Sacred Witness or Terror Texts? Grappling with the Poetics of Rape in the Hebrew Bible

Since my last post, I felt like I should send out this event coming up here in Lubbock, TX.

On Wednesday, January 19, at 6:00 p.m. at St. John's United Methodist Church, 1501 University Avenue, Lubbock, TX.  Dr. Susanne Scholz,  professor of Old Testament at Southern Methodist University Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, will address the question: How do you read and talk about rape in the Hebrew Bible when it is so common that statistically most church congregants have first or second hand knowledge of rape? To them these are terror texts that offer little support to contemporary people.  This lecture invites you to become acquainted with a feminist sociology of biblical hermeneutics.  Biblical narratives and poems will illustrate that the Old Testament can indeed be read as a "sacred witness" of rape and serve as an ethical and theological foundation for the Christian faith.

For ten years, Dr. Scholz taught in a liberal arts college setting and also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in fall 2007. She received both her Ph.D and M.Phil from Union Theological Seminary in New York, as well as having received the M.Div (equivalent) from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Her scholarly interests are in Hebrew Bible, biblical studies, feminism/women/gender, culture, and religion, as well as interfaith dialog. She is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), American Academy of Religion (AAR), European Society of Women in Theological Research (ESWTR), and the Catholic Biblical Association (CBA).

Among her publications are "Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible" (Fortress, 2010), "Introducing the Women's Hebrew Bible” (T&T Clark, 2007,) "Rape Plots: A Feminist Cultural Study of Genesis 34" (Lang, 2000), "Biblical Studies Alternatively: An Introductory Reader" (Prentice Hall, 2003), and "Zwischenräume: Deutsche feministische Theologinnen im Ausland" (LIT, 2000).

For more information, visit http://www.womenshebrewbible.com/teachings.html and http://www.smu.edu/Perkins/FacultyAcademics/DirectoryList/Scholz.aspx