Religion, Barnard College Women, War, and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation after 9.11 :: September 11 Terrorism Essays

Religion, Barnard College Wowork force, War, and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation after 9.11 i of the most disturbing things about living in New York metropolis since 9.11 has been the way in which the U.S. has been able to wage war on Afghanistan and nowadays whitethornbe Iraq, with very little public outcry. Id wish well to suggest that behind the apathy, certain traditions of Christian biblical interpretation may be at work, traditions that feature feminine figures in very circumstance ways. These ar interpretive traditions around salvation history, and apocalypse.Of course, one of the reasons that many people, in particular liberals, have not opposed the war is the discourse of saving Afghan women. There have been a number of insightful postcolonial critiques of this discourse and how it harms Afghan and Muslim womenfor example, Lila Abu-Lughods talk given at Columbia University, Responding to War, which reinforced on Gayatri Spivaks critique that so often white men feel they have to save brown women from brown men. I would manage to take these critiques as a premise, but move in a slightly different direction to consider where white men shit their savior-complexes. I am interested in how interpretations of the bible shape political events and how the interpretive traditions of salvation history and apocalypse may be grounding this neo-colonial discourse of saving women. Here Im not right talking about media rhetoric, but also about how people answer to that rhetoric and how certain ways of rendition the bible position them to act to that rhetoric. Given that evangelicalism and fundamentalism are alive and well in the U.S, I figure its important to consider how common interpretations of the bible are part of the political calculus. This might be an obvious point, but I think that those of us on the left might bemoan the Christian Right without salaried attention to precisely how biblical interpretations get incorporated mai nstream discourse. However, my comments here are meant to be more suggestive than conclusive.The trope of Israel as a muliebrity gets taken up in salvation history oriented interpretations of the Hebraic Bible in predictable ways. Israel is commonly read as char who must alternately be punished and saved, and then ultimately guide into dominion over other nations. For instance, Ive documented some examples of these kinds of reading in my work on