in an effort to spare her life and thus prevent his lineage from becoming obsolete. Instead, he is submissive to the requirements of the vow and to his daughter’s insistence that he kill her (Judg. 11:36); this is akin to the way that Adam complied with Eve when she passes him the forbidden fruit. And just as Jephthah blames his daughter for the action that he needs to take in order to obey the vow that he made, Adam ultimately blames Eve in Gen. 3:12 for the actions he took after she gave him the fruit.

However, it should be noted that Jephthah does acknowledge his own part in his conundrum when he says, “For I have opened my mouth to the Lord” (Judg. 11:35). In contrast, Adam does not acknowledge his own culpability for his downfall: “she gave me fruit from the tree, and [subsequently] I ate” (Gen. 3:12). While it is commendable that Jephthah acknowledges the role he played in his downfall where Adam does not, he still ultimately shifts the blame away from himself and onto his daughter – the victim of a horrific act of violence. Judg. 11:35 is a classic example of victim-blaming in the Hebrew Bible, that arguably reflects a blame-shifting mentality similar to what we see in Gen. 3:12. I argue that Jephthah, as a biblical descendant of Adam and Eve, illustrates the inheritance of blame-shifting passed down from his earliest forebears. The implications of Genesis 3, and other biblical examples of blame-shifting, demonstrates how a person who has greater power than their victim can use victim blaming to escape culpability and further marginalise those whom they have already victimized. This, as I mentioned earlier, can also be seen in contemporary contexts too.

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Overall, the notion that the myth of The Fall has been “designed in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female” (Millet, 1970: p. 53) requires an investigation into the blame-shifting attitude that this myth exhibits, and the consequences of that from a literary perspective. Blame-shifting sentiments in Genesis 3 are reflected in the story surrounding Jephthah’s unnamed daughter. Both Adam and Jephthah tried to avoid the blame for their actions onto the shoulders of a woman. Arguably, Genesis 3 introduces a wider blame-shifting mentality in the Hebrew Bible. The case regarding Jephthah’s unnamed daughter illustrates how women are blamed for the very violence perpetrated against them. Moreover, in Ezekiel 16 we see Jerusalem portrayed as an ungrateful and faithless wife to whom God has given so much; the narrator implies that if Jerusalem had been grateful and loyal to her “husband’” then no harm would have come to her. Moreover, in the Book of Job, Job’s comforters attempt to console Job, an upright person, that the misfortune he is currently enduring must be divine retribution for the sins he has to have committed. While Job’s “comforters” are not the preparators of his downfall, they still demonstrate a blame-shifting mentality by insisting that he must have done something wrong for God to punish him so badly. The reader knows from the book’s prologue, however, that this is not the case: Job is completely innocent of all wrongdoing.

In conclusion, Adam and Eve are presented in the Bible as the forebears of humankind, and their own propensity to shift the blame appears to have been inherited by their “offspring.” In a literary sense, the placement of The Fall at the very start of the Hebrew Bible has given “permission” for blame-shifting to take place in later narratives. By recognising the victim-blaming attitudes that occur throughout the Hebrew Bible, we are able to challenge and critique such behaviour and highlight its continued, toxic influence in contemporary society.

 

Works Cited

Brockes, Emma. (2019). ‘Chanel Miller on why she refuses to be reduced to the ‘Brock Turner

       sexual assault victim’. Accessed 6 November 2019.

Davies, Eryl W. (2003). The Dissenting Reader: Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible.

Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. (2002). Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of

their Stories. New York: Schocken Books.

Gay, Roxanne. (2014). Bad Feminist: Essays. Great Britain: Corsair.

Millet, Kate. (1970). Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday & Company.

Proctor, Kate. (2019). ‘Rees-Mogg sorry for saying Grenfell victims lacked common sense’.

        Accessed 6 November 2019.

Trible, Phyllis. (1973). ‘Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation’. Journal of the

       American Academy of Religion, vol. 41, no. 1: pp. 30 – 48.

Trible, Phyllis. (1984). Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.

Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

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UN 16 Days of Activism: Day 14 – Megan Robertson

by Megan Robertson on

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Megan Robertson and I have recently completed my PhD at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa. My doctoral research focused specifically on investigating how the lived experiences of queer clergy in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) co-constitute the institutional cultures and politics of the Church. Since 2018 I have had the privilege of working at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, at UWC. The Centre seeks to contextually, theoretically, and methodologically challenge asymmetrical systems of power. It thus allows me a space to research and teach in ways which bridges the false binary between academia and activism and places justice at the centre of the work I do.

How does your research or your work connect to activism?

The picture of me in this blog is taken in front of Church Street Methodist Church, the congregation which I was a member of until my late twenties. For me this is a site of my own identity negotiation and also the space which continues to drive the activism which is integral to my research. The church which I grew up in not only shaped my belief systems but perhaps more significantly provided me with a place to which I felt I belonged. As a teenager and young adult I became more involved in the broader provincial and national structures of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) and thus more aware of how the Church which provided a ‘home’ for me was also deeply patriarchal, heteronormative, racially segregated and hierarchical. I was also quite actively involved in the Church at the time when a minister, Ecclesia de Lange, was excommunicated for declaring her intention to marry her same-sex partner. Therefore, for me, the church and religion became both a place of significant belonging as well as a space for a great deal of injustice. These experiences inspire my research which explores how different people navigate religious belonging and exclusion and indeed transform those spaces in positive ways.

In my research I incorporate activism by exploring how politics of belonging, body politics and politics of the domestic and erotic are evident in the narratives and experiences of queer clergy who occupy positions of power and marginality in the Church. I argue in my work that the MCSA’s internal conversations around the inclusion of women and same-sex marriage are too narrow to do justice to queer experiences of exclusion, discrimination and violence in the Church. For the MCSA and other denominations seeking to become truly inclusive of queer, women (and all other) members, bringing lived experience into conversation with institutional cultures in research sharpens understandings of how the church can indeed be a place of inclusivity instead of rejection. In my work I am also interested in the activism participants themselves are engaged in as they inhabit the norms of the institution. In a complex religious context where gender-sex identities are contested I found that participants engage in activism in relatively covert ways through living their domestic and erotic lives, embodying clerical and Methodist identity and through silence. In illuminating these subtle forms of activism, the political project of my research explores the possibilities that varied ways lived experience can trouble normative powers of race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

Why is activism important to you and what do you hope to achieve between now and the 16 Days of 2020?

My fuel for doing research is activism. Before beginning my PhD and working in the Desmond Tutu Centre, I was disillusioned by academia and bought into the idea that dismantling social injustices and researching them were two separate tasks. However, I soon realised that the binary between activism and academia was a false and unhelpful one. It is my anger and frustration that continues to drive me to work towards a just and equitable society and it is in academia where I am able to make productive meaning of that anger and frustration.

Through the writing up of my dissertation, I have continued to be in conversation with some of the clergy who participated in my doctoral research. In these conversations we have begun to explore the ways in which my research findings can feed into the committees and activism work which they would like to pursue. Further, in my post-doctoral research I want to further explore the nature of queer activism in South Africa. My other passion is dance and theatre and I hope to explore the ways in which popular artists and performers in Cape Town interrogate the intersections of religion and sexuality on stage.

 

 

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#MeToo Jesus: Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse

by David Tombs on


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by Jayme Reaves and David Tombs

Since giving a Shiloh Project Lecture at SIIBS, the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, in January 2018 we have been continuing our work on ‘#MeToo Jesus’. Our paper ‘#MeToo Jesus: Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse’ has now appeared in the International Journal of Public Theology (December 2019) and is available on Open Access here. In the article we explore ways that recent readings of Jesus as victim of sexual violence/abuse might connect with #MeToo, and vice-versa. 

We start with Matthew 25:40, ‘You have done this to me too…’ as affirming a metaphorical connection between the experience of abuse survivors and the experience of Jesus. We then look beyond the metaphor, and discuss more literal and direct readings of Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse. We consider the work of David Tombs (1999), Elaine Heath (2011), Wil Gafney (2013), and Michael Trainor (2014), who each read Jesus as a victim of sexual violence and we note similarities in their work. The last part of the article tackles a question that we are sometimes asked about this reading, ‘Why does it matter?’ or ‘What good does this do?’. Exploring this question has been at the forefront of much of the work since the lecture, as part of the ‘When Did We See You Naked?’ project. We are particularly interested in how this reading might help to address the victim-blaming and victim-stigmatising which often accompany sexual violence. You can read more about the ‘When Did We See You Naked?’ project here, and listen to David’s interview (4 mins) with Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report (18 April 2019) here.

To examine this, we have been working with another colleague, Rocío Figueroa Alvear, at Good Shepherd College, Auckland (New Zealand). In 2018 Rocio interviewed a group of male sexual abuse survivors on their responses to naming Jesus as victim of sexual abuse. You can read the report on interviews with male survivors here. It is striking that this group of survivors were split on whether the reading is helpful for survivors, but they all agreed it was important for the church. 

Rocío and David are currently interviewing nuns and former nuns who have experienced sexual abuse. This has involved discussion of an abridged version of David’s article ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’ (see here). The shorter version was first published in Estudos Teológicos in Portuguese, and is now available from the University of Otago also in English, Spanish, French and will soon be in German. We hope to share our findings from the interviews next year.

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David and Rocio have also been part of a New Zealand group led by Emily Colgan, which includes Caroline Blyth and Lisa Spriggens. We are developing a tool-kit for use in churches on understanding sexual violence. It was really good to pilot some of the resources in November at a workshop with Anglican clergy and church leaders in Auckland.

During 2019, David has also had a research grant to work with Gerald West, Charlene van der Walt, and the Ujamaa Community at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on a contextual bible study on Matthew 27:26-31. This looks at how the stripping and mockery of Jesus might be read as sexual violence in a South African context. It has been interesting to see the difference that translation can make to responses, and to hear from students how the bible study was received when they used it.

Jayme Reaves has been leading workshops with church groups, activists, and clergy both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.  While these workshops are not aimed at victims/survivors of sexual abuse, they are facilitated sensitively with the understanding that there are no guarantees as to who is in the room. Building on this work and on the workshops conducted by Rocío and David elsewhere, Jayme is forming plans for a potential project in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia and is currently seeking funding and local partners that will expand the work in two areas: working directly with victims of sexual violence in conflict contexts and their support networks, and building in an ecumenical and interfaith dimension with a view to developing a faith-based resource towards addressing the stigmatisation of victims of sexual violence.

Looking ahead, we are excited to have two books in preparation. The three of us (Jayme, Rocío and David) are co-editors for the book When Did We See You Naked?’: Acknowledging Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse with SCM Press (forthcoming in 2021). We are delighted to be working with a fantastic group of international scholars on this collection. Meanwhile, David is writing for the Routledge Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible Series on The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross, for publication in 2020.

To promote further discussion of #MeToo issues, Jeremy Punt (Stellenbosch University) is planning a session on ‘#MeToo and Jesus’ in the Political Biblical Criticism Session (see here) at the 2020 International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Adelaide, Australia (5-9 July 2020, see here). The Call for Papers is here and still open until 29 January 2020. We plan to be part of the conversation. If you are going and interested, why not send Jeremy a proposal? Or come along and join the discussion: we would love to hear what you think. 

David is also looking forward to seeing Shiloh colleagues and others in Dunedin in August 2020. The New Zealand Association for the Study of Religions (NZASR) are hosting the 22nd Quinquennial World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). Colleagues in the University of Otago Religion programme have been working hard on all the organisation. It promises to be a great conference in a beautiful setting, so why not plan to come to Otago in 2020?

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