exegesis

Day Missions Room (streamed from private location due to COVID), Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT. November 2020

What does it mean to read? What does it mean to be read? How do we decide what words mean or how they are translated? Who can read? Who can write?

These are the questions we ask as readers of scripture, as interpreters of texts, as writers of sermons, of theology. Throughout history, and even in the present, readers, voices, and speakers of the text have been kept from the text, have been kept silent. The text has been read to/for them.

So, when we read, how do we read? As we run our fingers across the page, breathe the words over our lips, do we feel resonance or dissonance in our body? As we read scripture, are we also reading the markings of our textual interpretations on converted/subverted bodies?

Description: A reading body sits in a small empty room. יהוה‎ is being tattooed on their back without ink - bloodlining. The reader is reading a liturgical format Gospel from the Catholic tradition. As she scans the words with her fingers, she stops at each mention of the divine, pricks her finger and marks it with blood.