Faculty Books

Recent publications by Austin Seminary professors

Chalice Press, 2020, 189 pages, $19.99 (paper). Reviewed by Dr. Patrick B. Reyes, senior director for learning design at the Forum for Theological Exploration.

My face flushed with frustration. My co-facilitator and I had done everything to set the conditions for conversation and resources about parenting for faith and identify formation. The day’s topic was diversity and why it mattered. The phrase that triggered my emotion and heard all too often in these spaces left the lips of a parent as if almost on cue: “I don’t see difference and I don’t teach my children to see it either. We are all just human.” Parents are the worst! I thought to myself. Speaking as one, we simply care too much and listen too little. We had not even begun to share about the breadth of diversity in the room and a parent was already staking a claim. Facilitating a conversation regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and access with parents in a congregation, I did my best to stay calm. Moments like these, innocent in the minds of the speaker, are taxing to every person of color, gender non-conforming, differently abled, and neuro-diverse person in the room. I signaled to my co-facilitator who said they would step up in these moments. It was their turn to gracefully address this alltoo-often comment made by well-meaning and well-intentioned majority culture parents. But they did not say a word. The commenter continued: “I don’t want my children thinking that they are different than other people. Wouldn’t that just reinforce the stereotypes that we are here to stop?”

The ABCs of Diversity is the critical intervention parents need, and frankly, what I needed as a facilitator in this congregational setting! What Harris-Smith and Helsel offer is a grace-filled, careful, and thoughtful response to that speaker. Helsel and Harris-Smith provide tactics and stories that are helpful for parents in talking with their children and why talking about difference is a life and death matter.

The ABCs are incredibly helpful acronyms for Harris-Smith’s and Helsel’s approach to diversity when parenting (or in one’s everyday life). They leverage the ABCs to various ends: “Afraid, Backing away, and Control,” which names unhelpful responses to diversity; “Acknowledge, Be present, and Come Closer,” which names ways to stay engaged; or “Access, Build, Cultivate,” which names an approach to building a more just, inclusive, and equitable society.

They take on issues like race, gender, sexuality, and religious diversity. Offering heartfelt stories from their lives, the authors bring parents into the conversation with the familiar real-life experiences and curiosities of children. More importantly, they challenge parents to self-educate about issues of diversity.

The inner lives and curiosities of children expands well beyond the “celebration” of diversity so often found in many curriculums. Children are witnessing a world filled with violence. That is why one of the most important topics addressed in the book is “the talk.” For all those parents from diverse backgrounds, the talk has life and death consequences for children. The talk is precisely the type of education and formation so many Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and people of color have to have with our children about how their bodies are perceived by the majority world. And heartbreakingly, the talk is also about how to navigate in the body God gave them so that they will not be harmed, harassed, hurt, or something far worse. Being able to both be aware of the various talks parents from different communities have to give and how to do it well in our communities are important for developing a narrative around diversity that starts from the current reality.

The challenge with any book addressing parents, of course, is time. The authors are very aware of this fact. While the book can be finished in a single sitting, the depth of the pain and suffering communities who survived (or are currently surviving) violence is missing in this text. Similarly, as the planet faces conditions where the diversities of plants and animals are rapidly decreasing, the ABCs is a starting point, but it cannot be the ending. Helsel and Harris-Smith have prompted each of us to go deeper in our own understanding of diversity. What is most helpful is they provide both practices and resources for readers and reading groups to do so. Adopting the principles and insights lifted up could not be more important in these times.

If parents of majority cultures do not start doing the work outlined by Helsel and Harris-Smith, the burden continues to lie on those of where the stakes for “the talk” are high. Helsel and HarrisSmith have offered an excellent starting place for parents and adults alike.

Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, 201 pages, $41.40 (hardback). Reviewed by Dr. Kay Higuera Smith, professor, Department of Biblical and Religious Studies and program director, Religious Studies Minor at Azusa Pacific University

Gregory Cuéllar’s recent book, Empire, The British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century, shows how an archive is one of the most effective tools for displaying and classifying artifacts that underwrite Empire and its attendant colonial ways of thinking and being. Arguably, no archive is more relevant to the development of the study of the Bible than that of the British Museum, with its vast collections of “Oriental” antiquities. The task of the archive is to convince the populace that it is supporting the “common good” of the social body. Cuéllar argues that it does so both through “collective remembering” of ancient artifacts but also through “collective forgetting,” the conscious act of overlooking material that supports claims not benefiting the Empire. Cuéllar’s claim is not new. What is new is how thoroughly Cuéllar supports the claim. He does so by examining not only the collections, but the architecture and even the spatial and ideological mapping that go into the archive’s activities.

There is a secondary claim made in this volume, which is that the field of the academic study of the Bible is itself a kind of imperial archive in that it stores and organizes information and material evidence in a way that also supports Empire. Biblical Studies, as an academic field of discourse, emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the heyday of the British Empire and the time of developing nation-states. During this time, Western military advances, especially to the traditional regions in which the biblical stories emerged, included the confiscation of biblically related manuscripts, antiquities, and material evidence, all of which needed interpreting. By the same token, just as the antiquities collected in other fields produced new fields of inquiry and discourse based on the assumptions of Western modernity, so did the field of biblical studies. Not only was the British Museum, in supporting these advances, able to “claim ownership over a foreign group’s cultural heritage” (18), but it also legitimized a set of assumptions that were drawn from the natural sciences—assumptions, for instance, that these Western biblical scholars had the

training and ability to efface their own particular interests and to assess the texts, manuscripts, and material evidence with objectivity expected. Notably, despite assertion of objectivity, during this period the natural sciences themselves were awash in now-debunked racial claims which served to confirm that Anglo-Europeans were mentally and constitutionally more stable and more rational than people from other social-ethnic racial groups.

Cuéllar argues that another way that the guild of biblical scholars supported Empire is based on particular interpretations of history (133). Hegelian philosophy had advanced a notion that history was inexorably advancing toward the good, as interpreted by Western European norms. The chronologies developed out of these interpretations, in turn, determined architectural decisions as to how to arrange and organize artifacts within the Museum in order to reinforce the implied assumption that European Imperial power was the apex of biblical and historic time.

It is no surprise then, that a scholarly field which developed using these assumptions, even when those assumptions were later abandoned, has been unable even to perceive, let alone abandon, its established discourse—a discourse in which the interests of Anglo-European male clerics remained unchallenged for so long. This was the group that sought to answer the urgent questions asked and, not surprisingly, the answers at which they arrived were those that seemed plausible to that self-same group. In all of these ways, the beneficiaries of Empire created a discourse of the academic study of the Bible which, to this day, primarily represents and supports their own interests.

In this system, only Europeantrained, Anglo-European male academics were trusted with having attained credible scientific acumen. This acumen was then applied to the interpretation and arrangement of texts as well as artifacts. This control over knowledge production, notes Cuéllar, “involved a concatenation of encoded discourses, expert alliances, and technical maneuvers” (135), all of which benefited Empire.

In the end, Cuéllar’s book teaches us that we have much work to do. First, we must re-examine the assumptions within the study of the Bible that we have taken as given—assumptions related to the development of history, to how we assign epistemic authority to interpret the Bible, and to how we organize and create taxonomies of knowledge. The field is ripe for young scholars from the Global South, including subaltern men, women, and gender-nonconforming scholars worldwide, to begin to reassess and rewrite the urgent questions we bring to the study of the Bible, to archaeology, and to the material evidence and antiquities associated with them. Gregory Cuéllar has given us a path upon which to embark, and for that we should be grateful.