Abraham Smith - Böcker

This unique study considers the exegetical and hermeneutical possibilities of analyzing the entire letter of 1 Thessalonians as letter of consolation. Abraham Smith maintains that Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians with a full knowledge of the tradition of Greco-Roman letters of consolation and chose the genre to sustain members of the Thessalonian church. Showing how Paul's letter of consolation was understood in Paul's world and by subsequent generations, Smith demonstrates the usefulness of Paul's rhetoric of comfort for modern society.The Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation series explores current trends within the discipline of biblical interpretation by dealing with the literary qualities of the Bible: the play of its language, the coherence of its final form, and the relationships between text and readers. Biblical interpreters are being challenged to take responsibility for the theological, social, and ethical implications of their readings. This series encourages original readings that breach the confines of traditional biblical criticism.

Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told through colloquialism and a minding of song. Music has a scent and the song logic as this book meanders along that broken and disjointed road. Regional writing is a curse, it seems; but this book is unabashedly regional, in the sense that Smith sought to translatethe stories of his native county--and thereby the fading gleam or echo of a dying agrarian lifeway. This is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. More broadly, this is a book-length poem about culture history and masculinity and our rupturing and sometimes obliterating elisions with machines.The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. Gertrude Stein said the seed of DESTRUCTION OF MAN: "After all anybody is as their land and air is."

This Guide reads the Gospel of Mark as a 1st-century CE story about Jesus, for his followers, and against tyranny or the abusive use of power. First, the book shows students how the Gospel uses the form of a traditional laudatory biography (a ‘Life’) to reshape the memory of the shame-ridden trials and suffering of Jesus. Such a biography portrayed Jesus’ descent (as a son of God), his deeds, and his heroic death, dispelling any notion that the teacher Jesus was a charlatan or huckster. Second, Smith demonstrates how the Gospel devotes a great deal of space to Jesus’ training of his disciples - as he calls, commissions, and corrects them in preparation for the difficult moments of their journey.Third, Smith highlights the Gospel’s special characterizations of Jesus - as a prophetic envoy, a man of authority, and a philosophical hero - contrasting Jesus’ use of power with the abusive use of power by Rome’s representatives (Herod Antipas and Pilate).

A new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.

For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Tim Earley, Surgencies responds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. In each line Abraham Smith includes an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow. Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster. In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast. Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get honey-skulled.

In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies’ subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.