Difference and Dialogue: Reading the Joseph Story With Poor and Marginalized Communities in South Africa

Psychological Type and Biblical Interpretation among Anglican Clergy in the UK

“…The interest began with studies of liberation hermeneutics in South America (Mesters, 1980(Mesters, , 1991Segovia & Tolbert, 1995a, b) and South Africa (Sibeko & Haddad, 1997;West & Dube, 1996;West, 1991West, , 1994, and has more recently been developed in the northern hemisphere with empirical and ethnographic studies of readers in Europe and North America (Bielo, 2009;Village, 2005aVillage, , b, 2006Village, , 2007. These studies have sought to examine how lay people in churches interpret the bible in relation to their particular social contexts, beliefs, attitudes or tradition.…”

Facilitating interpretive resilience: the Joseph story (Genesis 37-50) as a site of struggle

“…Liberation theology and liberation hermeneutics, which we might have expected to celebrate a multi-vocal Bible, have been slow to recognise this contribution from biblical scholarship (Míguez 2006:126). Even Brueggemann's suggestive biblicaltheological analysis, based on the socio-historical liberation-oriented work of Gottwald (1979), in which he identifies two contending ideo-theological trajectories across biblical history and sociology (Brueggemann 1992a(Brueggemann , 1992b(Brueggemann , 1993, has not been taken up widely (see West 2000).…”

“…Their organised agency is central to our collaborative work of re-reading the Bible as a potential resource for social transformation. Thus, my argument with Mosala, going back to the late 1980s (West 1995), is that, while I recognise the significance of socio-historical methods in enabling us to identify the ideological voices in the sources that have been taken up and redacted by other (often dominating) voices, literary methods also provide access to contending ideological voices.…”

“…We began by working with the woodcut by Azariah Mbatha, in which he represents part of the story of Joseph in nine "narrative" panels. 5 At the time, we were exploring ways of working more overtly with literary-narrative resources, and Mbatha's woodcut offered local African art as a potential resource, mimicking the left-to-right and top-to-bottom conventions of the translated biblical text in Southern African languages and English (West 1994). Mbatha's woodcut is a remarkably "close reading" of the biblical narrative (West 2016d:410-420), and thus provided a useful entry into a close and careful literary-narrative reading of the biblical text itself.…”