On Monday Gil Scott-Heron will be releasing a new album. It his first in 15 years. I am, to say the least, excited. I remember the first time I heard Gil’s We Almost Lost Detroit. It pretty much blew my mind. Everything I’ve heard from him since then, most of it dating from the 60s and 70s, has been similarly impressive. He had some impressive observations about the similarities between American and South African apartheid. One of my favorite lines from his earlier work is "I believe in the separation of church and state, especially that church and that state."

This text makes repeated use of several strophes and metaphors. They include: "I adjure you, O maidens of Jerusalem, / By gazelles or by hinds of the field: Do not wake or rouse / Love until it please!" (2:7, 3:5, 8:4); the vineyard as a woman’s sexuality, the woman’s eyes being like those of a dove, the man being like a stag, the woman’s sexuality as a garden, "I met the watchmen / Who patrol the town" (3:3, 5:7), hair as flock of goats and teeth like ewes. The major theme among all of these metaphors and strophes is clearly to compare sexuality with nature, in particular fruits, flowers, livestock and a few wild animals. In the context of the primarily agrarian society in which the text was written such metaphors/strophes make a lot of sense. (more…)

My sermons "A Share Ministry (with Rachel Webb)," "Radical Hospitality," "Wrestling with Materialism" and "What Is to be Done" are now all on-line. My two last sermons remaining to be posted–"Remembering the Black Humanist Fellowship of Liberation" and "God Loves Everyone"–will be up sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Longtime family friend Marketa Luskacova is featured on the front cover of the March issue of B&W magazine. I have mentioned Marketa on this site before. My recipe for czech fruit dumplings originated with her and a couple of years ago I posted a few of her images from the 1968 Prague spring that had been reprinted in the LA Times. If you get a chance check out the article. It is quite good and the photographs are fantastic.

I finished 1 Samuel this morning. My outline of the text is below. In the next week or so I am going to post my outline of 2 Samuel as well as my outline of Ruth and The Song of Solomon. I am reading Ruth and The Song of Solomon out of order as part of my prepartion for my January 31st sermon Love, Sex and the Bible. Incidentially, for anyone who is interested, the two texts of Biblical criticism that I intend to read as part of my sermon preparation are Sex in the Bible: a New Consideration and God by Harold Ellens and the Rhetoric of Sexuality by Phyllis Trible. If anyone out there has better suggestions I would love to hear them.

1 Samuel Outline and Notes

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by Rev. Colin Bossen, January 17, 2010

We gather this morning, on the occasion of his 81st birthday, to celebrate the life of a man who strove for peace and racial reconciliation, a man who above almost all others is lauded as a model for civic virtue and self-sacrifice. On such occasions it is customary to present a sanitized version of the man that is almost suprahuman. This man, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is portrayed, from the contemporary standpoint, as uncontroversial and his cause is described as worthy and just.

I just posted three sermons from last year on the Society’s web site. They are "A Black Christ," "Learning to Fall" and "Letter to the President-Elect." I should have the remaining five sermons from my backlog up by the end of the week.

I recently joined a book group in my neighborhood that is reading Vol. 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital over the course of the year. We are using David Harvey’s video lectures as a guide. As has been my practice with the Bible over the last few months I will be posting my notes on the book on-line. I imagine that I will do the same with other major texts that I read in the future. Like my Bible outlines the notes largely serve as summaries of different portions of the work. Personally commentary will be, to the extent possible, bracketed off as reflections. (For anyone waiting on them, my notes of 1 Samuel and, possibly, 2 Samuel will be up by the week’s end).