Presidential Address: Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature 22 November 2014 San Diego, California

Good Evening and Shalom everybody.

Dear Fernando:

It is an honor to introduce your presidential address, Fernando. And a great pleasure. For what you’ve done in the course of your career for biblical studies, and for the SBL, has been and still is so remarkable and so enriching.

Most of us present here know that you were originally an immigrant from Havana, Cuba. You came to the United States as a teenager after the Cuban Revolution. You are Catholic. You first studied for the priesthood, then—fortunately for all of us—moved on to biblical studies, specializing in the New Testament, chiefly in the Johannine text and traditions. You finally joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University, where you are even now. Many a budding scholar enjoyed your research, teaching, and general good sense; and the horizons of your work gradually expanded in a way that would leave a lasting impression on biblical scholarship far beyond the study of the New Testament.

You started your scholarly trajectory by analyzing biblical texts in the textual-historical manner. We were taught, and we internalized, that historical-textual criticism was the main, even the only, way to approach biblical texts “scientifically” and “objectively.” We were taught that in academic work the personal didn’t or shouldn’t matter, that the personal should be repressed in favor of reaching the truth, and that the “truth” is, by definition, something that is detached from particulars—otherwise it has no universal validity. And universal validity is what we should strive for as scholars.

But soon you rebelled, and already in the mid-1990s you published the first and second volumes of Reading from This Place, both edited together with Mary Ann Tolbert.¹ In those volumes the Subjective stars as a scholarly determinant. “Location” was understood by you as a definition not only of geography but also of social situatedness, of gender, of personal and communal theology. This now, some twenty years later, seems like no big deal. It has become a matter of common sense, in the global perspective that we’re becoming used to willingly or less so, to assume that circumstances and differences cannot but influence scholars and scholarship, and that multivocality is a blessing. But twenty years ago, turning that way was a daring move. It was daring to claim that the interpreter’s work was not only influenced, but to a large extent also determined, by the interpreter’s location, broadly understood, and that life was not separate from the Academy. To paraphrase your own words, eisegesis was and still is commonly practiced under cover of (conservative) exegesis, although not always admittedly, and you wished to contribute toward changing this stand.

Here, of course, your personal origins are decisive. You have been a naturalized American citizen for decades. And yet, as an additional identity, your original Hispanic-Latino-Cuban identity has not been forgotten. As you wrote at the time, in 2003 you went back to Cuba for the first time, having left it for the United States in 1961. You felt at home there: everything was and seemed familiar, from the local language to people to geographical neighborhoods and sights to ideologies and hopes. That familiarity was tinged with sadness but also with the realization that it was your place—and yet it wasn’t your place anymore. When I asked you recently whether you wanted to repeat the visit, or whether you could see yourself as a Cuban local again, you answered both questions with an emphatic no. You are an American, although a feeling of being diasporic is unavoidable.

So you’ve turned this duality into an asset, to complement your classical training in biblical studies. This is what enables you to promote, with empathy and understanding, a variety of approaches to biblical criticism: from various geographical locations, from gender perspectives, from diverse theologies. And it’s not incidental that you’ve paid special attention to Latin American liberation theology: the most recent book you’ve edited, together with...