At the UEC

Since Lera has been gone on her honeymoon and Lena is taking two on-line classes, Sergiy and I have had extra desk hours at the UEC. It seems like I might as well move in. I have been here all day and now we are about to have our big cell meeting. At least I got a break from the UEC in order to go buy food for the meeting. Usually Vitaly or others do this. I haven't in a while. We are having open-face cheese/sausage sandwiches (buterbrodi) and new cabbage and cucumber salad dressed in oil. Since it has been so cold and very little sun this spring/summer, we are just now getting some new vegetables. I was afraid we were going to miss strawberries all together.

I just finished a book on hermeneutics. It's supposed to help you better interpret the Bible. I am just as confused as ever. I have started another title on the same subject and it looks even more boring and verbose than the previous one. I thought these things were supposed to have some answers. Mostly, they just list some general principles that are supposed to be "obvious" but there isn't much argumentation as to why this interpretive principle should be followed and this one shouldn't.

I personally think that the community in which one interprets and the tradition in which one participates probably has much more to do with hermeneutics than most people give credit. Not only are we all prejudiced but so are the communities through which we frame everything. We aren't lone subject. We are communities of followers, no matter how shallow our relationships may be. Thus, I am drawn to Stanley Fish's ideas from literary theory and wonder how that would looked smacked down on top of a conservative evangelical perspective.

I also think economics has much more to do with biblical interpretation. When the Marxists lost the day, it seems the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. If some of our Bible scholars weren't so well fed and air-conditioned probably the type of stuff being taught in our schools and the books being written would be very different. Maybe it should be a requirement that all Bible professors live in government housing for a semester and survive on a minimum wage salary. Maybe I should do that? Guess I sort of did it for a while.