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Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Oh Harvard
The Divinity School satisfies my nerdy cravings for intellectual absurdity day in and day out. Occasionally, however, I'm caught off guard by the sheer ridiculousness (not in a pejorative sense, mind you, but in a 'this-is-quite-irrelevant-to-my-life' sense) of contemporary scholarship. For example, in discussing the book of Revelation, a professor recently offered up the following: far from suffering the psychological resentment and paranoia of the dispossessed, the author employs intentional "solecisms…a form of creolizing the Greek. The Seer is poetic – deliberately transgressing grammatical norms as an exercise of his own discursive power. Like his post-colonial Anglophone counterparts in the new world order, the Seer negotiated a linguistic balancing act between decolonization and intelligibility."
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2 comments:
Oh, I don't know. Deliberately transgressing grammatical norms as an exercise in one's own (post-colonial) discursive power might be an important idea for an aspiring preacher to explore.
Just a thought, from someone who decades later discovered that two of the most important things he learned at Harvard were 1) Koine Greek, and 2) the connections between the ideas of James Luther Adams and the German sociologist of religion Ernst Troeslsch
You're likely quite right! In the midst of exam period, however, the thought of wading through swamps of critical theory jargon seems a tad overwhelming. Although, it might make for an interesting exam response - perhaps I should consider throwing a dadaist Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate into the mix.
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