<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">The book you mention looks good, Clarke. I’ll be getting a copy. Look forward to reading your chapter.<div><br></div><div>Greg</div><div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On Nov 7, 2014, at 2:13 PM, Clarke Rountree <<a href="mailto:rountrj@uah.edu">rountrj@uah.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr">I've followed this thread with a great deal of interest. I just want to put in my oar on one point Greg made about theologians' unwillingness to leave religious texts "undecidable."<div><br></div><div>In April, I hosted Stanley Fish at my institution for a colloquium (with 10 legal rhetoric scholars) that discussed the Supreme Court decision in DC v. Heller (that guaranteed 2nd amendment rights and made them individual, rather than militia-related). He soundly criticized Justice Scalia's opinion for taking the words of the Second Amendment, parsing them, and searching for meanings of individual words in historical dictionaries conducive to his own interpretation. Fish complained that this atomistic approach to meaning left judges to draw out about anything they wanted from, in this case, the Constitution. He called the method "crumbling." He contrasted its use in law with its use in interpreting sacred texts, noting that traditionally crumbling allowed one to draw out a multitude of meanings from sacred texts, to understand the many ways in which God's message speaks to us.(We see this in the tradition of preachers applying, say, the story of the Good Samaritan to OUR story of what we should do for Ebola victims, immigrants, or people injured on the side of the road.) The point of this erudite Milton scholar is that theologians have a tradition of pulling out multiple meanings from religious texts.</div><div><br></div><div>Now, it is certainly the case that the vocal, evangelical, "four-corners" folks evince the kind of "one way" thinking that concerns Greg. And, generally, I am concerned about the direction such conformist thinking yields. (For my beef with defenses of a belief in God, see my recent publication, <span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">“Faith,
not Reason, Underwrites the Belief in God: A Response from a Nonbelieving
Rhetorician.” In </span><i style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">Is Faith in God
Reasonable? The Great Debate in Light of Contemporary Science, Philosophy, and
Rhetoric.</i><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"> Edited by Paul Gould and Corey Miller. New York: Routledge, 2014.
136-150. NOTE that Marty Medhurst was my "believing" counterpart in this book.) But this is an awfully long tradition, with a lot of faces and approaches.</span></div><div><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">Cheers,</span></div><div><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">Clarke</span></div><div style="margin-left: 1.25in;"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"></span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Gregory Desilet <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:info@gregorydesilet.com" target="_blank">info@gregorydesilet.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Thanks
to Lee and Stan for additional comments. Both make interesting and challenging
points. But I think the response to both is implicit in what they say about the
phenomenon of interpretation that in fact takes place in religious circles and
theological discussions. To quote Lee, “. . . </span><span style="font-size:14pt">the history of the
Catholic Church is a history of argument about what the Word of God, and other
things such as Tradition, actually say.” Here the revealing words are “actually
say.” The assumption is that divinely inspired texts have an “actual” or
univocal meaning, that God does not speak ambiguously. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">Rhetorical scholars have seen the persuasive
reasoning for seeing the nature of texts as such that they can and should be read
in multiple ways. And here Stan is correct to say this need not imply one
interpretation is as good as another. But it should be understood to mean there
are two or more interpretations capable of being well supported (though not
necessarily equal in everyone’s eyes). Theologians argue about the meaning of a
divinely inspired text because they assume it has “a” proper, authoritative
meaning to the exclusion of other meanings. On the other hand, secular literary
critics may point to a text, a short poem for example, disclose how it may well
have multiple meanings (some perhaps even contradictory), and then be content
to leave it at that. Theologians, in my experience, are rarely if ever content
to leave a religious text undecidable. They seek and argue for an authoritative
interpretation and in doing so prop up the authoritarian ethos of religion.
Examples to the contrary do not so much defeat my argument as expose the
ongoing process of the secularization of religion—a process so slow yet
penetrating that congregations of the future will likely wake up one day and
find their sacred texts have been moved from the “religion” to the “philosophy”
shelf in bookstores and libraries (should these latter institutions survive
long enough for this future).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">Regarding Stan’s reference to my use of the
phrase “what we know about”—this is a good point. And I agree that “faith” is a key term to examine here. </font><font size="4">Even Sam Harris—he of the book titled “The End of Faith”—must have “faith”
in the power of reason and the methodology of science. The difference between
the two faiths of science and religion, for example, is the difference between
faiths in contrasting modes of evidence—the evidence of an experience that can
be repeated (the scientific test) and the evidence of tradition, sacred texts,
and transcendent personal experience (sometimes called direct divine
communication or DDC). Both forms of evidence require faith in a process and it
becomes a question of which process one finds more persuasive as a mode of
evidence.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">These lines of analysis lead to further layers
of distinctions—which take us down many related byways. What Lee proposes—an
NCA panel for 2015—is an interesting suggestion. For me, though, it would be difficult
to do because I have so many competing projects and a very limited travel
budget. Nevertheless, Lee, if you want to draft a question or questions or an
outline of the substantive issue of such a panel, we could all take a look and
discuss it further.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">Greg </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">Dr. Clarke Rountree<br>Chair and Professor of Communication Arts<br>342 Morton Hall<br>University of Alabama in Huntsville<br>Huntsville, AL 35899<br>256-824-6646<br><a href="mailto:clarke.rountree@uah.edu" target="_blank">clarke.rountree@uah.edu</a></div>
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