Religion, Barnard College Women, War, and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation after 9.11 :: September 11 Terrorism Essays

Religion, Barnard College Women, War, and evangelistic Biblical Interpretation after 9.11 One of the most disturbing things approximately living in New York City since 9.11 has been the way in which the U.S. has been qualified to wage war on Afghanistan and now maybe Iraq, with very inadequate public outcry. Id like to suggest that behind the apathy, current traditions of Christian scriptural interpretation may be at work, traditions that romp feminine figures in very particular slipway. These are interpretive traditions around salvation memorial, and apocalypse.Of course, one of the reasons that many people, particularly liberals, have not contrasted the war is the discourse of saving Afghan women. There have been a number of insightful postcolonial reappraisals of this discourse and how it harms Afghan and Muslim womenfor example, Lila Abu-Lughods shed given at Columbia University, Responding to War, which built on Gayatri Spivaks critique that so often white men feel they have to render brown women from brown men. I would like to take these critiques as a premise, plainly move in a slightly different mode to consider where white men get their savior-complexes. I am interested in how interpretations of the bible shape political events and how the interpretive traditions of salvation history and apocalypse may be grounding this neo-colonial discourse of saving women. here Im not just talking about media rhetoric, but also about how people respond to that rhetoric and how certain ways of reading the bible position them to respond to that rhetoric. Given that evangelicalism and fundamentalism are alive(predicate) and well in the U.S, I think its important to consider how greenness interpretations of the bible are part of the political calculus. This magnate be an explicit point, but I think that those of us on the left might bemoan the Christian Right without paying attention to precisely how biblical interpretations get incorpo rated mainstream discourse. However, my comments here are meant to be more implicative than conclusive.The trope of Israel as a woman gets taken up in salvation history oriented interpretations of the Hebrew Bible in predictable ways. Israel is commonly read as woman who must alternately be punished and saved, and then ultimately led into dominion over opposite nations. For instance, Ive documented some examples of these kinds of reading in my work on