Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies - SCIBS

Today!

Coming up on 23 March, Dr Emma Rhatigan (University of Sheffield) will present her research in a paper titled, ‘A limited and restrained form’: John Donne Reads the Penitential Psalms

Abstract: "This paper explores John Donne's sermons on the Penitential Psalms. I argue that when preaching on the psalms Donne was highly attentive to their status as poetry, often evoking what his contemporaries might call a rhetorical (what we might term a 'literary') interpretative framework alongside his theological analysis. Moreover, as a poet himself, I consider how Donne was not just attuned to the psalms as poetry, but also self-consciously aware that his reading of them would be shaped by his own experience of writing verse. I focus on two rhetorical figures which have long been associated with Donne's poetry, metaphor and prosopopoeia, and ask how these might have guided Donne's exegesis."

Please register at bit.ly/SCIBS202526

Coming up on 23 March, Dr Emma Rhatigan (University of Sheffield) will present her research in a paper titled, ‘A limited and restrained form’: John Donne Reads the Penitential Psalms

Abstract: "This paper explores John Donne's sermons on the Penitential Psalms. I argue that when preaching on the psalms Donne was highly attentive to their status as poetry, often evoking what his contemporaries might call a rhetorical (what we might term a 'literary') interpretative framework alongside his theological analysis. Moreover, as a poet himself, I consider how Donne was not just attuned to the psalms as poetry, but also self-consciously aware that his reading of them would be shaped by his own experience of writing verse. I focus on two rhetorical figures which have long been associated with Donne's poetry, metaphor and prosopopoeia, and ask how these might have guided Donne's exegesis."

Please register at bit.ly/SCIBS202526

Our first SCIBS research seminar of the year is coming up, on 9 March at 2pm. We are very pleased to host Lois McFarland (University of Edinburgh). Her talk is titled:"Q***r Resistance to Apocalyptic Narratives in Speculative Fiction"

Abstract:
Several recent works of speculative fiction feature q***r characters resisting certain affective responses to impending apocalyptic destruction. Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking and its sequel The Shutouts are among those that portray sapphic love amidst global catastrophe, and the chance of rescue offered only to a privileged few. Alderman explicitly situates her novel in conversation with Gen. 18-19’s narrative of destruction of S***m and Gomorrah, and Korn’s novels can be read alongside the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic texts. This seminar explores the novels’ use of biblical narratives of destruction and asks how q***r (biblical) scholarship offers ways of thinking through times of fear and crisis that are counter-apocalyptic (Catherine Keller), while still remaining future-oriented (Nicole Seymour).

All welcome; please register at bit.ly/SCIBS202526 for the link to join.

Please be aware that the seminar scheduled for 17 Nov with Dr Jennifer Barry has been cancelled due to industrial action at the University of Sheffield, to stop the ideological cuts to our university and to protect our jobs. We will reschedule with Dr Barry at a later date.

Today!

The next SCIBS seminar with Tim Hutchings will be on 10 November at 2pm.

Tim Hutchings (Nottingham University): "The Bible in the RE Classroom: Education Reform, Worldviews and the Politics of Change"

Please register to join at this link: https://forms.gle/ECDKxqUHpBwEtHus6

Full seminar schedule: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tsR0WNVn7yH40KJjbJToaAi4YNwM8WPAbFc_jPuF_Kw/edit?tab=t.0

The abstract for Dr Hutchings's paper is as follows:

In the modern RE classroom, what place is there for the Bible? What value do today's curriculum developers place on textual knowledge or the skills of biblical study? How do teachers invite pupils to engage with the Bible, and how do pupils respond? Religious Education is a compulsory subject at all primary and secondary schools in England, but the curriculum is determined locally by hundreds of committees, trusts and other groups. Curriculum reform is essential to maintain the relevance of the subject in a rapidly changing society, but the RE community must negotiate with dozens of interest groups, teacher associations, faith communities, academy trusts, politicians and other stakeholders before any national programme of change can be implemented. For the last five years, the RE Council of England and Wales has tried to promote a new approach to the subject called "Religion and Worldviews", which moves beyond the classic World Religions approach to set RE on a new foundation. According to the RE Council, this new approach is interdisciplinary, academically rigorous, responsive to social change and relevant to non-religious as well as religious children. The Religion and Worldviews approach has been developed into a published handbook and a set of trial curricula and forms the basis for a new National Content Standard that aims to establish a shared national understanding of what quality looks like in Religious Education. Opponents of Religion and Worldviews have been outspoken and combative, arguing that this approach is too sociological, too relativistic, gives too much space to nonreligious perspectives and undermines the privileged place of Christian theology and religious philosophy within the curriculum. This paper explores what is happening to the Bible in this rapidly changing and fractious educational environment. Using interviews with curriculum developers and teachers and a survey of current classroom resources, we ask how the Bible fits into the new paradigm of Religion and Worldviews education. Is the Bible being left behind, as a relic of an outdated approach, or has teaching about the Bible managed to adapt? Better understanding of the contested place of biblical study in schools may indicate spaces and partnerships where future intervention into school education by academic biblical scholars would be welcomed.

The next SCIBS seminar with Tim Hutchings will be on 10 November at 2pm.

Tim Hutchings (Nottingham University): "The Bible in the RE Classroom: Education Reform, Worldviews and the Politics of Change"

Please register to join at this link: https://forms.gle/ECDKxqUHpBwEtHus6

Full seminar schedule: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tsR0WNVn7yH40KJjbJToaAi4YNwM8WPAbFc_jPuF_Kw/edit?tab=t.0

The abstract for Dr Hutchings's paper is as follows:

In the modern RE classroom, what place is there for the Bible? What value do today's curriculum developers place on textual knowledge or the skills of biblical study? How do teachers invite pupils to engage with the Bible, and how do pupils respond? Religious Education is a compulsory subject at all primary and secondary schools in England, but the curriculum is determined locally by hundreds of committees, trusts and other groups. Curriculum reform is essential to maintain the relevance of the subject in a rapidly changing society, but the RE community must negotiate with dozens of interest groups, teacher associations, faith communities, academy trusts, politicians and other stakeholders before any national programme of change can be implemented. For the last five years, the RE Council of England and Wales has tried to promote a new approach to the subject called "Religion and Worldviews", which moves beyond the classic World Religions approach to set RE on a new foundation. According to the RE Council, this new approach is interdisciplinary, academically rigorous, responsive to social change and relevant to non-religious as well as religious children. The Religion and Worldviews approach has been developed into a published handbook and a set of trial curricula and forms the basis for a new National Content Standard that aims to establish a shared national understanding of what quality looks like in Religious Education. Opponents of Religion and Worldviews have been outspoken and combative, arguing that this approach is too sociological, too relativistic, gives too much space to nonreligious perspectives and undermines the privileged place of Christian theology and religious philosophy within the curriculum. This paper explores what is happening to the Bible in this rapidly changing and fractious educational environment. Using interviews with curriculum developers and teachers and a survey of current classroom resources, we ask how the Bible fits into the new paradigm of Religion and Worldviews education. Is the Bible being left behind, as a relic of an outdated approach, or has teaching about the Bible managed to adapt? Better understanding of the contested place of biblical study in schools may indicate spaces and partnerships where future intervention into school education by academic biblical scholars would be welcomed.

Our first research seminar of the semseter is on Monday 20 October, featuring the work of Dr Alexiana Fry. Her paper is titled ‘If I Am Pleasing’: Esther and the Fawn Response'. Please register to attend at the link: https://bit.ly/SCIBS202526

Abstract: Esther is often discussed in binary, in that she is either a damnation to the feminist cause, or is the perfect model of womanhood in the Bible. She is seen as a people-pleaser, manipulative, cunning. In paying attention to her consistent precarity and identity markers of subordinate status, being orphan, woman, Jewish, exile, this paper will demonstrate her behaviour through the lens of the trauma response 'fawn'. This interpretation renders Esther's fawning as not only a survival mechanism for interpersonal engagement because of her precarity, but also how these coincide with many areas of lack-of-attachment/failed attachments/care have shut her off from her own needs and necessitate the use of co-dependence, obedience, and hypervigilance to “respond to threats by becoming appealing to the threat.” Acting in ways that avoid danger (relatively speaking) and diffuse conflict, in order to create a façade of safety, is an extremely effective and even rewarded trauma response; however, it also forces one to abandon oneself. With a thorough description of what the fawn response is, examples of it in Esther’s narrative, and even a response to what can be seen as a fight response by the end of her story (thus holistically understanding trauma responses as fluid), this presentation will attend to a more nuanced understanding via a trauma hermeneutic of the often misunderstood Esther.

Our Autumn semester schedule of research talks is now available! Please email to receive the link to join.

20 October, Alexiana Fry (University of Copenhagen): ‘If I Am Pleasing’: Esther and the Fawn Response

10 November, Tim Hutchings (Nottingham University): The Bible in the RE Classroom: Education Reform, Worldviews and the Politics of Change

17 November, Jennifer Barry (University of Mary Washington): Gender Violence in Late Ancient Domestic Spaces

8 December, Lois McFarland (University of Edinburgh): Q***r Resistance to Apocalyptic Narratives in Speculative Fiction

Full schedule with abstracts at the link:

PUBLIC Research Seminar Schedule 2025-26 Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies Research Seminar Schedule 2025-26 Unless otherwise noted, seminars take place online on Mondays from 2–3:30pm. Please email [email protected] for the link to join. To view abstracts, click on the title of each paper. Semester 1...

Today! Still time to get the meeting link. Just send us an email.

Please join us on Monday 17 March for our next research seminar, featuring our current Sir Henry Stephenson Research Fellow, Matt Williams.

Matt will give a paper titled, "Spiting the Land That Feeds Us? Considering an Agrarian Concept of Home."

Abstract: ‘Home’ is a sufficiently ubiquitous term in general parlance as to require no definition, at least it would seem. At the same time, competing understandings of – and claims to – home play an increasingly significant and divisive role in key political debates today. Generally lacking in Western conceptions of home, despite their wide diversity, is a sense of the importance of land (especially cultivatable land). Thinkers such as Wendell Berry and those influenced by him respond to this development with a self-consciously agrarian counterpoint, which resonates with the situation of subsistence farmers around the world in places such as Northern Malawi. What insight can be gained by putting these contemporary agrarian perspectives into dialogue with notions of home found in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament? Is there a challenge here to rethink aspects of ‘development’ that have come to be taken for granted in the ‘developed’ world?

Please email Meredith Warren for the link to join.

Please join us on Monday 17 March for our next research seminar, featuring our current Sir Henry Stephenson Research Fellow, Matt Williams.

Matt will give a paper titled, "Spiting the Land That Feeds Us? Considering an Agrarian Concept of Home."

Abstract: ‘Home’ is a sufficiently ubiquitous term in general parlance as to require no definition, at least it would seem. At the same time, competing understandings of – and claims to – home play an increasingly significant and divisive role in key political debates today. Generally lacking in Western conceptions of home, despite their wide diversity, is a sense of the importance of land (especially cultivatable land). Thinkers such as Wendell Berry and those influenced by him respond to this development with a self-consciously agrarian counterpoint, which resonates with the situation of subsistence farmers around the world in places such as Northern Malawi. What insight can be gained by putting these contemporary agrarian perspectives into dialogue with notions of home found in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament? Is there a challenge here to rethink aspects of ‘development’ that have come to be taken for granted in the ‘developed’ world?

Please email Meredith Warren for the link to join.

Coming up next week, on 10 March:
*Ela Nutu Hall (University of Sheffield) will give a paper, "How Salomé Fell for the Baptist, or John the Baptist as L’Homme Fatal: Artistic Interpretations of a Biblical Narrative"*

Please join us online; email Meredith Warren to join.

Abstract:
According to the Bible, John the Baptist is executed by decapitation at the request of a little girl. The biblical account is very brief, yet Herodias’ daughter (known later as Salome) has become for many the quintessential femme fatale. Her metamorphosis is largely due to Salomé’s power to inspire artists, whose sensory interpretations of the biblical narrative have, in turn, left an indelible mark on the readers’ imagination. For example, when Oscar Wilde used the biblical narrative as inspiration for his play Salomé (1891), one of the criticisms that he received was that it had a ‘nauseating’ effect on the audience, most strikingly due to Salomé’s sexual interest in the Baptist (which culminates in her kissing the decapitated head of the prophet on the mouth). This sexual element is completely absent from the biblical text, so how did it emerge? Is Oscar Wilde responsible for it? Is it typical of his time? Pablo Picasso also chose to portray Salomé naked and, intriguingly, placed in the midst of itinerant acrobats, musicians and clowns. Picasso’s Salomé etching (1905) depicts her dancing in front of Herod; her complete nakedness exposed to him, her left leg kicking the air. But how did John the Baptist become the poster boy for biblical masculinity? As another example, the figure of the Baptist emerging from Auguste Rodin’s bronze statue ‘Saint John the Baptist’ (1880) does certainly exude virility: naked, tall, purposeful, with clearly defined muscles, proud genitalia and legs apart. Rodin is not alone in depicting the Baptist in sexualised tones. This paper investigates the complex relationships between the biblical text and some of its literary and artistic interpretations, with a particular focus on the emergence of Salomé as femme fatale and the Baptist’s as the archetype of virile masculinity – l’homme fatal (?) – in fin-de-siècle Europe.

Our seminar series for spring is now available! 📆 Featuring Ela Nutu Hall (Sheffield), Sir Henry Stephenson fellow Matt Williams, Tim Hutchings (Nottingham), and Lois McFarland (Edinburgh). 📚

Research Seminar Schedule 2024-25 Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies Research Seminar Schedule 2024-25 Unless otherwise noted, seminars take place online on Mondays from 2–3:30pm. Please email [email protected] for the link to join. Semester 2 10 March Ela Nutu Hall (University of Sheffield) How ...