Publications

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13057/2

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Browsing Publications by Author "Agnew, Sarah"

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    Embodied Performance. Mutuality, Embrace, and the Letter to Rome.
    (Pickwick Publications, 2020-09) Agnew, Sarah; Swanson, Richard W.
    Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah’s story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.
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    Left alone. Picking up a slave girl where Acts 16:19 leaves her
    (Tending to Stories, 2023-10) Agnew, Sarah
    In Acts 16:16–34, Paul is a channel for the Spirited healing of a young girl. Paul is then taken from the girl, and the story follows him to prison, and a sensational breaking of chains. No more is said of the servant girl after she is liberated from the spirit and her masters. Is she left to fend for herself? Standing in the marketplace, forgotten, I felt a freedom I had never known. Healed of the spiteful, angry voice in my head, there was a silence inside me, a stillness about me. I was glad my masters abandoned me, that the crowd left me … I was blissfully alone for the first time in my life, and I breathed … I pushed the rope from my wrist to the ground: free! So this is how it feels to know you are alive! Then I must have fainted – for the next moment I was aware of, two ladies were kneeling beside me in the dust … We cannot know how Paul might have supported this woman if he had the choice. But his own letters point to the mutual embrace of communities seeking to follow the Way of Jesus. This presentation begins with a story that recovers one of many silenced women in the biblical narratives, then explores Paul’s Letters for glimpses into communities of the Way, which the storyteller uses to illuminate the shadows and bring one woman back into the light.
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    Through the Valley. Studies and Meditations on the Psalms for Lent
    (MediaCom Education, 2023-02) Agnew, Sarah
    The Psalms: our rich spiritual inheritance giving voice to the breadth of human experience, bringing all of who we are into our relationship with the Divine. Through the Valley invites us to listen attentively to Psalms, God, and ourselves, our whole selves, with courage and compassion. Feel, wonder, imagine, create, and as you do so together, deepen your relationships with your community and your God.
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    “Whispered in the Sound of Silence”: Traumatising the Book of Jonah
    (The University of Auckland, 2016) Boase, Elizabeth; Agnew, Sarah
    The Book of Jonah is replete with narrative gaps and textual silences, silences which invite the audience to read into the indeterminacy of meaning. Too often, however, the book is interpreted as an object lesson for its intended audience, a tale designed to show the true meaning of God’s mercy and justice, warning against false nationalism or against the perils of disobeying God. Such readings read against Jonah and Jonah’s community, functioning to both silence and, we suggest, wound an already wounded community. Against the dominant trend, this paper draws on trauma theory to argue that the silences in the book can be read anew. The silences enact and speak into the traumatic memories of a community whose identity was shaped by the experiences of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile, and who continued to live under the oppression of the Persian Empire.