Marie Hause, Carla Godwin, and Victoria Reynolds Farmer discuss the Song of Songs. Listen here.

Knowing

• Background on the Song of Songs, its history of interpretation, and why it’s of interest for feminists
• Our previous experiences of the Song

Reading

• Summary of Phyllis Trible, “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed,” in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality
• Summary of Renita Weems’s entry on the Song in the Women’s Bible Commentary
• Our own responses to Trible and Weems and our own takes on the Song and how it can or should be read from a feminist perspective
  • regret not having been exposed to these perspectives sooner for my own pedagogy; interested in the Song’s relationship to the Petrarchan blazon tradition; really inspired by Weems’ discussion of the Song as inter-Biblical midrash
  • reference to Dr. Tina Schermer Seller’s book, Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy.
  • potential problems from a feminist perspective, raised by David Clines in “Why Is There a Song of Songs (And What Does It Do to You When You Read It)?” (from Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible); potential problems with reinforcing heteronormativity in interpreting the Song, with reference to Virginia Burrus and Stephen Moore, “Unsafe Sex: Feminism, Pornography, and the Song of Songs” and Christopher King’s entry on the Song in The Queer Bible Commentary

Passing On

• Pope John Paul II’s “Reflections on the Song of Songs” from The Theology of the Body (Pauline Books, 1997, 368-75)
• This Is My Body, Cameron Dezen Hammon
• The Queer Bible Commentary

Apologies for the low audio quality at some points in this episode.

Image credit: Virgin’s Monastery, Petrópolis, Brazil | CC