IMPOLITE TOPICS

Welcome back!

“About Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson”

The first things you need to know about me are that I am both a seeker and a scholar.

I’ll start with my identity as a scholar. I have excellent academic credentials to write about religion, politics, and the Bible.

I have a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Graduate Theological Union  in Berkeley California in cooperation with University of California at Berkeley. 

The GTU is a consortium of nine theological seminaries of various denominations, along with several centers of study. Since the GTU has a cooperative relationship with the University of California at Berkeley to offer Doctor of Philosophy degrees, I was also admitted to study at the university. So, I had access to a broad swath of theological perspectives and free access to the classes, libraries, and faculty of both the GTU and UCB.

“The Graduate Theological Union is the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States, pursuing interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, ministry, and service.”

Located in Berkeley, California, where the diversity of cultures and faith traditions reflects our own, study at the GTU is intellectually challenging and rich in resources. Students can pursue the Ph.D., Th.D., and M.A., plus two joint Ph.D. programs with the University of California, Berkeley.

As a union, we have the largest theological faculty in the United States, including renowned experts in Christian spirituality and liturgical studies as well as critical and creative scholars in 14 other areas.”

Graduate Theological Union

If you are interested in my doctoral dissertation, The Vision of Transformation:  The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40-48, is available on Amazon.  It combines classical rhetoric, human geography, and close study of the Hebrew, to demonstrate that the temple vision of Ezekiel is not a blueprint for a building, but a vision of a new society shaped by holy space.

I am still very proud of my work in that study. It was published as a distinguished dissertation and is recognized as a groundbreaking study in the field.

And in case you are wondering, I don’t earn a penny in royalties from sales of the book, because publishers don’t make money publishing doctoral dissertations, so they don’t offer any to their authors. 

I also have a Master of Divinity Degree (magna cum laude) from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Theological seminaries train students for ordination and ministry in churches.  I must admit, I have not been back since the day I graduated. Seminary was an endurance contest and left me with many unhappy memories.    

(By the way, I have always thought it odd to offer a degree called “Master of Divinity.” I am still working on figuring out what it is to be human. Who am I to master the divine?)

So my official biblical and theological education spans a continent and joins the vastly different mindsets of resolutely evangelical Gordon-Conwell with the dizzying array of theological perspectives of the GTU and the intellectual ferment of the world-class institution that is the University of California at Berkeley. I have also worked in churches, taught in theological seminaries, and developed an acute awareness of the differences between different theological perspectives among a wide range of religious organizations.

So what am I doing with this blog?  I am paying attention to the extraordinary power of religious words to affect people’s lives.

The academic world carves up areas of study. Long ago, the “Academy” made a fateful decision. Biblical scholars would do “exegesis” and theologians would do “hermeneutics.” Despite the big words, the difference means that biblical scholars would study the Bible to determine “what it meant” (exegesis) in the biblical era and theologians would take the results and tell people what “it means” (hermeneutics) in the contemporary world.

I am at home doing exegesis. I truly love words. My love for words carries with me a passion for precision in the use of language. (It also makes me unbeatable–so far–at Scrabble.) It also means that I have an ear for speech and pay attention to what people say and how they say it. I have also developed a keen awareness of how religious and spiritual communities develop their own code languages, known to insiders but not immediately obvious to outsiders, unless you tune in on them.

I have never been as interested in the study of systematic theology. It’s too much abstraction, too much effort to fit concepts into a system, and not enough digging into the words, and what the words mean in particular texts to suit me.

And so, I am happy doing exegesis. The problem is, the division of labor between biblical scholarship and systematic theology isn’t working very well. The biblical scholars merrily study ancient texts without being too concerned about bringing their insights forward into the world of here and now. And the systematic theologians are too busy with their abstract systems to immerse themselves in what the Bible scholars could tell them about what it meant. And so biblical scholars write amazingly erudite books about the Bible that only other biblical scholars will read, and systematic theologians write books about systematic theology that systematic theologians read.

The scholar in me must immediately qualify these statements. I am speaking about tendencies, not hard-and-fast categories. There are notable exceptions of wonderful scholars who bridge the gap between the Academy and non-academic audiences.  

The practical result is that many of the books and articles about the Bible that reach the general public tend to be written by people who have not spent their lifetimes immersed in rigorous study of either Biblical exegesis or systematic theology. 

So, exegesis–”what it meant”–and hermeneutics–”what it means”–are like two neighbors on the opposite side of a high fence at the top of a hillside.  Neither pays much attention to the other and whatever the other knows is not being passed through to the other side.

Meanwhile, the big game is being played in an arena far away down the hillside. In that arena, the people with the loudest amplifiers teach the Bible in ways that are superficial at best and deeply flawed at worst.

My first goal is to take what I know as a biblical scholar–an exegete–and make it real in the contemporary world as a hermeneut. (I didn’t make up this word. Hermeneuts do hermeneutics!)

The big game about religion, politics, and the Bible is too important to let the people with bad exegesis and worse hermeneutics dominate the discussion. It’s long past time to bring solid exegesis of the Bible and responsible hermeneutics about the Bible into the public arena.

Once after I preached a sermon, a woman came up to me and said: “You are the most interesting combination of practical and intellectual.”

I liked that. I still do. I never spent a moment in the Ivory Tower during my seminary education. I might have been learning Greek and studying systematic theology and church history, but I also had laundry to do, meals to fix, and children to take to soccer practices and piano lessons, along with long commutes in rush hour traffic each time I went to school. (And in Massachusetts in winter, long commutes to seminary often meant shoveling snow from the driveway in the dark, scraping ice from the windows, and a long, careful drive on treacherous roads.) 

I used to arrive at seminary after getting my children ready for school, and driving exactly fifty miles to school, only to encounter young, single men who had done nothing more that morning than walk downstairs for breakfast. In their little Ivory Tower world, they treated religion and Bible as a set of abstract concepts, without ever paying attention to how their theological constructions were affecting real human beings. They were part of the posse who continually “confronted the women with their disobedience” because we had the audacity to attend theological seminary. 

This, more than anything else, motivates me. I care about how the words of the Bible affect real people, because I know how they affected me.

I have observed over a lifetime how often the Bible is used a weapon of power against people who cannot defend themselves. I grew up in a family that was full of violence, deprivation, and ignorance, and felt the wounds of growing up afraid that I would die if I ever spoke the truth. I was terrified of the angry people in my life, but I was more afraid of the Father God in the sky who would kill me if I ever told the family secrets. Where did I learn that idea? I learned it at Sunday School, where they told me I had to be obedient to my parents.

Of course, they never told me that God would kill me if I told the family secrets. All they did was tell me I had to obey the people I feared more than anyone else in the world. My scared little mind made up the rest of the story. And no one in Sunday School or church ever seemed to notice how scared and dirty and hungry I was, as they told me cotton candy stories about God and happy families.

That God was never my friend and church was never a place where I felt at home. And so, I have always been a seeker. My religious and spiritual influences range from a stark New England Congregational church, with its Unitarian theology about Jesus, to a seminary education among ardent evangelicals, to doctoral work a continent away in miles and light years away in consciousness, in that wonderfully bizarre place called Berkeley (or “Berzerkley” for these who don’t love it as much I did in my years there.)

And along the way, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Framingham State College, with lots of calculus and physics and literature thrown in for good measure. I have studied all kinds of topics, from rhetoric and persuasion, to languages, to new age religion, ayurveda, naturopathic medicine, and Chinese medicine. I have taken classes in screenwriting and photography and painting. I have been married forever to a man I met as a sophomore at UMass. I am also a mother and a grandmother, which have shaped my consciousness of the world in ways that I would not have imagined before I held my firstborn in my arms.

I’m not a young woman, and so I have seen the world change in radical ways over my lifetime. I vaguely remember “I Like Ike” and knowing about the McCarthy hearings during the Red Scare. I remember “duck and cover” exercises in elementary school, when they scared us half to death with warnings about the “The Bomb.” I remember the civil rights movement, the rise of feminism, the uproar over Vietnam in the sixties. (I could write pages about these three movements in our collective history.)

I have lived through an era when television went from being a rare novelty to being the constant big eye in our lives. I even worked briefly as a computer programmer when programmers wrote out lines of code and waited for a day or two until the keypunch operators sent back stacks of cards. And now, I put up web pages and make blog posts on a machine that connects me to the entire world at the speed of electrons. 

I have also been shaped by the places I have lived. I grew up near the Atlantic Ocean, among the cranberry bogs, kettle ponds, and scrub pines on Cape Cod–a place that has never left me, although I left it long ago. I have lived on Air Force bases during the Vietnam War, and worked in an elementary school in Arkansas when the worst horrors of the civil rights movement were a recent raw memory and reminders of Jim Crow segregation were still alive and well. I have lived on an island in Puget Sound near Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Now, I am in a temporary sojourn in the desert, in a small place at the very tip of Nevada.
 
In the online world, there are places where you can find confident declarations of faith. Such places are not provided by seekers, because they have already found their truths. There are other places, where people do their best to tear down religion and the Bible as ignorant superstitions. They also have their unshakable truths. They aren’t seekers either.

I will do neither. My goal is to use my questions as a seeker and my art and science as a biblical scholar to write about what I have learned the hard way about religion, politics, and the Bible. I think it would have made a transformative difference in my life if I had known earlier what I know now. My deepest desire is that it makes a transformative difference for you. I invite you to join me in the quest.

Seeker and Scholar,

Kalinda

Dr.Kalinda Rose Stevenson

“Impolite Topics”

http:www.kalindarosestevenson.com/ImpoliteTopics