An outsider's view
'Bridging the gap' - Mark Leuchter on Sheffield's contribution to Biblical Studies:
Any reasonable person recognizes today that the world is becoming increasingly polarized and polemical in religious matters. The Bible is in danger of being molested by radicals who wish to see a particular application of its words and ideas trump modern traditions of diplomacy, pluralism and civil dialogue, and acts of aggression and even violence between hard-line faith groups are regularly justified by relatively medieval interpretations and applications of Biblical doctrine.
On the other hand, the Bible is in danger of being completely abandoned by communities frustrated with the radical religious zeal, angered by the lack of intellectual engagement of its contents and thus finding themselves more and more isolated from a meaningful interaction with it as an important testament to human culture.
The Biblical Studies department at University of Sheffield has always held a paramount position in mediating between these two extremes. It has been a bastion of careful, responsible consideration of the Biblical tradition, recognizing its great merit in the shaping of political and social worlds over the last two thousand years even as it has regularly promoted research that brings critical questions to bear on that legacy.
The Biblical scholars who have emerged from the department in the last 30 years stand at the forefront of the field in this regard, providing countless waves of students with the opportunity to find a true golden mean in approaching the pages of the Bible, respecting the place of its contents in the formation of currents of piety while challenging the thinking person to be aware of what that means in the shifting ideological landscape of our time.
The department has also done a tremendous service to the study of the Bible, Judaism, Christianity, and the ancient and classical world within the discipline itself. We find ourselves all too often falling into discrete "camps" of scholarship: researchers in North America quite regularly ignore the major innovations of Continental European work, and the Europeans often times reject out of hand critical insights produced by North American scholars who arrive at their conclusions through the use of intellectual models that have lost popularity on the Continent.
The scholarship cultivated and promoted by the Biblical Studies department at Sheffield has regularly helped to bridge the gap between these geographically oriented scholarly trends, producing an enormous amount of publications that have helped English-language audiences in North America become familiar with what is happening across the Atlantic, and thereby allowing these scholarly audiences a chance to engage in a larger discussion of mutual benefit throughout the guild. The roster of contributors to the publications sponsored by the department is truly representative of academic diversity within the field, and the department has regularly brought those diverse modes of thinking into contact with each other.
Students entering the university will emerge with a truly heightened sense of awareness and appreciation for a collection of texts that remains absolutely essential to the Western cultural experience, private and public, religious and secular.
Mark Leuchter is Director of Jewish Studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA.
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