Tag: Sociological Criticism

Donnerstag Digest (August 12, 2010)

This week in the blogosphere:

  • Baker acquires Hendrickson’s academic arm (HT: Nijay Gupta and Rod Decker).
  • Larry Hurtado rightfully lauds and recommends careful attention to Harry Gable’s Books and Readers in the Early Church.
  • Cynthia Nielsen continues her discussion of interconnections between Joerg Rieger and Frederick Douglass with a post about duality in identity construction.
  • Michael Halcomb has a new website specifically dedicated to Getting (Theological) Languages.
  • Kirk Lowery returns to the biblioblogosphere after a hiatus for the development of the Groves Center as an independent research unit. I had the privilege of doing an Aramaic and a Hebrew Bible text-linguistics seminar under Kirk and am again looking forward to seeing what shows up on his “scratchpad.”
  • Happy Dissertating suggests PhD2Published as a potentially valuable resource for new PhD graduates in humanities disciplines.
  • James McGrath spots several video recordings of presentations at this past year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
  • Michael Bird starts reading a recent biography of Ernst Käsemann and reproduces several, brief quotations from Käsemann that are, as one might expect, particularly insightful.
  • Todd Bolen reports a recent spectrometric analysis that suggests a Jerusalem origin for a newly discovered cuneiform tablet.
  • Ken Schenck discusses the reading of biblical literature as Christian scripture.
  • Brian LePort discusses the relationship between scripture and tradition in view of the Trinitarian-Oneness debate. On this relationship, our Writing Center director at Southeastern recently brought to my attention F. F. Bruce’s edited volume, Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. I have yet really to peruse it, and the book is scarcely findable in print at this point. Still, it does look like a very interesting volume, and much of it is available through Google Books.
  • Google and Verizon propose, regarding Net Neutrality,”that ‘wireline broadband providers [sh]ould not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition’, but broadband providers [sh]ould be able to offer ‘additional, differentiated online services’.”
  • Chris Brady shares some of his conclusions from his recent International Organization for Targumic Studies presentation about Boaz in Targum Ruth.

History and Collective Memory

Defending the legitimacy of the category of “collective memory,” Maurice Halbwachs observes the following:

History is neither the whole nor even all that remains of the past. In addition to written history, there is a living history that perpetuates and renews itself through time and permits the recovery of many old currents that have seemingly disappeared (64).

Thus, in some respect, the “collective memory” provides the means by which a community recovers for itself things that it has forgotten or allowed to fall into the vague and dusty corners of its memory. Without such collective memory, these lost currents would have no presence in relation to the community and they would have to be recovered—if they would ever be recovered at all—in the same manner as the community discovers new things of which it had not previously been aware.

In this post:

Collective Memory
Maurice Halbwachs