My talk: Reclaiming Exile
The stark shift in the literary traditions from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament limited the “acceptable” responses to the pain of exile—the expulsion from a grounding place, people, principle, and/or pathos. What one was “allowed” to say in the Hebrew Bible about suffering was largely silenced in the New Testament, and this has largely carried on throughout much of the Christian tradition. This talk will examine how this happened and attempt to reclaim the authentic voices of the oppressed in past and the present, the voices and perspectives on suffering that are often repressed within the modern Christian sensibility.
