Because You Bear This Name

Bonnie Howe received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union, and teaches at the Dominican University of California, the University of San Francisco, and New College Berkeley. Her main interests are New Testament interpretation and Christian social ethics; her research employs cognitive linguistic theories and methods to analyze moral discourse.

'WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) is perhaps the best-known contemporary slogan for the age-old problem of how to make coherent ethical sense out of the Bible's moral content. However attractive a slogan like this might be for its simplicity, most people have come to realize that the road from sacred text to concrete application is hardly a smooth super-highway. Bonnie Howe gives us an important supplement to this task by showing how cognitive linguistics might help reshape how we read the Bible as Scripture in moral discourse. Entering the on-going conversation about the importance of metaphor and imagination in hermeneutics and Christian ethics, she offers appreciative and evaluative critiques of the work of the Protestant New Testament scholar Richard Hays and the late Catholic moral theologian William Spohn. Howe helps refocus and redirect the Scripture and ethics conversation away from recovery, retrieval or description to a Scripture as exemplar model, in which Scripture is constantly engaging readers in moral discourse. At the same time, she offers an updated introduction to the kind of metaphor analysis methodology Mark Johnson proposed in his Moral Imagination. Christian ethicists and biblical scholars, as well as all those interested in the Scripture and ethics discussion, will be interested in, and helped by this engaging work.'James T. Bretzke, S.J., University of San Francisco.'Using the tools of cognitive linguistics alongside those of scriptural analysis, Bonnie Howe clarifies our understanding of metaphor, and its deep relation to religious and moral thought. At an even deeper level, she clarifies what it means to be a reader – and what impact that has on our role specifically as readers of ancient, complex, difficult and deeply important scriptural texts. Using Gilles Fauconnier’s work on conceptual integration, she explains how such texts can engage and influence us so intensely, if not simply. This is an important book for anyone who takes seriously the need to understand Scripture’s interaction with actual human minds.'Eve Sweetser, University of Califonia, Berkeley.'This ambitious study has three major aims. The first is to introduce a method, cognitive metaphor analysis, that, the author claims, represents a methodological “paradigm shift” in the understanding of metaphor and that, together with a culturally sensitive exegesis, lays the basis for a dialogue of modern readers with ancient biblical texts and their moral meanings. The second aim is to demonstrate the method in action by using it to examine the moral discourse of 1 Peter, while the third is to show how the moral vision of 1 Peter can serve as a “moral exemplar” for Christian moral thought and action today.'John H. Elliott, Review of Biblical Literature, 2007