The Bible and Modern Literature

This episode discusses how Native American writer Sherman Alexie’s poem “Crow Testament” combines a Native American Trickster figure, Crow, with multiple Bible references, to narrate the history and aftermath of White European violence against indigenous Americans. Using the stories of Cain and Abel, the battle of Jericho, and the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, “Crow Testament” situates colonial violence within the larger story of human violence narrated in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures.

This episode explores how Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "An Antebellum Sermon" uses the Exodus story to envision freedom from racialized violence in the United States. In addition to discussing how the Exodus story illuminates the White supremacist politics of Dunbar's era, the episode also uses Exodus, alongside Dunbar's poem, to reflect on the resurgence of open White nationalism in 2021 American politics.

This episode explores how British anti-war poet Wilfred Owen's poem "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" uses the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac to comment on World War I.

This episode explores how American author Ursula LeGuin's short story "She Unnames Them" makes use of the Genesis creation stories. While exploring the role of language in creating social roles, the episode also provides snapshots from the history of feminist and Womanist thought starting with Christine de Pisan, then touching upon Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Sojourner Truth, and Dr. Wilda Gafney.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's poem "Lot's Wife" draws its central images from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The story's unnamed, enigmatic character, Lot's Wife, who becomes a "pillar of salt," has fascinated rabbis, painters, and poets from antiquity to the Renaissance and into the modern world. This episode explores the poem and its source story, while exploring irresistible adjacent issues like homosexuality, the historicity of the Bible, and the role of storytelling in the construction of national identity.  

This Introduction explains what the Bible and Modern Literature podcast explores, establishing which Bible translations the host will use and previewing future episodes.