Lies, Damned Lies, and Hermeneutics: A Postmodern Take on Biblical Historiography
What do the Little Mermaid, postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the Bible all have in common?
Mix them together, and you have a recipe for my latest writeup at the collaborative blog, Dust and Light. The post opens thus:
Mark Twain made famous the old quip, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The point of the idiom is that even such supposedly “brute facts” as statistics can be interpreted to have multiple meanings.
As a tribute to Twain (and as a clever excuse to squeeze profanity into a blog title!), I named the article, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Hermeneutics: A Postmodern Take on Biblical Historiography.”
In essence, the post has four short parts:
(1) Modernity: Historiography according to the tenets of the Enlightenment
(2) Post-Modernity: Derrida’s critique of Modernity, and emphasis on interpretation
(3) Pre-Modernity: Historiography in the Bible and ancient Near East
(4) Application: How we should understand biblical historiography and interpretation
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My name is Aaron Rathburn. I am a senior in philosophy at Calvin College, and formerly studied at Trinity School of Theology (Wales, UK). I am a husband, and father of two. This site is a collection of musings on theology, culture, and more. 
I have an idea for a new sort of biblical (and other religious text) hermeneutic: namely, identifying and extracting all of the passages that could involve the tinge of the writer’s or the religion’s self-interest. What sort of text would emerge? If you are interested, pls see my post at http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/self-interest-in-religion-and-the-related-conflicts-of-interest/