New And Old Horizons In The Orality Movement

Orality formed us. Orality forms us. Orality will forever form us. Orality is a central theme of our lives. In this fast-paced world, few Christian workers take the time to look back to learn and build on the lessons of the past. Wise Christian workers, however, do not forge ahead into new horizons without first investigating past horizons. They understand in this complex world there are too many strong shoulders of the past to be overlooked. The dozen practiced researchers contributing to New and Old Horizons in the Orality Movement offer such inquirers wisdom from the past that can boldly and boundlessly improve the future of the modern-day orality movement.

Character Theology provides a natural, universal way for the world to engage God through his chosen cast of characters. As the media eras continue to change (oral to print to digital-virtual), too many Bible scholars, and consequently pastors and Bible teachers in the West and beyond, lack capability to effectively communicate Scripture to Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. These generations find little if any relevance in the Christianity promoted by those stuck in modernity’s sticky abstract systematic theology. Character Theology relates, sticks, and transforms these generations. Why? Because people grasp and engage God most naturally and precisely through his interaction with biblical characters and their interaction with each other! Characters communicate the Creator’s characteristics. The roadmap to the recovery and expansion of Christianity in the twenty-first century will be through Bible characters.

Have Western exegetes turned an Eastern book into a Western one? Has our fondness for a fixed printed text capable of being analyzed with precision and exactitude blinded us to other hermeneutic possibilities? Does God require all people to be able to analyze grammar to interpret Scripture? Does God assume all people can interpret Scripture through oral means? The authors recognize the effects of centuries of literacy socialization that produced a blind spot in the Western Christian world--the neglect by most in the academies, agencies, and assemblies of the foundational and forceful role orality had on the biblical text and teaching. From the inspired spoken word of the prophets, including Jesus (pre-text), to the elite literate scribes who painstakingly hand-printed the sacred text, to post-text interpretation and teaching, the footprint of orality throughout the entire process is acutely visible to those having the oral-aural influenced eyes of the Mediterranean ancients. Could oral hermeneutics be the "mother of relational theology"?

This book is dedicated to the present global generation of Bible storytellers. It will challenge you to learn from the rich history of the Orality Movement, do your cultural homework related to the integration of symbol, story and ritual, and tell the greatest story ever told with cultural and pedagogical clarity so that individual, communal, and national transformation can result, creating generations of like-minded Bible storytellers.

This book is a unique inquiry into the history and the ongoing moral significance of mass communication as an idea and social form.

This book examines the impact of changing modes of cultural transmission on Jewish and Western cultures over the past two thousand years. The contributors to the volume survey some of the ways -- conscious and subconscious -- in which cultural elements arc selected, shaped, and transmitted, and some of the ways they in turn shape the future of their cultures. Focusing on a range of Jewish cultures from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period, the authors consider both the transformation of traditions in their travels from one contemporaneous cultural context to another and their transformation within a single culture overtime. Some of the studies in the book deal with the transition from mixed oral-written cultures to ones in which written-print is nearly exclusive. Other chapters deal with the processes of transmission such as anthologizing, translating, teaching, and sermonizing. By contextualizing Jewish culture within Western culture and including a comparative perspective, the book makes an important contribution to Judaic studies as well as to other areas of the humanities concerned with questions of textuality and culture.

How language works in the worship of the church has been vigorously debated during the period of liturgical revision in the twentieth century coming at the end of what is known as the Liturgical Movement. Focusing upon the Church of England and the Anglican tradition, this book traces the history of ‘liturgical language’ as it begins in the Early Church, but with particular emphasis upon the English Reformation liturgies, their background in the Medieval Church and literature and their long and varied life in the Church of England after 1662. Inter-disciplinary in scope, yet rooted in a literary approach, the volume provides a rigorous study of the effect of liturgy upon the theological and devotional life of the Church.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.