Teaching and Learning > DOCUMENTS
Widening Access to Sacred and Canonical Texts in Teaching of Religion, Philosophy and Culture
Deryn Guest
Report
The PRS Subject Centre's colloquium on the 'Widening Access to Sacred and Canonical Text in Teaching of Religion, Philosophy and Culture' was held on 2nd- 4th July 2002 at St John's College, Nottingham. Day one debated what, if anything, needs to be done about the lack of biblical knowledge in student populations. During the morning, scholars from different fields, predominantly literature, gave brief papers on how this lack of knowledge means that scarce teaching time is taken up with explaining biblical antecedents. Questions of what students 'really need to know', why they need to know it and what resources are available to cater for this need led to an afternoon session evaluating papers from the Essential Bible project. This project is aiming to produce a small, cheap, accessible book that would orient students studying, for example Medieval literature, towards key biblical texts and their interpretation. The role that Theology departments could play in this project and in this dilemma generally deserves further consideration.
Day two was dedicated to non-traditional approaches to sacred texts. Dr Jonathan Wooding demonstrated how digital resources such as Bibleworks can be used to support scholars and introduced other resources available to the student studying languages such as Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The question of whether undergraduate students of the future will rely upon such software for translation, rather than learning grammatical paradigms provoked a stimulating debate. Two final papers (including my own), dealt with 'Confrontation in Contemporary Exegesis', addressing the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students in theology classrooms and the implications this has for teaching biblical studies, particularly given the fact that the Bible is often a key weapon in the homophobe's arsenal. The ethical responsibility of an Academy already involved in this area (whether it is overtly acknowledged or not) when dealing with the 'clobber texts' for LGBT's was debated in a constructive manner.
Report by Dr Deryn Guest
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
