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Many of us are familiar with the phrase stay in your lane, and we know typically what that means is that somebody prescribed with power has named a lane in which one or ones may participate and that the existence of the lane denotes the fact that there is an outside of the lane where one may occupy

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if they are not following according to the powers directive, stay in your lane. Today's speaker, perhaps in summary, can be described as engaging in the work of inviting us to imagine that there is no lane and that wisdom and value can be observed outside of that framework.

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It is my honour and pleasure to introduce our 2022 Thomas W Curry Lecturer, Doctor Anthony B Pin, who will deliver the second of his three-part lecture, Reading the Bible Against the Bible, Reimagining the Marginalized, for our Midwinter's Lecture Series here

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at Austin Seminary. Doctor Penn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religion at Rice University. The considerable breadth of his research interests include African American

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religious thought, religion and culture, humanism, and hip hop culture. He is the author and editor of more than 35 books, including his recent work The Nature of Things, Religion, Art, and Presence Together, published in 2021.

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His repertoire also includes a work of fiction, his 2015 novel The New Disciples. Through his multidisciplinary approaches to centering and prioritizing and celebrating, I should say, the embodied wisdom and experiences of those rendered to the margins, Dr.

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Pin gifts the contemporary landscape of theological discourse and biblical studies with fresh perspectives on what it means to be human and what is at stake in any attempts to claim insight into the nature of the divine imagination. Given the rigorous, dynamic, and provocative delight of yesterday's

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opening lecture, I'm confident that this morning's offering will continue to capture our attentions and interests. Please join me in once again welcoming Doctor Anthony Pin. Wonderful to be with you again, and thanks for hanging out with me for

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this second lecture In this series, we're turning our attention away from the hermeneutics I plan to apply to the actual application of that hermeneutical device. And what we want to do is reconsider Lot's wife.

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Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. She, the unnamed 1, looked back. I'm reflecting on Lot's wife. My concern isn't with what might be called a faithful read if by that is

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meant one keeping in place long standing theological social assumptions concerning characters and moral ethical worlds they occupy. Rather, I aim to privilege the margins and marginal figures for what they might tell us,

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over against normative claims that typically echo dominant social strategies. My reading is best understood as narrative subversion, in line with the hermeneutical principles I discussed in the first lecture, and meant to highlight and to celebrate what is often despised for the sake of

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tradition and then at the expense of particularly vulnerable populations. I hope in this way to expose and challenge what Ronald Handel has called the creative illusions offered by scriptural narratives and that have served to shape the moral and ethical contours of restricted life within our

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social worlds. Lot's Wife has been viewed often as a cautionary tale, a warning for those, particularly the recently converted, to avoid looking back and embracing old ways of thinking and behaving.

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Within this role, she might be classified as a minor character, but as one scholar suggests, the majority of unnamed biblical characters are obscure, incidental figures who make only fleeting appearances in the narrative.

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Still, these bit players, minor as they are, have major literary functions and the narrative as a whole. This is the case with Lot's wife, who offers a pivotal moment in the story, one that occasions a questioning of the very logic behind the ethics of escape

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and reconstitution, and what is left in the wake of such movement. But Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt within the region associated with the story of Lot.

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According to some accounts, there are formations, impressive formations, pillars really, and a variety of shapes and sizes. They are elements of the terrain projected out and constituting an aggressive reach by the earth as it pushes against the sky.

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On the other hand, they hold metaphorical significance as cultural social tropes impinging upon cultural imagination. In this sense, the physicality of the world, which is the shape of its being, ties together the horizontal nature of

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our social worlds and the verticality of our moral and ethical aims. Distinction is blurred, with materially effective moral sensibilities hard to distinguish from mystical commands. One of these pillars is said to have the shape of a woman, and this woman,

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for some is Lot's wife, estranged from her doomed home of Sodom and outside the new geography of obedience selected by her husband. What is the moral, ethical outrage with which this condemned community is charged?

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As James Coogan remarks, and I find this compelling in early stages of biblical interpretation, interpreters seem perplexed about the city of Sodom. God destroyed it because of the terrible things that were being done there.

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But what exactly were those things? Strangely, the Genesis narrative does not say. Regarding this obtuse condemnation, questions are not to be asked. Abraham used them all up and saving Lot.

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Abraham had a dialogue to the extent there is exchange of ideas and assumptions, but it includes no other human actors, just the mysterious representatives of a vertical order. There was no substantive exchange between the visitors and Lot and Lot and his wife.

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What place is better described as a series of demands without what David Vaum might call sharing of common content? Conversation between Lott and the visitors as Google is, if Google is correct, could or perhaps should have involved

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explanation concerning the grounds for the disregard of Sodom's people. Instead, there's an urging or command to embrace a tragic special status rather than a clearly articulated moral justification, and with this status in mind, simply accept this judgment and leave.

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We are to believe that in Sodom the body is is a site of exchange, marked by abomination and moral blemish. And so the body had to be targeted and destroyed, with a few saved as a material reminder of an obtuse outrage.

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Lot and his family are encouraged to deny laws and to move forward. Departure in this narrative, becomes a mode of compliance. Despite I'll defined moral turpitude, movement is an embodied and vacuous obedience.

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The quick departure of Lot and a portion of his family isn't a matter of finding freedom, but rather it involves unspecified obligation in a different physical space. Meaning behind this series of events isn't shared,

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and so it is lost on Lot and his family. If one thinks about it, and does so in relationship to the story of Lot's wife, so much of Genesis is about the establishment of proper relationship as the combining of interest around a

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powerful center of collected purpose that establishes A unified vision guiding the production and deciphering of life meaning. And all this is performed through material bodies. I want to suggest this unified vision is meant to keep us looking forward and safe

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from the question of why, which is a backward glance in a sense. Lot's wife demonstrates, and we might respect her for this, offering, the embodied nature of a fundamental question of great importance, one the Bible doesn't want us to

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entertain, the why question, unlike the questions of when, where, and how, It isn't simply consideration of placement that leaves untouched the assumed integrity of the proposed action. I'm less concerned with the flight from Sodom and what constituted the moral and

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ethical failure necessitating an extreme response. That is the what question. What did they do wrong? What does God want?

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I am not concerned with the dynamics of flight as obedience. That is the how question. How does 1 reconstitute light after trauma? And I'm not interested in the where question,

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which is concerned with the effort to match vague moral precepts with the physicality of a particular space. Where should we go when we leave what is familiar? I'm more interested and more concerned with the embodied why made available to

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us when we read from the vantage point of Lot's wife. The why question cuts to the quick exposing for view and interrogation the metaphysics undergirding the demand for compliance or activity. Lot's wife rejects this not so subtle demand and in so doing calls attention to

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the why of her circumstances. This question, the why question, exposes a framing of circumstances in light of human loss and response to laws that demands stillness. That is to say, because of Lot's wife, I read not by means of a lands of

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punishment, but rather through the embodied structures of laws. So this is not a story about the importance of forgiving so as to live the future in accordance with the moral demands of the past.

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One instead might think about the story as a wrestling with the nature and meaning of memory as the residue of loss. Yet memory is simply a map, and maps contain inconsistency and flaws, sometimes deceptions.

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What I value here really isn't what Lot's wife remembers. No, I'm not concerned with what loss prompts and what we might gather from it. I'm interested in this prompt and its relationship to the embodied moment of

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her turning, the moment of physical response. It is that moment triggered by laws, the moment of why that prompts the turn. This is the moment for which she is condemned in the narrative. Readers are led to believe it is a choice beyond human imagination,

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safety from danger humans can't fully grasp, a step in the direction of a vertically arranged sense of meaning and purpose over against an entanglement and lesser social considerations. Within the context of traditional Christian religious language,

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one might say it is as typically presented, A struggle between the well-being of the soul and the restrictive interest of the body. Brian Turner captures this one, saying there are societies within which

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our major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body. Here the body is an object held with some suspicion when it isn't directly in the service of some external power.

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In this case, the case of Lot's wife is a scenario in which the body becomes the means by which moral, ethical, or better put, theological social regulations are made hyper visible, fixed and displayed. But Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt.

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I would argue the degree to which we have been cautioned not to follow her example suggests she represents A subversive presence really worthy of consideration. That is, if one values the margins as the hermeneutic we are employing would urge.

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Still, can we trust Lot's wife to speak in meaningful ways and for significant populations? 2 As one might put it, borrowing from Miriam Frazier and Monica Greco, raise questions about power and

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resistance. I answer yes. Lot's wife offers a compelling and haunting statement concerning the dynamic of loss and as the fundamental range of the question, why.

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This, as a woman in the biblical world, isn't a question she could ask as a matter of dialogue with any discernible demand or wait. It had to be embodied, positioned in time and space in such a way as to cause a pause to acknowledge loss.

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Rod's wife becomes a marker of an odd space, the reified recognition of loss, or what one might call the reduction of embodied humanity to the residue of loss. The substance of life as vibrant and engaged is reduced to a calcified memory of what had been.

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Yet even in this is something of her humanity, the forging of meaning and perhaps worth, where refusal to forget and in forgetting denies something of herself. It is embodied in that the marginalized are denied a grammar and vocabulary with

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the capacity to dismantle the standard narrative. They must do this work with their bodies. Some have suggested Lot's wife first mistake was not treating guests those angels, not treating them properly by not

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safeguarding them. She is said to have gone to borrow salt and as a consequence alerted the community to the presence of strangers. If only she had salt and had stayed home, we are meant to wonder.

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Others argue. It was a deep and abiding love for her daughters and their husbands who didn't leave that produces A yearning only satisfied by turning to see if by chance they had decided to leave and follow Lot to safety.

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They had not. And she is punished, however. And this I say with a smile. Lot's wife counters the narrative by humanizing her circumstances,

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looking back in a mournful posture, which bestows it with a certain value. And this value is the importance of bodies and embodied experience. And in this way she pushes against efforts to reduce the material significance of embodiment and how bodies touch the world.

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She holds in creative tension the placement and purpose of bodies. Beyond the crude narrative of vague offense. She draws us back to the body, and she does so in a way that situates its vulnerability, the manner in which it is impinged upon,

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and the manner in which the regulation of the social world repositions it to address some vague purpose. If we pause with Lot's wife and reflect, we might come to appreciate that staid moral judgments failed to give witness to, in the words of a Sean Crawley,

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otherwise possibilities. Or, as LOL Gallagher frames it, there might be more to Sodom than the moral judgments, frameworks of race, rationality causing a dissonance. And this is quote the question of whether the Sodom that Lot's wife sees

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corresponds to the domicile and the ethos that precipitates the catastrophe. End Quote. He in turn raises questions concerning what might be a value even in that which is despised, the value of the margins where

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relationships develop within unhospitable places, somewhere between where Gallagher references as the middle distance between disaster and rescue. Yet even having said this, I wonder if for Lot's wife,

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is there such a clear distinction? Aren't there ways in which marginalization operates as an inability to distinguish a functional distance and difference between disaster and rescue? Undergirding the action of Lot's wife, if we think in terms of the religious

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political dimension of the story, is a demand for ownership of the embodied self over against regulation and control by external power, whether this be a husband, male relative, or the projection of a typically male identified cosmic other.

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In this rebellion, Lot's wife moves to an in between space in which her body isn't alive nor dead. She neither has the same capacities or obligations as say, her daughters, nor is she rightfully understood as utterly ended,

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surely not like those left behind in Sodom. One could even argue being turned into a pillar transitions her into art as it encourages awareness and deep consideration of what otherwise might go unnoticed and unaddressed.

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That is in light of Cone's comments on the arts and if I read philosopher of art Arthur Danto correctly, as claiming art is an expression of finding, confronting and displaying. The pillar as art, then brings something to our awareness as

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her reified body calls attention not only to itself but to a larger arena, arena of considerations shaping social life. Thinking of the pillar, thinking of Lot's wife, we are called to pause with her and speculate, ask questions and wonder.

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What if looking back isn't the problem? What if it points out an important, effective dimension marking life together, a liminal space of loss, so to speak, between two social, spiritual worlds, the one left and the new one promised but not reached.

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Her Looking back is a matter of reckoning, a display of what happens to bodies when left between worlds of meaning. He's one of those biblical characters who urges us to push against patterns of practice that are about no body, which is to name patterns of practice

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more concerned with structures of moral ethical control than the embodied bodies impacted by those structures, the marginalized bodies within social political systems and circumstances not of their own making. She gives us a way to understand embodiment as central to a type of

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connective tissue for epistemology and ontology, offering opportunity to reimagine how certain bodies are viewed, understood, addressed within, and projected into socio political structures.

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This all begins with her movement, her turning. Lot is given choices during the course of this drama, and while he seems less than steadfast in his dealings, he is not punished for his indecision.

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Martin Harris raises a question. Should Lot's wife, too, have bargained, he speculates, have asked for permission for the backward glance? On some level, this is an odd question that assumes too

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much regarding sociality, even as a matter of dislodged and to stabilize speculation. How does 1 bargain when 1 isn't named, is not informed of the problem, and the plan can't speak for her children, and when participation in the vertical

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dimension of engagement is withheld? Lot's wife can't bargain, but she can resist, even when this resistance involves only an embodied gesture, a turn. Lot is positioned to have a future if he surrenders any claim to the past,

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or what we might call his original grounding. Lot's wife's embody questioning is 1 posed from nowhere, from a point of transition from movement cancelled out. It isn't position in relationship to home.

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She has none, at least not anymore. Nor is it from a place of rescue, new terrain. She is between geographies of meaning. For Lot's wife, this groundedness is lost, and so she turns and looks.

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If asked about her gesture this turn back, Ellen Frankel imagined Lot's wife might respond, saying something like this. I look back to all that I had left behind, my other daughter's grave, my friends and relatives, my home with its cherished mementos,

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my childhood. And I wept. There are other possibilities. Perhaps she looks back to escape the gaze of her husband,

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who'd suggested such limited worth and value for his daughters. Perhaps she is looking back to a different horizon of worth. Perhaps there is something else going on with Lot's wife that teaches a more challenging and no less noble lesson.

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And here is the problem for the biblical text. It seeks to project death differently for the main characters, not as a final distancing, but rather as a lesson, a form of transition.

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Think in terms of Adam and Eve, for whom death marks an epistemological shift that isn't felt along every dimension of existence. For Lot's wife, there's a different sense of laws, a distance without religiously and socially justified meaning.

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Is she tied to Sodom? That is, to ask about the roots there for her, depths of relationship that frame her identity beyond her immediate family, that refuses to flee, that sparks this turn?

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Perhaps. Yet it is not necessarily the case that her glances for Sodom. It is just as likely to be looking through the city to be focused on what she can't make output, that which she seems to remember,

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as in stitched together. She could despise the city, after all, she didn't pick that location, but rather was taken there by law. All we know is that there is something behind her whose loss prompts an embodied

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question, a question that can't be named through verbal expression, language fails, and that there is a depth of connection that can only be presented through a giving of the embodied self. Not to look would be suicide.

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That is a surrender of all that marks her claim to time and place constituted through relationships that define and defy social life. Lot's wife doesn't take her own life. Rather, her questioning prompts a response from

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the powerful and effort to silence her and maintain the status quo. But this fails, and in a sense Lot's wife wins to the extent we remember her and in this way are confronted with the question she asked through the embodied language available.

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She turned, and we turn with her. Lot's wife urges us to ask questions, to defy silence even when our words fail us. There is something prophetic about her pause and turn by prophetic here,

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I'm not comparing her to the biblical figures who forecast and warn, who categorize the connections between activities and outcomes. Rather, I'm attempting to think with Fred Moulton, who notes that the prophetic can refer to one quote who tells the truth,

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who has the capacity to see the absolute brutality of the already existing and to point it out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what is could be that double sense, that double capacity, to see what's right in front of you and to see through that to what's up ahead of

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you. End Quote. She, through this move, embodies the prophetic, then, to the extent she is both what is and another way grounding herself in a more

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than one sphere of relationship to life, meaning it holds a defiant or differently knowing posture toward social regulations, and that in her turn, she seems to announce something important. You can take away my home and all that grounded me,

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but you can't make me change my mind. Lot's wife, unlike Lot, refuses to have her experience or relationships flattened out and reduced. She denies the assumption that relationships can be dismantled easily

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because they are born in and only by flesh and guided by unchallenged moral and ethical codes that impose on our bodies. True, she can do nothing to prevent departure, but she is able to hold on to something of herself by refusing to continue,

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as if circumstances don't trouble her, and as if a vague future is justification enough for traumatic loss. Lot's wife looked back. I am not alone in recognizing this look back as associated with laws,

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but unlike some, I do not give this negative connotations. Take, for example, what one finds with John R Coats, who writes Folk. It's not just her looking back, but the act of looking back itself that

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is so human. That poignant little fault, the slight yet critical symptom of human frailty that we can never grow out of, not all the way, because it is too human. We just can't help but screw things up from time to time.

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End Quote. This little fault. Perhaps if one must maintain the sense of looking back as punishment or punishable, it is Lot who is warned, not Lot's wife.

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This wouldn't be the only time that Lot's communication skills and judgement are questionable, if not outright morally distasteful. After all, this is the man who offered his daughters a satisfaction, demonstrating a graphic objectification

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and belittling of women tied to a normalized and regulating structure of social life. Marking this and so many other biblical narratives, Valerie Miles Tribble puts it well when saying the narrative does not indicate

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whether Missus Lott or her daughters overheard the offer, the offer of their bodies and lives for explicit abuse in exchange for two strangers notwithstanding the omission. And this is her point.

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What is weighed and Lott's LAX behavioral ethics is a truth that the shelter of Lott's roof was not protection for them in case the women had not already known. End Quote. And what is more and what is more, Sharon Pace Jensen argues Lot is

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portrayed as an insincere, self-centered individual who is disrespectful to God's angels, exploits his daughter's welfare, and is a procrastinating dweller in a sinful city. Lot maintains a standard of practice that positions women outside the circle of

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concern and safety. Exposed and vulnerable, they are, in effect, reduced to objects position and played within a larger game of obtuse morality. In truth, Miles Tribble continues, the innocent and sinful summarily were

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obliterated, calling attention to the silence of gender invisibility and the abuses of textual violence in patriarchal centered narratives. And in this story, certain marginalized bodies are presented

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as both the source of unnamed transgressions and the object of reconstitution. One might think of this term, Lot's wife's turn, as recognition of a melancholic mood associated with laws that affords no

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mourning for most, and that mourning is a privilege not afforded those on the margins, those believed to have nothing worth missing. Yet, and despite this social assumption, the disregarded on the margins can demand

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to mourn, if by no other means than positioning their bodies against the future. A deadly embodiment of mourning is what Martin Harris calls Lot's wife. And there's something to this, although I believe he emphasizes the

00:32:11.140 - 00:32:24.200

wrong dimension of her act. Attempting to use Lot's wife to work through spectatorship and relationship to those who witnessed 911, he highlights what she aims to see. The city of Sodom, he argues.

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The viewing of the city produces an absence in the place that argument or protection should take. He says this in relationship to the terrorism and the falling of the towers, but in relationship to the falling of Sodom and in light of her marginalization.

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In this moment of turning is not absence but practice of protest. And that it is a rejection of future to the degree it won't allow denial of laws and the constitution of the undergirding social logic that makes acceptable the destruction encountered by extension and turning and that very act of turning.

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She denies theatrical justifications. Nothing can be said about ultimate possibilities or cosmic demands that will tame or sanction her laws. Lot's wife is not an embodiment of mourning,

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but rather she turns the body into mourning. Removing the preposition of reconstituting the relationship between parts is significant here in that it rethinks distinction between body and mourning.

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Lot's wife defies tradition through an unwillingness to ignore laws, to deny the materiality of our condition, and to deny the manner in which that materiality shapes what might be thought of as future. The act of turning, with the biblical texts and many

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interpreters project as a posture of disrespect and allegiance to a troubled past, I would argue, makes her presence firm and undeniable, urging us to review circumstances through the body that bears loss. This turning isn't a reinforcing of objectification, but rather it is a break,

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a pause, a moment of reflection on that status. Through this turn, Lot's wife demands recognition and a context in which she has been ignored, left unnamed, and not recognized as anyone of importance.

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This pause, this turning, as a moment of reflection and acknowledgement of loss against a vague future's physical and psychological defiance. The sovereign authority in the story simply wants an arrangement of things,

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some bodies destroyed and others put in motion. Yet she pauses, and in that pause she exists for a moment in a space of her own making, somewhere between destruction and departure.

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Looking back serves to limit the power Ralph Ellison might call, quote, incalculable forces that hover about the edges of human life, like cosmic destruction lurking within an atomic stockpile. End Quote.

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Or what one might name systems of a control and exchange. This is because the guiding logic undergirding the social world is exposed and open to questioning in such a way as to privilege what had been disregarded. Her mournfulness is a mode of rebellion in that she claims relationships,

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connection to life, where she is told there are none. Before the turn, her position weighs her down, curves her back and shifts her gait. Memories are lodged in the shape and lines of the body,

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the Nicks and scars formed over the years, the trail carved by tears and dug by uncertainty and disappointment. But there are also the dimensions of what had been, that the departure is meant to negate, the moments of joy,

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the experiences of tenderness, the warmth of family pushed away from that, knowing what was familiar was now doomed. What is her Lot? With Lot, she is dislodged.

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Is there anything about these new circumstances and the absurdity of the moral codes promoting their flight that would or could suggest to Lot's wife the prospect of future any different than the past? No, it is not the prospect of life anew with

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Lot that motivates her. She, in that moment also turns against this endless trauma named patriarchal desire. It is not marginalized status as wife meant to train daughters to be and

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embrace marginality, but her question, her embodied question of why that persist. And the turn is a denial of decontextualized prospects and a demand to recognize the circumstances defining the present and memory of the past, one might say at the moment of turning, with the decision informing that split

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second she performs the only freedom she can gather. Lot's wife in that turning owns her body. For once, she owns her body and what it gathers, and then that she honors relationships under even the most dire of circumstances.

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Renita Weems does a masterful job of exposing these physical and psychological considerations when retelling the story from the vantage point of her effort to explain to her daughters the circumstances around their trauma and the motivation for her various acts.

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Taking on The Voice of Lot's wife, Reams begins by rehearsing a dimension of the escaped, often and forgotten by readers. That is, Lot's wife has to quickly decide what physical markers of their life won't be condemned to ashes.

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She, Lot, and the daughters will travel alone, but not really alone. They are accompanied by a few items that honor their situation prior to the visitors.

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I remember looking around and wondering. Reims imagines Lot's wife to say, how could I be expected to pack 30 years of living into one bag? So I dashed from one side of the room to the other, stuffing everything,

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anything I saw into the bag in my arms, all the while singing a ditty I no longer remember. End Quote. There's a torturous uncertainty in silence and inability to reflect on what

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was taking place. As Weems speculates, Lot's wife has questions. She wondered what would become of all that had been held precious despite what was assumed by the city.

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After all, whether she was actually tied to Sodom or not, it was her home, or at least the best representation of place available to 1 without recognized will or agency. It was the space of possibility where they stopped and named their family.

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She wanted to ask Rights Weems. I wanted to know what exactly we were running from, where we were going, how long we would have to stay. I wanted to ask, but I couldn't.

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End Quote. It would take time and the full weight of loss for the question to surface. And even then, it couldn't it be expressed through words, words shaped by the social, cultural frameworks that defined her

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position. It was a question that could only be expressed, forged through body language, Applause, a turn. There's a type of surrender suggested by Weems,

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a sense of lost identity represented by the pillar of salt and her namelessness. That is, Weems continues in the voice of Lot's wife. I am ignored.

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No one even bothered to record my name in my obituary. It read like a postscript. A parenthetical aside, End Quote. However, I think this is to assume the story must

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move through lot that her action does nothing to claim space and meaning over against impose social wishes and demands. I want to remind you that we remember her because of the embodied turn and the disruptive questioning it speaks.

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Turning again to weems, one finds words highlighting the centrality of such a question. And I quote at length. I started seeing my life whole.

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The smell of death will make you do that. You know. I saw my life as a nervous child, my years as a neurotic woman, my marriage as an obedient wife, my parenting as a forlorn mother.

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I thought about the things that had happened to me in my life as we were running. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn't even know why I was running. Oh Lot had said something about Sodom being destroyed,

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but I didn't quite know why. Why did the whole city have to be destroyed for the sins of a few? More important, why were we being saved? Why this family?

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Where were we going? How long did we think we would survive in the lonely hills? How did we know we could love one another in a deserted place? What would it take to start over?

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The more we ran, the more questions I asked for Weems. Lot's wife looks back to collect memories, to gather something sufficient to provide a purpose for moving forward, something upon which to ground hope in the future.

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I read it differently, and that I hear it as a question that pulls at more than her particular artifacts of his life lived. What it raises this the psychological toll of movement, the residue of change. It it asks concerning what is gained and what is lost,

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what is actually left behind and what refuses to be dismissed when one moves. What are the effective consequences of movement as a mode of restriction for the marginalized? The out there, so to speak, confronts the familiar and seeks to

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negate it. What prefigures this term, what prompts the demand to move, isn't simply a matter of hospitality. What prefigures this term, what prompts the demand to move,

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isn't simply a matter of hospitality, or what one might call a staid sense of place as porous and open. No, instead it is about the effective arrangements of belonging, the effect of an embodied grasp on place,

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and what happens when this grasp is troubled through efforts to reduce vibrant beings to objects moved at the pleasure of a haunting other. Does the past really leave us? Can we wash it away by not looking as we leave?

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What is the physicality of lament, something of the mundane? When taken, breeds a type of despair. There's no future marked by deep meaning and security with no right to wish. It might be different than this.

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What happened could happen again because the logic and source of destruction is fickle and cares little for what matters to Lot's wife. Through this turn, she struggles in and against the body. To have the body tell one's own story.

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There is only loss carried in a new place. This isn't simply a lamenting of loss in the form of destruction, but rather a questioning of loss and its underlying logic, the organizing principle that gives meaning to particularities.

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But Lot's wife looked back. Here, one might say, with Lot's wife, we have a lingering over the assumed distinction between life and death, and turning to look, she holds the two intention, reifying them with her and the pillar of

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salt. Or, as Mary Rosmeren says, Lot's wife is the only one who in her gaze expresses loss, the loss of her home, of her two daughters, and of a future that abruptly ends, Roz Marin continues.

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Thus, Lot's wife sees the humans and suffering beyond the authority that deems these lives redundant. Her story in action, her turn, encourages us, as Weems so insightfully names it, to color outside the lines,

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which is to explore the uncharted territory of stories that could give us clues as to what biblical women felt about their lives. By extension, and considering her turn, we are gaining opportunities to interrogate our own lives in the social worlds that shape and define those lives.

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Make a mistake to forget Lot's wife. Anyone who seriously reads the New Testament Gospel of Luke is aware of this dangerous oversight. Remember, Lot's wife is the pronouncement coming

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from the one in relationship to whom Christians read the Bible. One must assume that she isn't given the basic marker of personhood, of social place and lineage. It is her action, not her genealogical placement.

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We are to remember, in short, don't forget that Lot's wife looks back. In her looking back, she struggles against the stranglehold of an imposed future denied by her assumed raw utility. One might say, to borrow language from Lauren Bernard,

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that Lott's wife through this moment of indecision, this reflecting back, reverses A cruel optimism, which is to say, she reverses a desire in this case to escape and re establish social order that actually counters her ability to flourish.

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For Lott's wife to flourish is to question social assumptions that hold in place structures of imposed sovereignty. And looking back, she does this. She questions by rejecting A cruel theological optimism pushed on her by Lot,

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and on Lot by the visitors and on the visitors by Abraham. They push an attachment to sovereign ideals that is foreign to Lot's wife. To the extent she isn't authorized to participate in their decision and debate what they project is gain as advancement, she's experiences as laws.

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There is a violence here, one meant to tame the inquisitive intent of the turn. It is to reify the displeasure of a system designed to avoid such questioning of its workings.

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What we encounter as we think about Lot's wife is the tension between the realities of circumstances on the horizontal plane of material existence at odds with the wish of vertical aspiration. In the strongest of terms, one might even borrow distinction offered

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by Steve and Sprinkle when discussing marginality. He writes flesh. He writes flesh. The seat of the desires and decay is at odds with the dictates of the spirit.

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The statement is often given as identification for a problem, a negative conflict. However, I think there is another way to view it. With Lot's wife one finds an embrace, an endorsement of the signification of

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our occupation of time and space in a manner that would come to be associated with best efforts to recognize and center the all forgotten presence of women. It is because of this term that this nameless woman is remembered, and it is because of this term we have debated the significance and meaning of

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despised locations. In a certain sense, she holds them body and not body in a sort of tension, a Nexus where loss and possibility consume each other, where the horizontal and vertical

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dynamics of our interactions come together. And this coming together demands something of us. This is to read the Bible against the Bible, and to read our lives against social norms and regulatory structures,

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and in this way, to push against debt dealing epistemological assumptions encased in unhealthy theological claims. Lot's wife raises the question of why, and that question cuts deep. And she does so in a manner that isn't so easily dismantled.

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That is to say, she poses this profound query through the positioning of her body, through the body language that stops time to the extent it stops movement. Remember Lot's wife, but today, Remember her for the power and the beauty

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in the embodied question her turn entails. Thanks so much. Thank you, Doctor Pin for bypassing the lane so that we can walk through the rich field of exploration and meet Lot's wife to

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embrace her wisdom embodied through her experience. Thank you all for joining us this morning. We will pause in just a brief moment for an extended time of lunch, about half an hour.

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We will regroup at 1:30 PM for a moderated panel, and I'm delighted to note that Doctor Pin will be joining the panel live for that presentation. As you meander away from this space and throughout the hop in experience,

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if you're joining us online, I encourage you to explore the exposition booths and the other areas where there are a rich array of offerings. Providing information about the seminary, opportunities for fellowship and connection, ways to give in support of rich programs

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that this seminary is able to provide because of the generosity of those who share their giving ministries with us, as well as many other things. So again, thank you so much for your presence. We look forward to seeing you in about 30 minutes.

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The. The. Yeah. The.

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The. Music. Music.