Resources by Laura Carlson Hasler

The Bible and Ethics is an emotional class for me to teach, and it is often an emotional class for my students to take. In most other classes that I teach, I try to put brackets around our conversations, like bumpers for novice bowlers. I encourage students to stay in the text of the Bible or in the world of its composition: “Okay, but where to you find that idea in the passage you just read?” I’ll ask repeatedly. Or: “That sounds like a pretty modern idea. Can you find evidence in the text that our ancient authors would have understood that concept?”But in my class The Bible and Ethics the conversation zigs and zags between ancient worlds and more modern ones. We’ll spend an entire class session on how seventeenth-century American Puritans applied the biblical story of Amalek[1] to their own experiences. Or how the 1995 Disney film Pocahontas might shed light on the Bible’s account of Rahab.[2] The Bible and Ethics class is about what biblical laws and stories meant in their ancient contexts. But it’s also about what these passages do: both the actions they have inspired in others as well as the – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising – attitudes they generate within us. In that respect, this class often gets personal, even emotional. We shudder together at Cotton Mather’s 1689 sermon[3]that urges his listeners to beat Native Americans “small as the Dust,” just like the Israelites annihilated the Amalekites. Students prickle at Lori Rowlett’s suggestion that Rahab can be read as a colonizer’s dream girl,[4] all too eager to capitulate to invaders. “I talked to my mom about this story” – one student told me after class – “and we both agreed that Rahab is brave. Besides, what other choice did she have?” She flushed a little. I did too, weighing whether to simply affirm this student’s complaint or to rearticulate the Rahab-as-colonial-fantasy argument. In the end, I tried to do both.In Part 1 of this series,[5] I explained the invitation I issue in this class for students to read biblical texts through the eyes of marginal characters. I define marginal characters as individuals that experience violence or are otherwise silenced; or those who are represented as “other” by virtue of their perceived ethnic difference, for example. During the course of the semester, we read examples[6] of scholars – ancient and modern; religiously devout and not – who have done this kind of work. I then give students the opportunity to try their hand at this kind of biblical rewriting. The idea, again, is to expand our consideration of who is human and who deserves our attention. I tell my students that, at its heart, this is an exercise all about paying attention: both to the surprising details the text itself may yield about this overlooked character and also to what you experience in the act of rewriting this account. Paying attention both to the Bible and to your own of experience retelling its story, I tell them, will offer you crucial information.Here are the directions I give students for this assignment: Select a story we have discussed in our class. Within that story, choose a character that sits on the margins of this story, by dint of the violence inflicted upon them or because of their perceived outsider status.Each rewriting should be between 400-500 words and should consciously inhabit the perspective or direct its narrative gaze on a marginalized character. (This doesn’t mean you have to adopt that character’s first-person perspective although you may choose to do that).Each rewriting should be a contextually-conscious and detailed reworking of the biblical text it is based on. That means that it needs to be footnoted, clearly deploying our secondary reading (reading 3-4 references). It should also directly reference the biblical story (4-5 references). Both sets of footnotes should explain how the specific details of the assigned reading have informed your creative reimagining. At the end of the document you must include a brief (300 word) reflection that responds to the following questions: (1) Why did you choose this character? (2) What emotions or features of this character’s experience were you attempting to convey? (3) What made this assignment challenging? (4) What was your major take-away from this assignment? If it changed the way you interpret the passage you selected, explain that. If it did not, explain that too.This assignment tends to bring up big and varied feelings in students. Students often express frustration with the absence of biblical content to go on and the demands this assignment makes on their creativity. Some struggle to present their chosen characters as intelligible. Others have told me that imagining the lives and losses of these figures have made them feel a spectrum of defensiveness, anger, liberation, and sadness. This assignment often reveals something to the student about how they have learned to read the Bible. It showcases the power of both the biblical story and their received lens for interpreting it. At its best, this assignment also gives them sense of how it might feel to read otherwise.   Notes & Bibliography[1] https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.17.10?lang=en&aliyot=0[2] https://www.sefaria.org/Joshua.2?lang=en[3] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.9783/9780812204896.53/html[4] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/culture-entertainment-and-the-bible-9780567228789/[5][6] https://jibs.hcommons.org/2022/11/02/4-2-brownsmith-call-me-by-your-name/

For the past several years, I’ve gotten obsessed with Orpah: Naomi’s other Moabite daughter-in-law in the biblical story of Ruth.[1] Often overshadowed by the story’s eponymous hero, Orpah can be read as Ruth’s opposite. When Ruth leaves everything to follow Naomi, Orpah returns to her people and her land. Ruth becomes an Israelite, Orpah remains a Moabite. I’ve been interested in Orpah ever since reading Laura Donaldson’s piece, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes.”[2] Donaldson urges us to rethink this character’s often-maligned decision to remain a Moabite in light of contemporary assimilation pressures and erased cultures. What does it mean, she asks, to read Orpah’s choice as brave instead of bad? My course, The Bible and Ethics, encourages students to get curious about Orpah’s story, to relate to her point of view, and to understand her choice to return home as intelligible, even heroic. This encouragement is part of a larger effort to humanize biblical characters that are often ignored or disparaged either within a given biblical story or in the history of its interpretation. If we can get curious about people less visible in a powerful text, the theory goes, it might prime us to see humanity more acutely elsewhere. The idea is to notice beauty, complexity, and pain in individuals and communities we have learned to ignore. But this kind of reading and seeing is difficult. Getting curious about Orpah is particularly challenging both because we have learned to overlook her and because her biblical mentions are scant. Sometimes my students don’t see the point. Why consider the story of Orpah when we have the compelling duo of Ruth and Naomi? Why follow Michal when we can think about her captivating husband, David? Why imagine the perspective of Lot’s wife or of the children who die in the smoking ruins of Sodom and Jericho when Abraham, Lot himself, and Joshua are demanding our attention? The pull of the biblical authors’ own attention is strong. Following the stories of Orpah, Michal, Lot’s wife, or a child in Sodom is like sitting in a darkened theater and trying to keep track of a character who has left the stage. Maybe they never walked on stage to begin with. Either way, it would be easier to just keep watching the show. Fortunately, we have examples of scholars and poets who have taken up the challenge of reading for characters whose stories have been lost, erased, or never written. Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”[3] and Wilda Gafney’s “Womanist Midrash”[4] offer cues and strategies to grapple with absence and to shine a light on individuals – fictional and actual, ancient and modern – whose presence we ignore. I want to be clear that this way of reading rarely makes converts. And that’s not really the point. Students, by and large, remain committed to our biblical protagonists and find accessing curiosity and empathy for marginal characters quite difficult. Poetry helps. Poetic re-imaginings of biblical stories are some of the most potent teaching tools I have both because they are pithy enough to be experienced collectively during a class meeting and because they invite us to explore the emotional quality of this kind of reading. Natalie Diaz’s “Of Course She Looked Back”[5] is a great example. Diaz’s poem – affectingly unpacked by Pádraig Ó Tuama in his Poetry Unbound podcast episode[6] – witnesses the destruction of Sodom from the perspective of Lot’s wife. What I love about this poem is where it begins. Of course Lot’s wife looked back at the ruination of her adopted home, the poet declares. In fact, “you would have, too.” As she fades from the biblical story, together with the silenced screams of Sodom’s children, Lot’s wife asks us to imagine ourselves as among the forgotten.  Notes & Bibliography[1] https://www.sefaria.org/Ruth.1?lang=en[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470775080.ch10[3] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115[4] https://www.wjkbooks.com/Products/066423903X/womanist-midrash-volume-1.aspx[5] https://onbeing.org/poetry/of-course-she-looked-back/[6] https://onbeing.org/programs/natalie-diaz-of-course-she-looked-back/

Teaching Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is one of the most challenging—and enjoyable—parts of my job. It shares some of its challenges with any other large humanities class: how to keep students engaged, reading closely, and asking sophisticated questions while they sit in a sea of their peers.Other challenges are particular to this course. I jokingly tell colleagues that I teach one of the only Gen Ed topics—the Bible—that students know everything about before entering the classroom. Which is another way of saying that it can be difficult to tap into students’ curiosity about a text they may know about intimately from other places. To be curious about a text is to be vulnerable to new ways of thinking about it and not everyone who walks into my classroom feels ready to be open in that way. Thus, while I assume that every student actually does have questions about the Bible, some are primed to offer only answers instead of queries about this text. This resistance may be due to the ideological heterogeneity of their peers, to the fact that my authority to teach derives from academic, not religious, credentials, or some other reason entirely. In any case, the large, nondevotional site that is the public university lecture hall can be a difficult context not only for students to stay engaged but also to unleash their curiosity about the Bible in the first place. The practice of Designated Respondents (DR), which I now use every semester I teach this 120-student course, does not resolve all of these difficulties. It does, however, generate conditions in which to address them by creating a framework for consistent engagement, inquiry, and connection. Practice Designated Respondents works in some ways like a sustained and structured “fishbowl.” Here is how I introduce students to it in the syllabus:Three times during this class you will be asked to serve as the “Designated Respondent” for a class meeting. This means that you will come to class more prepared than usual. I will look to you first to actively participate, respond to and pose your own questions during the course of the class. Try to speak at least once in each of your assigned sessions. If you are unable to attend one of your scheduled days, please contact me and I will assign you to another group. I divide students into six or seven groups (fifteen to twenty students per group) and begin the DR practice at the end of the second week of class, once enrollment has stabilized. For the first round many students are quite nervous to speak up. To help relieve anxiety, I open these sessions by asking students to pose their prepared questions about the reading, so they can get used to hearing their own voices. They can ask questions about anything. I only require that their questions: (1) invoke the assigned biblical reading directly; and (2) are put in terms intelligible to a broad, religiously-diverse audience. The goal here is to get students to slow down enough to let the Bible surprise them and then to make those surprises intelligible to students who may not share their guiding interpretive assumptions. I have found that after students speak up once or twice they gain confidence in this aspect of the assignment. Inviting students to sit towards the front of the room, if they are able, helps to mitigate the intimidation they may feel from speaking in a larger space.This practice means that I structure every class session around large questions and leave ample space for discussion. I put one or more of these questions on the opening slide for students to consider as they settle into the room. That way, more reticent students can contemplate and even prepare their responses in advance. EvaluationStudents assign themselves a grade for this aspect of class, though they can only assign themselves full points if they: (a) attend their assigned class session, (b) complete all the assigned reading for the day, and (c) complete the entire rubric.The self-evaluation rubric consists of the following questions:What percentage of the reading did you read in advance of this class?Describe two passages from the assigned reading that you were prepared to discuss.What two questions were you prepared to ask in this class session? Be as specific as you can, invoking the biblical text directly.Describe what engagement looked like for you during class.Out of 10 points, explain what grade you would assign yourself based on your answers to the above questions.It is worth noting that for some students, speaking in class is not just a strong disinclination but not possible or healthy. I work with students to create specific strategies for their voices to be heard during their assigned sessions. However, the evaluation rubric permits students who are not able to speak up to still articulate their questions, explain their engagement (which may consist entirely of attentive listening and active notetaking), and achieve full points.  Results Some students truly hate this assignment. It requires them to read and to attend, and it strongly encourages them to speak in a large class. Each one of these components can be profoundly challenging. But many more students, while anxious at first, find their voices through this practice. Some have shared with me that it has empowered them to speak more in other courses as well. Here is how one student recently described it: “I really liked the designated respondents! At first I thought it was terrible, but after I did it and participated in the course, I found them really beneficial. I have thoughts and answers to questions every day in the class but I am always too scared to raise my hand (simply social anxiety!) but being told that I have to respond has helped me participate more in class.” This practice has helped me forge connections with a larger percentage of students and to better understand their interpretive questions and concerns. I have also seen it generate connections among students within the class. Speaking up in class is a vulnerable act and it encourages students to be curious about the Bible and about one another. I have witnessed students, who were otherwise strangers, linger after class to talk in response to what they raised in our discussion. Finally, DR prevents any one student (or handful of students) from dominating discussion. Hearing from a diverse range of voices (by semester’s end, nearly every student has spoken) makes our class more socially-connected than is typical for a hundred-plus person course.Designated Respondents is not a panacea for the problems of student anonymity, alienation, and disengagement that hamper many large courses. However, by creating clear structures for close-reading and active participation from a wide range of voices, it creates conditions for some of these issues to be assuaged.