ABSTRACT
Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization. The book focuses on the ways in which individual and social bodies manipulate—and are manipulated by— the politics and power encoded in language and formalized canonical knowledge. Scriptures, in this sense, function as complex phenomena that are instrumental to social conservatism as well as social critique and social change. The essays in this volume, written by established and up-and-coming scholars across a wide range of disciplines, seek to locate, engage, and interpret the ways in which the scriptural shapes and reshapes people and the dynamics of identity formation. The chapters are organized around four domains or types of inquiry: the cognitive, the conscientized, the inscriptive, and the formative. It will be of interest to scholars of religion, as well as those interested more broadly in critical social and historical studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|19 pages
The Cognitive (Or: Ways of Knowing)
part II|41 pages
Conscientization (Or: Knowing the Self in the World)
chapter II 3|7 pages
The Blue Cat Scholar
chapter II 4|8 pages
The Institute for Signifying Scriptures
chapter II 5|9 pages
Transgressing Racial Sexual Policing
chapter II 6|15 pages
Trespassing Scriptural Boundaries
part III|27 pages
The Inscriptive (Or: Marking the World)
part IV|44 pages
The Formative (Or: [Re-]Making the World)