Today I received in the mail and began reading James K. A. Smith's The Fall of Interpretation. I did so because I have seen it discussed on many blogs and was intrigued by it. I read pretty eclectic material, even in theology, but it is outside my normal interests as he is a Pentecostal writing from a position of Reformed theology (yeah, I'm intrigued to find out how that works). Plus he interprets Derrida and Heidegger and discovers good material in them for the Christian church, from his perspective as an evangelical.
From the closing pages of the Introduction, I really liked this paragraph:
The hermeneutical structure of creation is good; it produces goods: a plurality of interpretations and a diversity of readings. The sin of Babel was its quest for unity -- one interpretation, one reading, one people -- which was an abandonment of creational diversity and plurality in favor of exclusion and violence; and the "ravages of hatred have an ominous sameness." Plurality in interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation: a creation where many flowers bloom and many voices are heard, where God is praised by a multitude from "every tribe and language and people and nation" (Rev. 5:9), singing songs in a diversity of tongues, even worshiping through a diversity of theologies.
Part of what really intrigues me about this paragraph is that it is the sort of thing one reads most often from queer scholars.
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