God’s Power Manifested Through the Marginalized

Lectionary Date: July 7, 2019 [4th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C]

This week, Justin Reed joins Rachel and Tim for a conversation all about the healing of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. Justin is Assistant Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in KY, and an ordained Baptist minister. A PhD candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary, his research and teaching interests include ethnicity in the Hebrew Bible, inner-biblical interpretation, Bible in popular culture, and reception history. Justin’s dissertation explores Genesis 9:18-29, the passage about “Noah’s curse.” Throughout millennia, interpreters have read this passage through a particular, destructive ideological lens. Informed by critical race theory, Justin challenges this long-standing bias and proposes an alternate interpretation in which the context of the primeval history in Genesis and ironic use of intertextual allusions offer crucial interpretive clues and permit a more nuanced explication of how ethnocentrism has manifested in biblical literature. Justin explores some of these issues in his chapter, “‘How—how is this just?!’: How Aronofsky and Handel Handle Noah’s Curse” in Noah as Antihero: Darren Aronofsky’s Cinematic Deluge (Routledge, 2017) edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletch and Jon Morgan.