Mark & the ‘Other’: Engaging Women, Gentiles, and the Enslaved
Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/30/2017
9:00 am - 1:45 pm
Location
Rush Creek Christian Church
Categories
Mark & the ‘Other’: Engaging Women, Gentiles, and the Enslaved
Twelfth Fred B. Craddock Seminar on the Gospels
Saturday, September 30, 9:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Rush Creek Christian Church, Arlington
Emerson Powery, Professor of Biblical Studies and Coordinator of Ethnic and Area Studies, Messiah College, Mechanicsburg, PA
The earliest Gospel in the Christian tradition portrays Jesus encountering a variety of people in the villages surrounding the sea of Galilee. How Jesus interacts with non-Jewish males will attract our attention in these talks. Do these interactions enhance Jesus’ mission? Do they alter his plans? And, why might Mark depict Jesus in such encounters in the first place? In contemporary conversations, it is common to discuss how citizens interact with non-citizens and what the church’s role should be in fostering these relationships. These recent discussions are informed by a long (and, oftentimes, troubling) history of interracial interactions. It is imperative that we search our sacred stories to find guidance and open up new possibilities for opportunities of engagements with the “other.”
Emerson Powery, Professor of Biblical Studies and Coordinator of Ethnic and Area Studies at Messiah College earned his MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and PhD from Duke University. He has published several books on the New Testament, including Jesus Reads Scripture (2003) and True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (2008). He served on the editorial board of a recent translation project, the Common English Bible (2011). As his most recent publications indicate—essays “The Bible and Slavery in American Life” (Oxford University Press) and “The Bible, Slavery, and Political Debate” (T & T Clark) and a co-authored book, The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved—his research passion is to grapple with how the Bible functions in underrepresented communities. He is the proud father of four sons, including his youngest (a 15-year old) with whom he plays chess on Sundays.
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