WS Chronicle

Rhonda Burnett-Bletsch, the Lucy H. Robertson Professor of Religion at Greensboro College, has been invited to join the editorial board of a new, peer-reviewed academic journal on how the Bible has been interpreted during the past 2000 years and more.

The journal, to be called “The Journal of the Bible and Its Reception,” will be published by scholarly book publisher Walter de Gruyter Press, based in Berlin. It will provide a forum for original research in biblical reception history. While older methods of biblical studies ask, “What did this text mean back then to its author or original audiences?,” reception studies examines the many consequences of how the Bible has been interpreted (received) by later audiences during the past two millennia and more, both within faith communities and in the secular culture.

Burnette-Bletsch will be one of two managing co-editors for the first two issues of this journal. She recently attended the first editorial-board meeting, at Princeton Theological Seminary. Members of the board presented academic papers reflecting their own perspectives on biblical reception for inclusion in the journal’s first issues. Burnette-Bletsch’s paper examined biblical subtexts in the work of the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.