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Greetings everyone, alums, friends, board members, faculty, staff, students, just all of you who are joining us for what is by necessity the second annual Midwinter Lectures in a row, coming to you virtually. It was our fervent hope that we could host you in person this year,

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but the ongoing pandemic has not cooperated with us. But we're grateful for the blessing of our technological resources here, which will enable us to push out this event to your screens, wherever you are. I'm Ted Wardlaw, the president of Austin Seminary,

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and we are delighted to be able to share with you that we have a little over 320 online registrations, which means that a bunch of you are looking at us now on screens all over the country and possibly more, more beyond the country.

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Want to welcome all of our in person and online attendees? Today's schedule is Curry lecture number one, first from Anthony Penn, followed by Wester Westervelt lecture #1 from Doctor Evelyn Parker and Monday evening worship service in the Chapel with the Reverend Betsy Lyles Swettenberg.

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I want to encourage people to use the chat feature and to visit the Expo booths and fellowship rooms. Most lectures and both worship services are live from the campus. Doctor Anthony Penn's lectures were pre recorded this past weekend coming from

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Houston. He will join us live for tomorrow's moderated conversation. We're delighted that two out of our three lecturers plus our midwinters preacher are able to be with us in this campus and they will be introduced to you more fully

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later. I'm very pleased that unlike last year, most of our presenters have been able to come to Austin to gather here in person and to be in recognizable places on campus.

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You will hear our preacher from the familiar spaces of Shelton Chapel and you will hear 2 from 2 of our lecturers from this brand new beautiful space of what is now the largest classroom and auditorium on our campus, the Michael and Stacey Wright Room on the 4th floor of the Mary B and Robert J

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Wright Learning and Information Centre. On this, the first occasion of its use, it is my pleasure to welcome for his first of three lectures this year's Curry Lecturer, Doctor Anthony B Penn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of

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Religious Studies at Rice University in Houston. He is unable to be with us in person, and so he is being broadcast to us from Houston. A native of Buffalo, NY, Doctor Penn received his BA from Columbia

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University in New York City, his Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, and his PhD in the study of religion from Harvard University. He works at the intersections of African American religion, constructive theology,

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and humanist thought. Some of you might remember Apbs documentary from last year called The Black Church, This is Our Story, This is Our Song, which was a spellbinding 4 episode series anchored by Doctor Henry Louis Gates,

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which examined the evolution and the impact of the Black church across the centuries of its life in America. This spellbinding, illuminating documentary of the tenacious and transformational life of the Black church in America provided my first

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introduction to Tony Penn, whose commentary throughout each episode was riveting to me. So it is a personal privilege to introduce Doctor Penn to you at this Midwinters.

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Dr. Penn, we welcome you to Austin Seminary, and we look forward to what you will bring to us across the span of your 3 Curry Lectures. Welcome.

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Hello. It's wonderful to be with you, even if we can't be in person. I am so delighted and honored to have been asked to give this series of lectures for the past couple of years.

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I've been really, really interested in how we might rethink text of importance for us and to rethink them in ways that actually privilege the margins. That is to say, thinking about these texts in ways that

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privilege the most disadvantaged. What I'm beginning with is the Bible, and the way I want to do this doesn't require any particular allegiance to the Bible. It doesn't require the assumption that this is sacred text with some sort of

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cosmic reality that transcends our full understanding. One could also think of the Bible as literature that has influenced and informed the grammar and vocabulary we use to describe and narrate life. Regardless of how 1 views Bible, it's safe to say it has had significant

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impact and even those who are liberation minded tend to read it from my vantage point in a particular way. And it's a way that does not fully acknowledge the place and the importance of the margins.

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Its moral and ethical compass suggests instead the securing of a particular type of status for those who are despised, as opposed to troubling the entire system. I want to reimagine how one might read the Bible. And the way I'm thinking about this entails a reading of the Bible against

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the Bible, reading it in a way that privileges always and already the margins. That is to say, reading the Bible against the Bible in a way that celebrates the despised.

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In this first lecture, I want to give you a sense of my method, how I'll go about doing this. And then in the remaining 2 lectures, I'll give you 2 case studies, 2 examples of how one might read the Bible against the Bible using the

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hermeneutic of established in the first lecture. So let's get started. On June 1st, 2020, Donald Trump stood in front of St. John's Church, looking stern and awkwardly holding a

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Bible in his right hand. Trump held high a text upon which many ground their sense of moral and ethical obligation. It is, for them, a profound symbol of justice,

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a marker of vertical connection and potentiality. Yet it has also served to safeguard injustice. Think of its application to sanction, enslavement, segregation, and ongoing violent disregard.

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In a sense, Trump's photo op points to the manner in which the biblical text repeats itself, which is to say, it imposes itself anew with each stage and each age and within multiple contexts. It has served to narrate life lessons.

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Not always positive lessons, mind you. Still, for many, the biblical text is a deeply imaginative means of mapping out cartographies of wonder and flight, and so there is an implicit assumption across the ages that Scripture matters

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enough to challenge or embrace. Perhaps this is because we find something of ourselves within those stories, something of our moods, fears, wishes, and so on. Or, as John our Coats frames it, in reference to Genesis.

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We have to admit, he concludes that we can find the same pathos in their lives, the same humor and irony that we find in our own. Some characters fade, but the moral and ethical underpinning,

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the modalities of rules for relationships often remain intact. Carol Newman makes a similar case when saying the following in reference to the story of Job. It's complex and elusive nature allows interpreters to see mirrored in its

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perspectives, congenial to the tenor of their own age. This adaptability is truly not to be regretted, for it is what gives the book its perennial value. The text is alive, and as such, each effort to capture it takes place in

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a particular moment and in light of the particular context and mood of the reader. What we have is, according to Audrey Slender, reminds, a fusion of horizons by means of which the biblical world and our contemporary context touch.

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Or, as Elizabeth Schulifrierenza points out, inquiry regarding the nature and meaning of the biblical text is a commutative practice that involves interests and visions. And this is because, Shula Fiorenza continues,

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1's social location or rhetorical context is decisive of how one sees the world, constructs reality, or interprets biblical text. While mindful of these perspectives on the reach of the biblical text, my concern while with you these two days isn't whether or not the Bible is mimetic.

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The realness of the biblical world in comparison to the social worlds we know and live in isn't of interest to me. I'm much more engaged with application. That is to say, I'm interested in the biblical text

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realness stemming from Lent authority or what one might name the impact we granted. With all this said, I want to emphasize a point which is this. Biblical stories require digging and pushing beyond popular takes on key verses and figures.

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For example, Scripture has been read often assuming a certain sensibility meant to safeguard tradition and advance the interests of those selected as having special status. Some might argue this is a fundamentalist read of the Bible.

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Yet, I would respond, many liberal religionists read Scripture from the perspective of the favored, who represent narratives of life that often work through exclusion. Such, for instance, is the typically unchallenged assumption

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justifying the tendency to not read the Bible story of community development from the perspective of those on the margins who aren't favored, who aren't the central actors within the unfolding drama, those who, in a sense are pushed out to make room.

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I'm sure the statement brings certain communities to mind, and for me it's the Canaanites. Yet this inside out approach isn't a necessary nor required interpretive practice.

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Vital lessons are often found in the corners of Scripture and with despised or forgotten figures, those typically silenced in favor of the representatives of power and empire. Believing this to be the case, I ask a question.

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What lessons emerge when the Bible is read, privileging the margins of life, where the voiceless are found? Now, mindful of this question, I argue if the Bible is to have relevance for those who suffer most, a concern for most, if not all of us,

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I would imagine, requires a reading of the Bible against the Bible. Such a reading involves A poetic term that dismantles and deconstructs, which is to name and ability to critique the Bible for the sake of the

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marginalized, to amplify the significance of embodied experience. And so I want to use our time to read the Bible against the Bible. I do this work and chart this course not as a biblical studies scholar.

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This is not my training, and I don't pretend the same disciplinary concerns and sensibilities as a scholar of the Bible. Instead, I approached this work as a scholar of African American religious thought, trained in theology with a somewhat

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expansive set of theoretical and methodological interest. Which is to say, I aim to read it against the structures of meaning that have built up over the years, and in this way to surface alternate sensibilities and interpretive

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possibilities. That privilege embodied well-being. Another way of putting it is to simply declare again my privileging of the Bible and its narratives regarding the margin.

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My goal is to celebrate the marginalized, to probe the corners of the biblical story and to honor the long despised, and in so doing, to hear the voices of those not believed to hold morally significant status and standing.

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What makes their stories important is tied to the way in which they have an enduring relationship to the moral and ethical questions that position and describe and encounter with the world. Using a grammar defined by the outsider, I want to present marginalized in

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Scripture as a way to rethink the language and practices of subversion employed by the oppressed. To name themselves anew. The marginalized speak claims based on the sway and movement of experience.

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And so I want to maintain and expand on this earthy read of scripture, a read that privileges existential context and refuses to assume the necessity of traditional perspectives and opinions. The stories, then, are sacred stories because they have an

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enduring relationship to the deep moral and ethical questions that position and describe the human encounter with the world. I believe them to be slippery stories meant to impart moral and ethical lessons, but not always positive lessons on how to behave,

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but at times lessons that we should read as life by negation, how not to behave. Find this alternate meaning requires a different hermeneutic. And if one thinks about my earlier question, what lessons emerge when the Bible is read?

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Privileging the margins of life where the voiceless are found through the Black and womanist theologies that formed much of my early training and that explicitly claim a concern with the marginalized. What one might rather is the utility of an irreverent and imaginative hermeneutic

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that pushes beyond narrative comfort and instead privileges profound suffering. Drawing on James Cone and Dolores Williams, I want to spend the rest of our time today defining and presenting this hermeneutic.

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Please be mindful that I'm not interested in unpacking and utilizing Cohn and Williams this particular reading of Scripture. I certainly don't intend to do this beyond a shared sense of Scripture being secondary to the materiality of the experience of the marginalized and useful

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to the degree it addresses the concerns of the oppressed. Nor do I want my conversation to suggest Cohn and Williams are the only way to form this hermeneutic privileging the margins. Instead, I explore the work for what I can gather

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from them, not in terms of details of narration, but rather the principles and values animating the activities described in certain scriptural stories. In other words, I'm interested in the hermeneutical

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posture suggested in their work, and how that particular interpretive design might be useful in our reading of Scripture from the margins. With Williams, there's a mood of defiance guiding her interpretive work that has consequences for us.

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More on that later, but for now I use Cone here because I find particularly intriguing the development of his hermeneutical sensibilities in conversation with two of my favorite thinkers, Richard Wright and Albert Camus.

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Put another way, his engagement with Camus and Wright exposes dimensions of marginality more easily ignored without the push against certain overdetermined theological assumptions these two moralist offer. In a word, this engagement with Wright and Camus

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amplifies the look, the sound, and the shape of marginalization and its relationship to social normativities. Thinking with Cone, imagination becomes an organic hermeneutical principle determining the shape and content of biblical narratives

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and their claims. And it is organic in that it stems from the experience and existential condition of the marginalized as Cone approached and understood them. He makes graphic the nature and content of experience of socio economic and

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political pain. While Cohn spoke of new visions of life, this turned to imagination as a technology is significant for his perspective on persistent suffering. Suffering, Cohn writes, always poses the deepest test of faith,

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radically challenging its authenticity and meaning. No rational explanation can soothe the pain of an aching heart and troubled mind. End Quote. This strategy of imagination pulls towards others with a deeper degree of

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regard, a submersion in the muck of the material world so as to uncover the depths of human suffering without being subdued by what is found when theologized. Imagination, according to Cone, is the only way to talk truthfully about

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ultimate reality. Cone's technique of religious imagination is akin to Camus's moral imagination. In either case, with either qualifier, there is a concern with lucidity, awareness beyond social codes, and cultural misrepresentations.

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Both are informed, the former through a theological impulsion, the latter through a brand of moralism by a mode of rigorous questioning that seeks to expose and challenge hypocrisy, Cone argues, and this is important.

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One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life and death and hope and tragedy. Cohn speaks about the poetic quality of imagination and relationship to the

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creativity of the arts. But there's another sense in which imagination is reflected in Cohn's work is poetic. There is something poetic about imagination as Cohn described it.

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Poetic to the extent and involves the signifying or the destruction of language of signs and symbols so as to free them to do a different type of work. Turning again to imagination and relationship to the arts, perhaps there is something about the silence of the world to the marginalized

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that makes necessary artistic production. It is this recognition, I would argue, that pushes Cone in the direction of the tutorial of creatives. These artists, like Right, provide Cone a language and improvised

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grammar of life. They speak of the present. It's pain and misery without surrender and without flinching. Artists offer imaginative frameworks that signify teleological projections and

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instead demonstrate the power of the margins. Performed art in this regard gives a factual expression to lucidity, naming the absurd of life experience as such and pushing against it. Now, regarding this work, I believe Cohn pronounces that all

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aspiring black intellectuals share the task that Leroy Jones has described for the black artist in America to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. The workings of an irreverent imagination don't entail full removable of Cohn's inherited theological vocabulary, but rather the degrading of that language,

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the signification of its traditional intent so as to expose the value of contradiction, of paradox. There's something about the interrogation of language, the poetics of the margins, that marriage recognition to the extent it points to a hermeneutic beyond

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suspicion and telling a perspective that over against the normative arrangement of life might come off as a bit mad. In fact, as Cohn writes, one has to be a little mad kind of crazy to find salvation in the cross, victory and defeat and life in death.

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Now, brackening some of the theological claims, one might think this madness in light of more recent work. I have in mind Lamar Bruce's brilliant How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, in which you recast madness, pushing against modern depictions that

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restrict the marginalized, in this case people of African descent defined by blackness, by normalizing white supremacy's logic as the only viable mental framework. For Bruce, the work of art making in the form of

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music, comedy, and literature speaks a new possibility by presenting madness as the push by the marginalized to claim something of themselves over against the normative social positions. In this case, and I believe Cone is in agreement,

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madness is a radical act of resistance from the margins. Furthermore, Cone recognized as early as Black theology and Black Power that language must reflect existential circumstances. It must be drawn from the experiences of a people, that is,

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from the margins of the social world, and as a consequence, language changes over time. The grammar of life reflects evolving circumstances. So when thinking about the development of Black theology as a formal enterprise,

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Cone says times have changed and the current situation demands a language appropriate for the problems we now face. Symbols must reflect the existential arrangements of life as lived. Furthermore, turning to the Cross and the lynching

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tree, Cone writes, The Cross and the Lynching Tree can help us to know from where we have come and where we must go. We continue to seek an ultimate meaning that cannot be expressed in rational historical language and that cannot be denied by white supremacy.

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Through poetic imagination, we can see the God of Jesus revealed in the cross and the lynching tree, and those who see the connection more clearly were artists, poets, and writers. End Quote Hone uses artists to articulate and perform the existential and

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ontological entanglements that are the place of marginalization in our social world. But why is this the case? He writes.

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Artists force us to see things we do not want to look at because they make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the world we have created. And he goes on to say this more than anyone, artists demonstrate our understanding of the need to represent the beauty and the

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terror of our people's experience. In a word, artists offer a vehicle for thought on the moral narratives embedded deep in the biblical text. Mindful of his words, what 1 gets with Cone,

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particularly his more recent work, is a move toward a heightened appreciation for critique, for the pointing out of hypocrisy and a sensitivity to suffering as outside the scope of temporality proper. And in this way there is open new possibility for understanding the

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pedagogical opportunities forged at the margins. Home castigates Black thinkers and ministers for failure of imagination, the lack of a critical type of imagination which is central and that it to quote comb.

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It takes a powerful imagination grounded in historical experience to uncover the great mystery of black life. Now the turn to re imagination exemplified by the artist is vital here, and that is Camus notes, art forges a way of experiencing and

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describing rather than explaining and resolving. Artists reflect in graphic detail the nature of life within a debt dealing society without surrendering the truth of that experience. Art was a touchstone for Cohn and reflecting as he proclaims the heartbeat

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of black life. How could it not be? In light of his take on the nature of artistic engagement? What Nina Simone said about an artist Cohn reflects,

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expressed my feelings about a theologian. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist, a theologian too. Herein is found a difference between imagination exercised by artists and

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wishing, which marks the substance of much sermonic and academic reflection on experience. While the former imagination destroys and reconstitutes signs and symbols so as the honor experience, the latter bends experience to the non

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historical. As Cone often said, it lacks passion, radical imagining, as one might name it, and tells something of an irreverent depiction of life. That doesn't dismiss what Bactin would call degraded dimensions of experience,

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which are the places of deep and rich materiality, of deep and robust attention to the substance of life. While the latter, the wish tends to cover up, to sanitize the hard elements of existence along the margins.

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For Cone, these wishes geared towards vertical considerations lend very little to and poorly reflect the magnitude of needed historical engagement. A critique of thought and practice involves such a shift in that,

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according to Cone, to be human in the condition of social oppression involves affirming that which the oppressor regards as degrading. The artist explores the sacred within the ordinary sacred because it seeks to struggle against the absurd, and in that struggle name black being as

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transformative. According to Wright, it is vital to have more than perspective, that is to say, a position from which to view historical experience.

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No, the Hermanus, or writer in this case, must experience that experience and thereby, Wright says, social an emotional milieu that gives tone and solidity of detail. Themes for the writers, he makes clear, were merged when they have begun to feel

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the meaning of the history of their race, as though they in one life have lived it themselves throughout all the long centuries. Or, as Camus suggests, imagination opens one to the actual suffering in the world, how it is described and experienced,

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and proposes ethics as more than reflection or abstract denouncement. Artistic presentation of life challenges conceptual frameworks and theological assertions in such a way as to already and always privilege the materiality of life, reflecting the significance and

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centrality of marginalized experience within the context of human history. Humanity then, from early in Cone's work moving forward, is the point of departure, the existential referent for anything worthy of the name Black theology.

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In this way, Black theology is existentially based and articulates an effort on the part of the oppressed, in his words, to be in spite of non being. For Cone, the museum idea that the world offers no

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truths wouldn't disturb, and that the world, for Cone is the social world one might call the anti margins that both defines and confirms the status quo. Through Cohn's hermeneutical application of imagination,

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one deciphers A structured rebellion against the wild conditions of life. Still, as has been pointed out already, there is an embodied bias in the Black male theology approach, a normalizing assumption involving attention to biblical deliverance that highlights maleness and cast the

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privileged bunch who fight against the status quo. As already and always masculine, there's more to the margins than one can gather from Comb. And so while his hermeneutical sensibilities help surface layers of

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marginality that encourage a different posture toward the biblical text, it's important to recognize their limits. I now turn to Dolores Williams, whose hermeneutic of identification ascertainment offered in a groundbreaking Sisters in the Wilderness,

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raises powerful questions concerning biblical claims and the marginalized beyond those named by Cone. I mean that this hermeneutical shift. Williams marks out an important caution against the assumption of a paradigmatic

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use of certain biblical narratives that in fact limit our sense of who is marginalized and how such forms of disregard appear and are felt. Put another way, one might ask this question so as to better map the geography of marginality.

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One wonders, Williams writes, how biblically derived messages of liberation can be taken seriously by today's masses of poor, homeless African Americans, male and female, who consider themselves to experience a form of slavery.

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In this way, the most marginalized of the marginalized in any context are more easily recognized, and by extension, this rereading affords an opportunity to reshape grammar and vocabulary, the language by means of which we challenge our circumstances and name the

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world we want. If one reads, writes Williams, the Bible, identifying with the non Hebrews who are female and male slaves, the oppressed of the oppressed, one quickly discerns a non liberative thread running through the Bible.

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And this bold statement is to point out the need to push one's reading of Scripture in such a way as to gain a sense of the texture, the tone and fullness, and in recognition of the margins, to push to the core of dispossession and disregard.

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Which is to say, the margin isn't defined by one mode of suffering, one social context of misery. And this amplifies the nature of the margin, the depth of despair against which one might wrestle.

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Biblical figures live beyond the page. And while William speaks this in terms of Hagar, it is no less true in more general terms, she writes, noting the importance of the arts as does comb sculptures.

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Writers, poets, scholars, preachers, and just plain folk have passed along the biblical figure Hagar to generation after generation. There's no passivity in this recognition. Rather, Williams interrogates the use and exposes

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not simply which persons and perspectives, which sensibilities and moral assumptions are made, but which are overlooked. An effort to reread, or what I call reading against doesn't entail in Williams's words, changing the text as it appears,

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but instead it involves again turning directly to Williams's framing and her words bringing in more non traditional sources to aid in the interpretation than have been used by leading western exegetes. In a word, for Williams, remembering involves an all out push

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against what she calls patterns of invisibility. I want to apply Williams's thinking in a way that involves more than suspicion concerning traditional focal points or protagonists and that isn't simply placing the margin at the center and in this way maintaining the same value

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system but with different figures acting it out. The biblical figures of concern to us over the course of these three lectures remain at the margins, but what one sees or gathers at the margin is recognized for its moral and ethical value.

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In a word, this loose application of Williams's thinking adds to our hermeneutical effort the necessity of asking and I reading a set of questions. Who is being ignored in my reading?

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Am I really straightforward and inclusive in their inclusivity? Whose well-being is harmed or overlooked by traditional readings of this narrative? And is there an alternate value system available within the narrative when it is read against itself?

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Where is the marginality or limits of exclusion within the margin, or what Williams would call the wilderness? The structure of values imposed by the narrative is of benefit to whom, and this benefit is generated at the expense of whom.

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These questions advance in irreverent mood and posture, making vibrant existential experiences often belittled or covered up, and in so doing, an alternate grounding of meaningful purpose is exposed.

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Such questions urge readers to shift away from a view from above by means of which only the most popular or more traditional structures are visible. Instead, they encourage a few from below, a prioritized positioning on the ground and mindful of the embodied nature of our encounters with and in the world.

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It involves a freedom to borrow from renita weems to interact with biblical pronouncements according to their own interests and cultural re imaginations. Again, it involves a freedom to borrow from Renita weems to interact with biblical pronouncements according to their own

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interests and cultural reimaginings. This involves raising questions concerning traditional readings of such stories, exploring why particular interpretations and applications have dominated, and then working to handle and apply

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these stories in a way more consistent with the needs of the marginalized, shifting from the central geographies of power to a repositioning that better appreciates and renders normative the marginal spaces and peoples. In a word, turning again to Renita Weems, such work should involve powering readers

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to judge biblical texts, to not hesitate to read against the grain of a text if needed, and to be ready to take a stand against these texts. This alternate vantage point seeks to expose hidden corners and in the process,

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overlooked positions and perspectives are brought into focus through abstraction. The view from above seeks to enable answers solid affirmations, whereas the view from below tends to offer questions, alternate approaches to questioning that celebrate rather than hide the

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limitations and possibilities of embodiment. Other than seeking to subdue discomfort, the realities of embodied experience through what Williams might name predetermined moral constraints, the view from below the vantage point of the marginalized acknowledges discomfort,

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honors the bodies experiencing it, and recognizes the limits on our ability to resolve things that trouble us if we use the tools provided In line with the status quo, such effort entails A refusal to safeguard the Bible for the sake of the Bible,

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but instead to privilege those who've been hidden in its pages. This may be too functionalist for some, but I would argue it it is a required shift for those who claim concern for the oppressed and for those who are disrespected and disregarded when Trump holds the Bible aloft.

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Williams highlights the non Hebrew presence that speaks against biblical assumptions of inclusion. But one could just as easily reference the complex grouping of the ill considered, which is the name those who aren't

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necessarily invisible in the text, like Job's wife, but whose circumstances don't figure into the narrative in a transformative way. They, one might add, are the objects for biblical manipulation, but they aren't given the weight of subjects.

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Instead, they are disruptions that, through their negation, speak to the intended narrative and status quo, supporting truth. To discover the complexity of the margins, to recast those at the margins in such a way as to render them praiseworthy, one must read the Bible against the Bible.

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Doing so, by extension, is to recognize the moral and ethical codes, the values undergirding normative sociality may not be the best framing of life for the marginalized, and that these very codes and values define and reinforce marginality.

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Reading against allows, as Williams would say, revaluing value whereby we are able to surface values and life codes from the vantage point of the marginalized in light of their once silenced depiction of life.

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I'm full of cones, hermeneutic, and Williams is corrective in light of the depth of sorrow she urges us to address. And before taking my seat, I want to provide a bit of context for our next two lectures, as well as a sense of the manner in which

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I plan to apply this imaginative and irreverent hermeneutic. First, my concern here isn't with the truth of biblical claims. My interest is less disciplined, so to speak,

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and has to do with how we might think Scripture in ways that free it from more disciplined interrogation of language, historical context, and cultural nuance, and instead I want to encourage exploration that is much more fluid and flexible.

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Again, I want to call it a reading of the Bible against the Bible. I want to understand. The Bible is literature with long standing appeal,

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but one somewhat foreign to the world in which we encounter ourselves. The Bible, then, is a catalog of meaning, assertions and framings not unlike those found in other great works of literature. Mindful of this, my concern is to surface and explore the

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counter hermeneutics and moral ethical perspectives drawn from the margins of those stories, and finally to suggest what these insights might make possible and what it might make possible to think and do within contemporary situations of disregard.

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In short, over the course of these three lectures, I celebrate the despised, honoring the creativity and the value their outside status generates. In an earlier set of talks given as the Men's lectures for the Unitarian

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Universalist Association, I explored the economy of having and giving that undergirds, informs and names relationships within the biblical text and within our contemporary social world. I made an effort to do so by rethinking, Rethinking 3 despised and marginalized

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figures, Job's Wife, Nimrod, and Judas. And I did so in light of the dynamics of this economy of exchange here during our time together. I want to step back from thinking about how one has or gives relationships.

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Instead, I want to explore the withdrawal of connection, the effective dimension of engagement with laws as a type of bereavement. And I want to do so in a way that highlights and affirms the embodied

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nature of laws. Now, this statement is rather vague. I get it, but keep in mind it is within the next two lectures that I aim to give more substance to my claims regarding the

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nature of the margins and the look of alternative hermeneutics and value systems developed along the margins. I do this by turning to Lot's wife and to Thomas. I won't read the entire related scriptural text for each,

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but I'll ask you to do that at your leisure. However, I want to provide a bit of context for you now, and I'll do that by reading Genesis chapter 19 verses 12 through 26 and the Gospel according to John chapter 20

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verses 24 through 29. First, the portion of Genesis, the two men said a lot. Do you have anyone else here, sons in law or sons and daughters or anyone else in the city who belongs to you?

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Get them out of here because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that He has sent us to destroy it. So Lot went out and spoke to his son-in-law,

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to his son-in-law who were privileged to marry his daughters. He said, Hurry and get out of this place, because the Lord is about to destroy the city. But his sons in When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of

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his wife and of his two daughters, and LED them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them. As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, Flee for your lives. Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain.

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Flee to the mountains, or you will be swept away. But Lot said to them, No, my Lord, please. Your servant has found favor in your eyes, and he have shown great kindness to me and sparing my life.

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But I can't flee to the mountains. This disaster will overtake me and I'll die. Look, here's a town near enough to run to, and it's small. Let me flee to it.

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It's very small, isn't it? Then my life will be spared. He said to him. Very well, I will grant this request too.

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I will not overthrow the town you speak of, but flee there quickly, because I cannot do anything until you reach it. At the time Lot reached Zar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the Lord rained down, burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah from

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the from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the city and all the vegetation in the land. But Lot's wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

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And now the passage from the Gospel of John. On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together with the doors locked for the fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said,

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Peace be with you. After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord again. Jesus said, Peace be with you.

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As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

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Now Thomas, also known as Vitamus, one of the 12, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the disciples told him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see the nail marks in his hands,

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and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. A week later his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,

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Peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here, see my hands, reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.

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Thomas said to him, My Lord and my God. Then Jesus told him, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

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From these two readings I highlight for your consideration 2 statements. First Genesis chapter 19 verse 26. But Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. And then John 20th chapter 24th 1st.

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So the disciples told him, we have seen the Lord, but he said to them, unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into a side, I would not believe.

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If your experience is anything like mine, you've heard more times than you might care to admit negative depictions of both figures, marking them frequent punching bags for bad faith. However, I want to think them differently.

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Both Lot's wife and Thomas encounter circumstances and make demands of the world inconsistent with group regulations and restrictions, and as a consequence they are respectively marginalized because of gender, social isolation, and as a rejection of communal standards

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of belief. Lot's wife and Thomas don't fit, and while the larger narratives in which they are found don't cast their oddity and thought and behavior in the most positive of terms, if we read from their vantage point in

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light of the poetic possibilities along the margins, alternate insights will emerge. And these new possibilities challenge dehumanizing patterns of thought and conduct populating the structures of tradition.

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They do so through a bold and radical mood of irreverence, and some of what I mean by this is captured by the hauntingly prescient lyrics of a Porgy and Bess song. It ain't necessarily so.

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The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, it ain't necessarily so. Thank you so much.