Tag: interpretation
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Reframing
Maybe not everyone gets stuck seeing things just one way, but many of us do. Because of that, hearing from other people, comparing readings, seeing texts and situations “through other eyes,” unlocks new meanings. I might have a hard time imagining your perspective, and you may have a hard time imagining mine, but if we…
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First Sunday in Advent
Examples matter. Images matter. This morning our opening hymn was “Awake, Awake and Greet the New Morn” – a great one. [Here is a congregational version, with lyrics.] The third verse goes like this: In darkest night his coming shall be, when all the world is despairing, as morning light so quiet and free, so…
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If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Bultmann?
Zimmermann, Jens. Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press, 2015. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] This is the last of the three “little” books I picked up at Carmichael’s on a day I really hadn’t even planned to go to a bookstore.[*] As the title announces, this is a “very short” introduction…
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Isn’t Hermeneutics Too Abstract to Matter in Real Life?*
I misread the situation at the intersection by the grocery store. I paid attention to the oncoming car’s turn signal (“There’s nothing like a turn signal. And that was nothing like a turn signal.”) instead of the fact that they were in the left turn lane. So I waited for the “oncoming traffic” before I…
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All Interpretation, All the Time
One of the insights of hermeneutics is that human beings are doing interpretation all the time. It’s why we can fit in to the “real world” around us. We “read” things correctly, we know what things mean when they present themselves to us in familiar contexts, and know how to respond to them properly. And…
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Undetermined
We’re less free than we think. We’re creatures of habit, with paradigmatically pre-fabricated attitudes, deeply pre-constructed preferences, subliminally influenced inclinations, socially conditioned choices, and systemically structured first impressions and reflexes. And we’re more free than we know. At any given moment, capable of … something else; open to pausing, noticing, wondering, asking, deviating, breaking the…
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Notes on Genesis 3 (Part 1)
The text we are studying for Sunday, September 30 is Genesis 3:8-17 & 22-24, the part of the dire chapter 3 that follows the stomach-churning moment when the humans suddenly realize that they have made a really really bad mistake. I say “stomach-churning” because I have once or twice in my life had the sudden…
Matters of Interpretation 