Searching for Meaning: Reading the Lord’s Prayer Closely
The Third Jean and Parker F. Wilson Seminar
2/27/2010( 8:30:00 AM - 1:45:00 AM )
Northway Christian Church, Dallas
Francisco Lozada, Jr, Associate Professor of New Testament and Latina/o Church Studies, Brite Divinity School

This course will explore the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4 from a variety of critical perspectives, ranging from the Lord’s Prayer’s earliest version, history on how the Prayer came about, and its literary and theological background to the more contemporary perspectives relating to social justice and liberation reflected in the Lord’s Prayer. Framing the course is the theological question of how should Christians read the Lord’s Prayer? And what does the Lord’s Prayer teach us about how to engage global issues?
Francisco Lozada, Jr. holds a doctorate in New Testament and Early Christianity from Vanderbilt University. His teaching and research interests include New Testament Studies, Cultural Biblical Interpretation, and Latino/a (Hispanic) Theology and Church Studies. He is actively involved in leadership positions in the Society of Biblical Literature. He is a past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), a past teacher of the Hispanic Summer Program: An Ecumenical Program in Theology and Religion, and a mentor for doctoral students of the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) housed at Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Lozada has published a monograph entitled A Literary Reading of John 5: Text as Construction (2000), a co-edited (with Tom Thatcher) book entitled New Currents Through John: A Global Perspective (2006), and numerous articles in cultural hermeneutics. He is currently working on a manuscript in Latino/a Biblical Hermeneutics and another in the area of New Testament Studies. Dr. Lozada is Roman Catholic.
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What did Jesus look like? Why does it matter how he is portrayed through images? Though common, our depictions of Jesus are often unquestioned and convey a great deal of unexamined messages when used in worship and teaching. In these sessions we will begin to explore these depictions to determine what if any impact they have on contemporary Christian communities and how they subtly inform larger conversations about “race,” ethnicity, and anti-semitism by privileging one conception of Christ. In four modules, we will consider the accuracy of our traditional familiar images, wrestle with the problems of “qualified Christs,” explore alternative images, and suggest a way for the Church to foster human reconciliation at the start of a new millennium.
Rodney S. Sadler, Jr. is Associate Professor of Bible at Union Presbyterian Seminary (Formerly Union-PSCE) at Charlotte. He is a graduate of Howard University (B.S.-Psychology, Philosophy), Howard School of Divinity (M.Div.), and Duke University (Ph.D. Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology). Dr. Sadler lectures and writes on the following subjects: Black Church Studies, the Bible and “Race,” Difference in Scripture, “Race” and the Face of Jesus, Biblical Archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls, and general themes in Old Testament and New Testament studies. He is widely published, serves on editorial councils of Interpretation, The African American Devotional Bible, and The Africana Bible (forthcoming) and authored a discussion on “race” in Scripture entitled Can a Cushite Change His Skin? An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible.
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St. Augustine once famously named restlessness as central to what it means to be human. “You have made us for yourself,” Augustine writes to God in his Confessions, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” In this course, we will explore how literary artists from many times and places have explored the deeply human, deeply religious enterprise that emerges from this restlessness—the enterprise of making journeys and embarking on quests. We will read and discuss excerpts from great journey narratives such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Abraham and Sarah’s journey in Genesis, The Quest of the Holy Grail, Dante’s Inferno, Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Stephanie Paulsell is the Houghton Professor of the Practice of Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School where she regularly teaches a course on the literature of journey and quest. Author of Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice (Jossey-Bass, 2002) and editor of The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher (Eerdmans, 2001), she is at work on a commentary on the Song of Songs.
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