Teaching Bible with Art

Some Things I've Been Working On

Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, by Diego Velázquez - http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/8710/kitchen-maid-with-the-supper-at-emmaus, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9459270

As long as I have studied the Bible, I have done so alongside and with art. My dissertation was about the Roman catacombs, including substantial discussions of catacomb depictions of biblical texts and the potential meanings that might have surrounded them. I have written about biblical manuscripts, and the way the materiality of those texts—including illuminations or illustrations—work as part of the interpretative framework people bring to them. I have written four commentary sets for the Visual Commentary on Scripture, and I’m currently working on a fifth, all of which curate exhibitions of visual art to accompany biblical texts. I’ve reviewed books on visual art and the Bible, and one of my forthcoming articles (which I’m really proud of) reads the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection with and through depictions in paint. And one of my current long-term projects is a collaboration with a visual artist on a book about biblical narratives.

All of that has taken me further and further into the world of visual art, and it has made me more and more curious about the possibilities of interpreting Bible with and alongside art, and of teaching and learning with art. This December, funded by a grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, I’m researching arts-based pedagogies and working on a potential class based on art and Bible.

This research has a few potential audiences. I want to show the grantors that I am doing what I said I would do with their funding, so Wabash is an audience, certainly. My students are a potential audience, since I am funneling this research into a class to be taught at some point in the future, and into innovations in the classes I already teach. When the collaboration with the visual artist comes to fruition, I hope to use some of the things I have learned in this season to enhance the public-facing aspects of that project. But in the shorter term, I wanted to share some of the things I have been reading and thinking about here. These are not finished thoughts by any means, but a view into the way I am putting things together and learning during this time.

One of the most interesting articles that I have read so far, one that has really framed my thinking in unexpected ways, is Educated Feet: Tap Dancing and Embodied Feminist Pedagogies at a Small Liberal Arts College, by Sonja Thomas, which was published in the journal Feminist Teacher 27.2-3 in 2017. I came across this article unexpectedly during a keyword search in my institution’s databases, and I find it fascinating. In it, Thomas is thinking about the ways some expressions of scholarship or knowledge are thought of as legitimate, and others are thought of as illegitimate—and what the differences between the reactions say about how we authenticate and privilege knowledge. In Thomas’s case, she is thinking about tap dancing, and she’s thinking about it in two ways. First, she’s noticing how marginalized tap is in the academic world where she works; she writes that she has worked hard to “rethink the separation I had made between ‘silly’ tap dance and ‘professional’ feminist academic work.” Second, though, Thomas is pointing out that tap dance is actually an ideal lens through which to interrogate things like gender, sexuality, class, and race, and that it not only belongs in the “professional” contexts where it is sometimes not welcome, but that it works exceedingly well there. The places where lots of things meet are good places from which to think about the things that are intersecting. (If we imagine that we want to know a lot about roads, then an intersection might be one of the best places to stand, because it’s by definition a place where roads come together). It sounds straightforward, but as her article demonstrates, there’s a bias against that kind of thinking.

The parallels with biblical studies are substantial. In biblical studies, a handful of methodologies and approaches get the field’s approval as “professional” or authoritative, while a bunch of others get pushed into that “silly” category, or otherwise marked as unserious, or “unprofessional,” to use Thomas’s language. This is something I have been thinking about in my teaching and publishing for a while now, though not in nearly as sophisticated ways as people like Denise Kimber Buell and the late Gay Byron who point out the structural biases in the fields of biblical studies and early Christian studies. Why do the interpretive methods that came out of the European Enlightenment get thought of as neutral or universal, but things like feminist interpretation or postcolonial interpretation get understood as “perspectival” or “situated” or “identity-based”? And why do we not do more questioning of that so-called neutrality?

What I like about Thomas’s article is her focus on “embodied feminist learning,” which in her case is tap dance, to help students make connections, and to “dismantle the imaginary and racialized boundary between what is considered ‘professional’ and ‘unprofessional’ teaching and  research.” For my field, biblical studies, I think visual art has the potential to do something similar—to take the interpretation of the Bible out of the realm of only books and texts, as a discursive field dominated by ideas from 19^th-century Europe, and to democratize and widen the scope of how students are invited to participate in and respond to the text and the lived experiences and material instantiations of it.

I’ve been thinking about Thomas’s argument in conversation with another piece I’ve read this week, The Margin Speaks: On the Radical Possibilities of Embodied Knowledge as Decolonial Pedagogy, by Kimberly D. McKinson, published in Cultural Anthropology 37.3, in 2022. In that article, McKinson is describing practices of “auto-ethnography” and “photovoice” that she uses in her teaching. Those are both complicated terms, but they boil down to something like describing one’s self and learning to speak through photography, specifically by using the camera on your phone. What I like about this is that it is approachable, and probably familiar to a lot of people. Most people have phones with decent cameras these days, so it’s an interesting thing to assign students to do—to use those phones to develop their own “photovoice” and then use that voice to give an account of themselves. In thinking about my own context of teaching biblical studies, I like the idea of using photography this way, because it’s something most (but not all, which is important to keep in mind) students will have access to. It’s visual without depending on the hand-skills needed for drawing or painting. It’s not that it’s easy to be good at photography, but rather that it’s a medium to which many people are at least casually accustomed, and which has a fairly low barrier of entry in the time and place where I teach. So, I’ve been imagining a class (or an assignment within a class) in which I invite students to respond to or interpret biblical texts through an auto-ethnographic practice of photography—curating an exhibition, for example, of images that arise out of a reading of Revelation, or the Psalms, or the idea of Easter or baptism as described or expressed in biblical texts. It’s not something that has much of a history within biblical studies at all, but it might be a doorway to different modes of interpretation, in the way that McKinson describes as “decolonial,” that in my context would help students sidestep some of the big methodological orthodoxies of studying the Bible.

In the flagship journal of biblical studies, the Journal of Biblical Literature, Brian K. Blount published an article (a transcript of his SBL presidential address) titled The Souls of Biblical Folks and the Potential for Meaning (JBL 138.1, 2019), in which he suggested that we reimagine the discipline and guild of biblical studies as a border-crossing enterprise. Blount’s article points out the ways knowledge is privileged in the field in ways that are similar to Thomas’s example of tap dancing, limiting “serious” “meaning potential” to more traditional (whiter, maler, more European, straighter, etc.) methodologies. Blount argues that we ought instead to be transcultural interpreters, learning to read from our own places but also with regard for others’ places and spaces, and the ideologies that might come with them. He suggests a pedagogical practice—and this is partly what caught my eye—of coalition building. Assuming a “surplus of meaning” in the text, the classroom would become a space of finding partners and collaborators for understanding the emerging meanings of biblical texts together, crossing the borders between ourselves and others, and building coalitional interpretations. As someone who sometimes struggles with the way the field has been organized traditionally, this seems like a thrilling idea. And it would be perfect for the kinds of students I teach, who already are suspicious of dominant and dominating narratives, and who are already interested in solidarity across supposed borders.

I also came across a pair of articles from Wabash’s own Journal on Teaching, from 1.1 in 2020—a longer one by John Van Maaren titled Transformative Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Toward a Threshold Concept Framework for Biblical Studies, and a shorter one by Tat-siong Benny Liew, titled Teaching the Bible as a Threshold Concept in a Liberal Arts Context. Liew’s piece is responding to Van Maaren’s piece, and offering an example of how it might work in a classroom, using visual art and video. These both helped me think about how I might use art to think about my learning goals in courses (related to the “Threshold Concepts” that both are discussing), and how art might be helpful in illustrating some of the things I want students to grasp. Liew’s example is around the threshold concept of authority, which is a very powerful one in biblical studies, and not always an easy one to cross. His use of art (Diego Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, seen above) seems like a promising way to talk about Bible, because it takes Bible out of its special category somewhat, and shows how, even if people think Bible is different from everything else, it is still subject to the same patterns of interpretation as everything else, and its interpretation is still contested and contextual—which speaks to the question of authority. I find it helpful as an example of how art can serve as a pedogogical and theoretical tool, and not simply an illustration of the Bible and its authority.

These articles might seem disparate and unrelated, but they (plus many others) are helping me put some things together during the period of this grant. They’re helping me think about how I might use visual art in my classes in multiple ways, and how I might construct a class from the starting point of visual art (photography, and photovoice) as an interpretive tool. I still have a lot more work to do, and more writing and research, but so far I am feeling energized by the chance to think about these things in intentional ways.