Derrida's Bible: (Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida) (Religion/Culture/Critique) [Paperback]

Yvonne Sherwood (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 140396663X | ISBN-13: 978-1403966636 | Publication Date: November 11, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

This collection asks what it might mean to think about a seemingly oxymoronic thing: Derrida's Bible. Reading little bits of scripture alongside little bits of Derrida, the contributors invite you to a series of Bible Studies that certainly wouldn't fit into those conventional devotional series called Daily Bread or Daily Light (nor into their presumed opposite--Daily Scorpions or Daily Darkness). They question the popular belief that 'Derrida' and 'Bible' are self-evident things that invite either wholesale denunciation or whole-hearted disciple-love. Following Derrida's lead they ask what it might mean to think Bible in relation to pressing contemporary questions: ethical, religious, theological, philosophical and political.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This valuable volume represents a helpful shift of focus of current discussions of 'Derrida and religion' to 'Derrida and the Bible,' to the way in which this scrupulously close micro-reader of texts reads and helps us read Biblical texts, the assembled conglomerate of which is what is meant by 'Derrida's Bible.' The collection shows superbly how 'the Bible' (like 'Plato'), as a single overarching theological unity or an enabling ecclesiastical authorization, is exploded by a close-even 'literalist'-reading which releases an avalanche of metaphors, puns, competing theologies, heterogeneities, multiple layers of cut and paste authorship, good news and bad, awash in problems of interpretation and translation-in short, everything that Derrida predicts a 'text' (a 'scripture') would be. Yvonne Sherwood has produced an important collection for which everyone, readers of Derrida and readers of the Bible, will be grateful."--John D. Caputo, Watson Professor of Religion, Syracuse University

"Readers who imagine they already know what Derrida's Bible amounts to--a transcendental signified cast down to earth, Lucifer-like, here; gleeful greasing of the higher rungs of a Jacob's ladder there--will be pleasantly surprised by this collection. The Derrida of the title is, for the most part, 'later' Derrida, increasingly irreducible to deconstruction, and certainly to deconstruction-by-numbers; and the readings of biblical texts showcased within are, at their best, correspondingly nuanced, surprising, and consequential."--Stephen D. Moore, author of Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives

About the Author

Yvonne Sherwood is Senior Lecturer in Old Testament/Tanakh and Judaism at the University of Glasgow. Her work to date includes The Prostitute and the Prophet, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives, various articles for Biblical Interpretation, the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the companion volume to the AAR conference, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, co-edited with Kevin Hart. She currently chairs the Reading, Theory and the Bible section at the Society of Biblical Literature and co-directs the University of Glasgow's Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (November 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140396663X
• ISBN-13: 978-1403966636
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,114,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)