20 Years On… Theorizing Scripture: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon

On April 11-13, 2024, the Institute for Signifying Scriptures will be hosting a special annual meeting to commemorate two momentous occasions: The 20th Anniversary of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures and the 25th Anniversary of the African Americans and the Bible Project. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be highlighting some media to help you get excited about the meeting. I hope you’ll join us in Atlanta. I believe there will be a virtual element, but be there with us live and in technicolor if you can.

Twenty years ago the Institute for Signifying Scriptures launched at Claremont Graduate University. The occassion was marked by the Theorizing Scripures conference and volume. It was transdisciplinary, ideologically transgressive, and multimedia. Vincent Wimbush describes its connection to the African Americans and the Bible Project in the volume Scripturalizing the Human.

Catch a glimpse of the conference below.

Using scriptures as a fraught abbreviation and sharp analytical wedge for the complex dynamics of human discourse and dis/closure, ISS represented the broadening, the comparative international focus, and the radicalization of the African Americans and the Bible project agenda, challenging and orienting research to the formation of the human and the attendant social-cultural formations and psychosocial and political dynamics.

The podcast below features three friends and colleagues who also studied at Claremont Graduate University and the Institute for Scriptures, Lalruatkima, Robin Owens, and Katie Van Heest.

Reading Scriptures: Reflecting on the Formation of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures after 20 yearsThe Institute for Signifying Scriptures

It was refreshing for me to hear about there experiences as their time preceded my own time at the Institute. While the “Bible-as-text” was never really the subject or last word at ISS, my colleauges did their coursework through a larger university biblical studies program. I arrived at Claremont in 2014 in a time of transition for me, CGU, and ISS. Long time readers of the blog will remember that I was seeking a biblical studies that would allow me to study anthropological hermeneutics. CGU’s School of Religion and the Claremont School of Theology were working out their relationship, and the New Testament program was moving across the street. And ISS was in the beginnings of forming what would later be called the Critical Comparative Scriptures program. Owens, Van Heest, and Kima were students whom I looked up to and were part of an era that made possible the work that I would come to do at ISS.