Wil Gafney: Reading and Seeing from the Margins

We do everything we do in this world through our embodiment. There remains a pervasive myth that we move through this world working and creating without leaving any trace of our own lived experience upon our moving and interacting, commenting and creating. With such a mythology the dominant voices become normative, and can be associated with objective truth, obscuring the understanding and experience from the margins. In biblical scholarship, whiteness is so often unarticulated in its effect on biblical translation, that it is as if in their interpretation scholars have left no imprint of their own lived experience and perspectives. The Rev'd Dr Wil Gafney is an Episcopal Priest and Biblical scholar, specialising in a Womanist interpretation of the Bible. Womanism is an American Black women's feminist way of seeing; a lens centred in the lived experience of Black women, and especially interested in the well-being of those who are vulnerable and often exploited. In this conversation Wil speaks with Dom and Sue about the importance of attending to the multiple cultures and contexts of every text that we may be aware of dynamics of power in both the time of the text and in our own. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.