Along the lines of the theme of this year’s conference, “La Labor de los Manos,” this session draws together scholars of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sacred texts to take up questions around the translation of scripture. The panel will consider the translation of scriptural texts as a work of interpretation in various ways—as a form of devotion or moral action, as an act of hospitality or an act of exclusion, as something that can be alternatively celebrated or mourned.
Within this paper, we bring together two accounts where God reveals Godself to Mary within and through her visceral, embodied experiences of pregnancy. We ask how these two accounts inform our traditions’ understandings of God and God’s relationship to and with humanity, specifically women. We want to share two readings–one from the Gospel of Luke, the other from Surah Mariam (Q 19), that give accounts of Mary that are not shared or overlapping, but invite our imaginations and theological reflection on the example pregnant Mary gives us. In considering scripture reasoning, we analyze how these particular Marian texts transcend barriers through the personal, relational, and everyday faith lived. We start from a place of friendship, of shared personal affinity for Mary, and in this paper move to explore the two different textual accounts, before coming back together to contextualize how these particular accounts continue to motivate, shape and sustain particular communities of women across the Christian and Muslim traditions.
This paper explores the overlapping and intersecting histories of race and the Bible as a form of translation. How do biblical texts and translations refract, render, and represent race? Conversely, how are modern understandings of race reflected in, shaped by, and indebted to biblical interpretation? After establishing a working definition of race informed by critical race theory, I examine examples that illustrate a notable pattern in the history of interpretation of racializing the bible and biblicizing race.
This paper will explore the way a contemporary Jewish thinker with innovative, some might say heretical, ideas translates them back into the language of tradition bridging the new and the old through language. In doing so, the radical nature of his ideas become refracted, and normalized, through the language of the past.
This paper studies how asymmetrical relations between colonial and colonized traditions informed understandings of freedom and sovereignty in late-Ottoman Islam. It argues that these negotiations became a sight for larger ethical debates about how Islamic truth should and could be defined within the conditions that make up modern life. By centering the writings of feminists thinkers like Malak Hifni Nasef, `Aisha Taymur, and Fatima `Aliyye, it presents a notion of freedom that champions the interdependence of human, natural, and cosmological orders.