Scriptures Everywhere

About Scriptures Everywhere

What are scriptures? What is the work people make scriptures do? In this podcast, we come together monthly as a learning community, and we reflect on the relationship between scriptures and particularly persistent themes in the world around us.

Publisher

The Institute for Signifying Scriptures

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Jul 2025

Latest episode

18 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

13 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Sept 2026

   Sources, Systems, and Confidence: Election and the Manufacture of Scriptures Everywhere

   In this month's episode of Scriptures Everywhere, Arthur F. Carter, Jr. is joined by Jeremy L. Williams (Brite Divinity School) and Jessica Lynn Stewart (Emory University) to ask what functions as scripture in this US electoral season, and what systems and institutions create, mediate, and authorize those texts. Are algorithms scripture, or just an authoritative source? Are polling and political theory reliable conduits for crafting reality? What happens to faith when the authoritative processes and texts people inherit fail to explain the lives they're actually living? Along the way: Derrick Bell's space traders, Saidiya Hartman on the usable past, and whether despair is arrogance or honesty all guide this month's conversation. Guest bios: Jeremy L. Williams, PhD Associate Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School, is the author of Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles: Race, Rhetoric, and the Prosecution of an Early Christian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2023). A graduate of Vanderbilt, Yale, and Harvard, Williams earned a degree in New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard. His research uses CRT, ancient historiography, Black studies, and rhetorical criticism to explore abolition, criminalization, and race in New Testament interpretation and early Christianity. Williams is the inaugural director of Brite's Center for Theology and Justice and an ordained CME elder. Jessica Lynn Stewart, PhD Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, is the author of the forthcoming Are We There Yet? The Geography of Black Progress (Oxford University Press, 2026). A graduate of Denison University and UCLA, Stewart earned a degree in Political Science at UCLA. Her research explores race, place, and political economy through mixed-methods analysis of census data, public opinion surveys, and interviews. Stewart previously held an Anna Julia Cooper Center postdoctoral fellowship at Wake Forest University. Arthur Carter, PhD Assistant Professor of New Testament and Director of Black Church Studies at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in Religion (New Testament) from Vanderbilt University. A contextual biblical scholar, his work addresses New Testament hermeneutics, historiography, and early Christian identities. With transdisciplinary training in diaspora studies, he brings insights from Black Atlantic cultural and discursive traditions to bear on ancient texts and their historical reconstructions

2. 

   20 Aug 2026

   Election and Chosenness

   For the Fall 2026 season, we explore how scriptures, textual and otherwise, inform the meaning of election and its sociopolitical practices. In this first episode, Richard Newton, Nick Pumphrey, and Arthur Carter take up election as a sign of choice and chosenness. Prompted by R. S. Sugirtharajah's "Known Knowns and Unknown Unknowns: Scriptures and Scriptural Interpretations" in Vincent Wimbush's Theorizing Scriptures (Rutgers, 2008), and Peter Baker's recent reporting in the New York Times on the president's re-litigation of the 2020 election results, we consider who is authorized to mediate what a public knows from all it has never thought or learned to ask. Where Sugirtharajah, borrowing Donald Rumsfeld's taxonomy of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, traces the entanglement of biblical studies with empire, we extend his analysis to the political season and ballot box, where voting turns out to be less a matter of choosing than of performing who belongs among the chosen. Richard Newton is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He holds a PhD in Critical Comparative Scriptures from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox, 2020) and co-editor of Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2023), and curator of Sowing the Seed. Nicholaus Pumphrey is Professor of Religious Studies at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, where he also curates the Quayle Bible Collection. He holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Claremont Graduate University and is the author of Superman and the Bible. His interests include popular culture and religion, and comparative Near Eastern literature. Arthur Carter is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Director of Black Church Studies at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in Religion (New Testament) from Vanderbilt University. A contextual biblical scholar, his work addresses New Testament hermeneutics, historiography, and early Christian identities. With transdisciplinary training in diaspora studies, he brings insights from Black Atlantic cultural and discursive traditions to bear on ancient texts and their historical reconstructions.

3. 

   17 Apr 2026

   Citizenship and Scripturalizing Anti-Blackness in the Americas

   This was the third and final session of the Spring 2026 season for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures' podcast, Scriptures Everywhere. We concluded our conversation about Cruelty as Citizenship by Cristina Beltrán. The participants reflected on why Latina/o/e/x people both complicate and reinforce whiteness in U.S. democracy and considered the historical context of racial categorization in both Latin America and the United States. The participants concluded by discussing how scriptural politics and interpretation are used to maintain power structures, by turning to arguments around birthright citizenship where the Trump administration demonstrates an approach to scriptural authority that is not strictly textual.

4. 

   20 Mar 2026

   Scriptural Pleasures: On Cruelty as Citizenship

   In this episode, we move from Stephen Best's None Like Us (2018) to a kind of flip side of diasporic belonging, the violent practices that constitute citizenship. We focus our discussion on Cristina Beltrán's Cruelty as Citizenship (2020) as we consider how the pleasures of cruelty are scripturalizing practices, and scriptures are that "something significant," that sanctified border, that binds citizenship together through exclusion.

5. 

   20 Feb 2026

   3.1 None Like Us: Diasporic Desires and Demystifying Scriptures

   In this first episode of our spring 2026 season, we speak live from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures Annual Meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We discuss the introduction to Stephen Best's None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) with a focus on how scriptures make diasporas and what it takes to demystify and "decode" the scriptural traditions of social life. Special thanks to Richard Newton, University of Alabama Department of Religious Studies, for organizing this annual meeting and conversation.

6. 

   19 Dec 2025

   On Finishing a Book: Memory, Loss, and the Future

   In our final episode of the fall 2025 season, we discuss the role of memory, of how and why we try to forge a sacred past and communal memory, how gender matters to the dynamics of Barracoon as a site of memory, and what it might mean to find messier ground. We look ahead to our meeting in person in Alabama in February 5-7, 2026.

7. 

   21 Nov 2025

   Do you understand? Rethinking the grounds of scriptures

   In this episode, we discuss different forms of knowing and understanding, and how Hurston makes Kossula into scripture even as his stories depict for us strategies for navigating distinct, and sometimes conflicting, scriptural worlds. We particularly examine the language of understanding, and the photograph of him at the end of Hurston's narrative about Kossula.

8. 

   17 Oct 2025

   Barracoon as Scriptural Locus

   In this second conversation about scriptures, memory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon, we discuss the title of the book and what it tells us about the politics and emphases of scripturalizing practices. We also consider facets of Hurston's and Kossula's language that point us towards practices, ways, and forms of knowing and not knowing.

9. 

   15 Sept 2025

   Scripturalizing Kossola/Cudjo Lewis: Memory, Naming, and Making the Text of Barracoon

   In this first episode of our fall 2025 season on memory, we gathered to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", which was written almost 100 years ago but only published in 2018. We consider how its recent publication represents a form of scripturalizing alongside how Hurston's own work seeks to make a person into scripture.

10. 

    2 Aug 2025

    Reading Marronage: Reflecting on the Present and the Future of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures

    In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Arthur Carter, Dr. Rachel Beckley aka Rachel Schwaller, and Dr. Richard Newton discuss how the Institute for Signifying Scriptures currently works as a site of intellectual marronage. What does marronage mean for intellectual life? What is to be gained by the Signifying (on) Scriptures project?

11. 

    2 Aug 2025

    Reading Scriptures: Reflecting on the Formation of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures after 20 yearsThe Institute for Signifying Scriptures

    In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Lalruatkima, Dr. Robin Owens, and Dr. Katrina Van Heest discuss the early years of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in the 2000s. What is the ISS? What were the questions about scriptures that were examined in its first decade?

12. 

    21 Jul 2025

    Reading Darkness: Reflecting on the African Americans and the Bible Conference After 25 Years

    In this conversation, first recorded in the fall of 2023, Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew speaks with Dr. Grey Gundaker and Dr. Velma Love about the African Americans and the Bible conference after 25 years. Why did this conference matter in 1999? What are its legacies for the study of the Bible, scriptures, and African American communities?

13. 

    10 Jul 2025

    ISS@20: Signifying on Scriptures

    Recorded in 2023, our inaugural episode comes from HTI's Open Plaza Talks podcast. Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, talks to fellow scholar Vincent L. Wimbush, Founding Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. This episode was originally released to celebrate the annual conference in Atlanta—April 11-13, 2024 under the theme of “Marronage”—and to mark the 25th anniversary of the initial conference that inspired the founding of ISS, along with the publication of African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (Continuum, 2000; reprinted with Wipf and Stock in 2012). Edited by Dr. Wimbush, the anthology brought together 68 scholars and experts from a range of disciplines, including: ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies, as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. Today, ISS is an independent organization composed of members of varied backgrounds—scholars, researchers, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, community leaders, and social activists—”who are committed to constructing and advancing a new mode of critical inquiry into social–discursive formation.” Here, the term ‘scriptures’ is “used provocatively as shorthand for an illuminating analytical wedge for cross-cultural, disciplinarily-transgressive excavation of and conversation about the politics of meaning.”

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 17 / 100

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