The hermeneutical text

Hermeneutics how does it go? checking my last year's lecture notes,

pre- modern hermeneutics is based on trust;
modern hermenetics is guided by doubt and;
post modern hermenutics is dominated by suspicion.

A typical question that a person operating with a hermeneutic of suspcion must ask is,

" is there some way to rescue this text from its oppressive perspective and use so that it can liberate the very people that it was written to oppress or the people who have been oppressed by later interpretations."

In a roundabout way using a hypertext resource can resue the text for its oppressive perspective but I don't think that is quite what Fiorenza means oh well...

What I actually want is to explore whether "scholarly writing" using hypertex, blogging, electronic reference, etc.. has implications for hermeneutics.

With the information of technologies already available I can sit in my back yard with cell phone and moniter the video images from my DVD and with a laptop computer to ensure my blogging, assignments , emails and journaling are all kept up to scratch.

This kind of distancing power has shifted me back to future of the book post. As a reader of if:book this post will enagage with Ani Santos's project in progress Media Commons.

Santos argues for "writing in a mediated environment" in which folks like you and me (us), who can lead the way particularly in publishing Biblical articles. One way is the hypertext resource that we are in process of setting up.

I myself felt the gradual shift from thinking an "electronic press" to thinking about "electronic scholarly publishing".

As Polanyi pointed out, "we indwell our technologies, we extend our bodily presence to interact with each other." and so it is with blogging.

Blogging allow us to have a converstion, dialogue and share our thoughts, a way to research, get other's views. It employs a kind of peer to peer discussion on subject, topic at hand.

A chance to be professional, personal, and a way to research. Reading If Book discussions gives the chance to link into what others have to say about future of the book.

A future that could have blog entries bound together in "codex " form. Now that could be interesting - all those different voices contributing to one topic. Watch the space huh?

Take "Ruth" each one of us contributing our own hermenuetic towards the topic.

From such a cross-cultural class, we could use so many different lens,

* post-colonial,

* feminist,

* cultural,

* immigration,

* suspicion,

* otherness etc...

It is a complex proecess but it is time for a new a new way of doing book.

Te atapo - the dawn