Yearly Archives: 2017

A Relational, Recursive, Eschatological and Sacrificial Model for the Humanities

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Categories: Presentations

A gathering of fourteen Harvey Fellows, organized by Randy Heinig with help from Laura Yoder, Bryan McGraw, Amy Reynolds, and Mark Jonas, provided an encouraging forum and some invaluable feedback on a mini-paper in which I define more systematically than I have before my approach to religious studies as a practice of sacrificial listening:

“A Relational, Recursive, Eschatological and Sacrificial Model for the Humanities.” Harvey Fellows Symposium “Christ in the Culture 2017,” Wheaton, Illinois, September 16, 2017.

Here is a pdf of the two-page paper. It addresses an audience of fellow Christians; one of my long-term projects is to articulate it in terms that will resonate with a broader academic audience. During discussion Pat Kain made the important suggestion that I address not only the negative experiences of misunderstanding but also the positive experiences of (partial) understanding that point ahead to the eschatological consummation of that interpersonal understanding toward which my scholarship is directed.

vishanoff.com is now a complete archive of my scholarship

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Categories: Personal

Today I finished posting on vishanoff.com all my old conference papers and publications. This makes the site a complete archive of my scholarship, with pdf files of almost all the papers and slides to which I own the copyright, and links to all the rest.

I post new items every one to three months, and you can subscribe to receive notifications of new scholarship using the “subscribe by email” or “RSS” buttons on the left sidebar.

There are four main ways to find things:

  • The links in my c.v.
  • The list of “themes in my work” in the right sidebar.
  • The year-by-year archives at the bottom of the right sidebar.
  • The search icon in the upper right corner.

Thank you for your interest in my work!

David Vishanoff
University of Oklahoma

European and Islamic Contributions to an Anthropocentric Qur’anic Hermeneutic

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Categories: Presentations

Mehdi Azaiez and the staff of Beit al Hikma (Académie Tunisienne des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts) put on a stimulating conference in Beit al Hikma’s beautiful home in Carthage, right on the Mediterranean. Over the course of three days (July 4-6, 2017) a full-throated debate played out, in three languages, over the context within which the Qur’an ought to be read. My own contribution traced the main currents of European philosophy and Islamic thought that made their way into one Indonesian thinker’s call for an anthropocentric reading of the Qur’an:

“An Anthropological Turn in the Qur’anic Sciences: European and Islamic Contributions to Aksin Wijaya’s Indonesian Hermeneutic.” Conference on “Qur’anic Studies: Methods, Contexts, and Interpretations,” International Qur’anic Studies Association and Beit al Hikma, Carthage, Tunisia, July 4, 2017.

The slides from my presentation, which trace the connections between thinkers across a world map, are available here. The text of the paper is still too rough to post here, but I plan to turn it into an article within the next year.

Indicative and Performative Theories of Divine Speech in Classical Islamic Legal Theory

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Categories: Presentations

Nadja Germann and her research team put on a very rich and remarkably focused conference on “Intention and Signification: Philosophy of Language Across Islamic Disciplines, 800-1200” at the University of Freiburg, in beautiful Baden-Württemberg, Germany, from June 1 to 3, 2017. What a feast! My own contribution was:

“Indicative and Performative Theories of Divine Speech in Classical Islamic Legal Theory.” Intention and Signification: Philosophy of Language Across Islamic Disciplines, 800-1200, University of Freiburg, June 3, 2017.

The paper has now been revised and published in the conference volume from De Gruyter.

An Early Recension of the Islamic Psalms of David

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Categories: Presentations

Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala and the Biblia Arabica team put on a delightful conference on the transmission of the Arabic Bible among Jews, Christians, and Muslims from April 26 to 28, 2017, in Córdoba, at Casa Árabe, whose jasmine-filled courtyard is pictured above. My contribution was:

“An Early Recension of the Islamic Psalms of David: The Koranic Style and Content of Istanbul Fatih 28 and Madrid 5146.” Biblia Arabica conference on Translators, copyists and interpreters: Jews, Christians and Muslims and the transmission of the Bible in Arabic in the Middle Ages, Cordoba, Spain, April 28, 2017.

The slides from the presentation are available as a pdf here.