11-16-2011, 10:56 PM
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Westar launches "Bible Seminar"
Westar Institute Launches Bible Seminar
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On Nov. 17-19, The Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar and Polebridge Press, will launch a new project called The Bible Seminar.
"Today the Bible is deployed in the service of all manner of conservative and right wing causes. Biblical scholars need to weigh in on these debates," Dr. Stephen Patterson, director of The Westar Institute and George H. Atkinson Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., recently stated. "Religion plays an enormous role in the shaping of our public life. Scholars of religion have a unique vocation to become public intellectuals. The mission of the Westar Institute is all about getting scholars to embrace that vocation."
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Possibly related, Bishop Spong has published 'Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World'
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The claim that the Bible is the "Word of God" in any literal sense violates every rational faculty that human beings possess, says John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal bishop and pioneer of progressive Christianity. "Irrational, and at least in scholarly circles, universally dismissed attitudes toward the Bible still have power today, and play a large role in America's national life," Spong says. In Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World (or via: amazon.co.uk) (HarperOne, $28.99, November 8, 2011), he attempts to end the tyranny of "uninformed biblical nonsense."
The problem, Spong says, is that very little biblical scholarship has trickled down to people in the pews. A longtime champion of critical engagement with Scripture, he brings a deep love of the Bible to his efforts to guide people beyond a Sunday school-level understanding of the texts. "I am not the enemy of the Bible. I am the enemy of the way the Bible has been used," Spong says.
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