In Insights from African American Interpretation, a volume from Reading the Bible in the 21st Century: Insights series, Mitzi J. Smith describes the distinctive African American experience of Scripture, from slavery to Black Liberation Theology and beyond, and the unique angles of perception that an intentional African American interpretation brings to the text for a contemporary generation of scholars. Smith shows how questions of race, ethnicity, and the dynamics of "othering" have been developed in African American biblical scholarship, resulting in new reading of particular texts. Further, Smith describes challenges that scholarship raises for the future of biblical interpretation generally.
About the Series
Reading the Bible in the 21st Century introduces contemporary biblical scholarship to students and other interested readers, showing how each of the various approaches current today is a strategic interaction with the biblical text, and inviting the reader to try it out. Each approach has its own purposes, distinct advantages, and particular limitations; each approach springs from specific assumptions or intuitions about the text, or from a particular vantage point in our world. The series has two component parts: Insights and Strategies.
Each volume in the Insights series describes what we've learned from men and women who have changed the way we all may read the Bible by sharing the way they read it from their distinctive point of view.
The goal of the Strategies series is to pull together the variety of methods and perspectives at play in contemporary Bible interpretation, and on developing the skill and discernment to apply those methods sensitively and responsibly.
