Religion, Animals, and the Bible - Arthur Walker-Jones, Suzanna Millar

Religious stories and symbolism very often feature animals of all kinds. Over the last few decades, scholars have taken more notice of these non-human actors that often play an important role in religious belief and practice. Today's conversation features Arthur Walker-Jones and Suzanna Millar, the co-editors of a new book at the intersection of Animal Studies and Biblical Studies entitled Ask the Animals: Developing a Biblical Animal Hermeneutic. Our discussion explores the ways that we think about the appearance of animals in Biblical texts and considers, more generally, new approaches to understand the confluence of animals and religion.

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:04

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen. Today we have a little bit of a different kind of an episode in that it is precipitated by the publication of a book. This is a book called Ask the Animals - Developing a Biblical Animal Hermeneutic that is published as a part of the Semeia series from the Society of Biblical Literature. And just in the interests of being forthright, I will just mention that I have a an essay in this collection. Today we have the two editors of this volume, Arthur Walker-Jones, who's professor of religion and culture at the University of Winnipeg, and Suzanna Millar, who's a lecturer in Hebrew Bible at the University of Edinburgh. So we have a conversation about the confluence of animal studies, and we'll talk about the viability of that term with biblical studies that incorporates both Hebrew Bible and New Testament. This is a topic that is really interesting to me, although I think that you'll hear some indications that the field itself is is contested, that different people imagine it in different ways. Different people include not only different methods, but but even different boundaries as to what is included in it, what is a part of field itself. How much of this is about ethics, how much of this is about studying cultural practice, how much of this is about biology, etc, just sort of personal narrative for me, I've taught a class called Animals and the Sacred for near on 15 years here at Muhlenberg College, and so it was a delight when I was invited to contribute one of my pieces to this work. But the the field itself is is interesting, not only in its relationship to animal studies, but but imagine all of the religious communities and the religious stories and rituals that you know that include animal imagery, or animals within ritual, or animals within mythology, or animals as symbols, that animal studies, kind of goes beyond that. Sort of takes that as a starting point, or at least that's my starting point in Animals and the Sacred but then we can go beyond that and think also about animals as sentient beings in their in their own right, or animals as actors, as the collection, another collection on some of these topics that's more broadly religious studies that I use by Paul Waldau and Kim Patton. The title is the Communion of Subjects that goes off of a Wendell Berry quote that we should not just imagine animals as objects, but that they are subjects in their own right. If you are not an academic yourself, you can sort of peek behind the curtain a little bit and think about how much categorization and the way that we think about the topics we talk about is both reflective of the world we live in, but also reflective of the politics and culture of higher education. And I think that that comes comes through loud and clear here as well. The final thing that I'll say, just to set up this episode, is that you'll hear both Suzanna and Arthur relate personal stories about interactions with animals, in both cases, their interactions with companion animals or pets. And I think that it's telling that even in our information economy, in our post domestic world, we have lots of interactions with animals, whether they're squirrels in your local park or dogs or cats or whether you're a hunter or a fisherman or an agriculturalist, that we certainly have less contact with animals than, say, an agro pastoral community might have, but animals are still a part of our world and a part of our imagination. And I think one of the things that we might take from these conversations is that it's a challenge to think about what those interactions are, and not to take them for granted, but to imagine that they are culturally determined, that they don't have to always be the way that they are, and that this is something that we sort of metacognitively can not only think about, but think about the way that we think about animals in our world. So without further ado, here's that conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Dr. Arthur Walker-Jones and Dr. Suzanna Millar, thanks for being on ReligionWise. I appreciate you being here.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 4:53

Thank you so much for having us.

Suzanna Millar: 4:55

Thank you for having us.

Chip Gruen: 4:57

All right, so as I explained in the introduction, the occasion for this conversation is the publication of the collection that you edited together entitled Ask the Animals - Developing a Biblical Animal Hermeneutic, which came out from the Society of Biblical Literature press in the Semeia series just last month in June. A good deal of our conversation today will be unpacking some of those terms. There's a lot going on in that title. But before we get to that, I would like each of you to introduce yourselves. How did you come to this work, and how is this collaboration between the two of you on this particular project born? Suzanna, can we start with you?

Suzanna Millar: 5:37

Of course, yeah. And so I really came to the field of study of animals in the Bible after my PhD. So I finished my PhD in 2018 and then I was thinking about what direction I wanted to take my research in. And at the time, I was attending the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Conference, which is a big conference in the area, and there was a consultation going on about animals in the Bible at the time, and I remember going to one of the sessions of that consultation and just finding it an incredibly exciting place to be. It felt like things were happening in the field and that there was actual, real important work to be done. So from that, I sort of got interested in the field, and it's a quite a while ago now. So I may be misremembering things, and I'm sure Arthur can correct me if I'm misremembering things, but I believe I presented a paper, and then subsequently Arthur had had been thinking of this idea of putting together a volume, and he contacted me to ask whether I would like to contribute my paper to the volume, at which point I said, Oh, I'm sorry that paper is going to be published elsewhere. However, would you like a co editor? And so I think that was the way that I became involved in the project and but I'm sure Arthur speak more eloquently to it than I.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 6:56

That's a you have a better memory than mine, I think, actually, but it's basically what I remember. I remember you appearing in one of the sessions. I've been interested in animals for a long time. Though, my interest in animal studies was sort of precipitated when we had a family dog that we had got for my son. We had spent five and a half years in Fiji, and he was having trouble readjusting. We went there when he was six months old, and came back to Canada when he was six, and he was having trouble readjusting to Canadian culture. And he had a had had a dog that he loved in Fiji. So we thought, Well, maybe if we get, get him a dog that will help him, so that this dog, JoJo, was important to our family, and as he got older, he got unable to take himself out, and so I had spent several months taking carrying him outdoor. And I think it was that I had to go to a Society of Biblical Literature meeting, and my partner said, you know, I can't carry him, so we're going to have to put him down before you go to SPL. And everybody assured me that that was fine, but when we went to the vet to give him the injections, the vet gave him the first injection, he was, by the way, in a lot of pain. The reason I was having to carry him out was that he had very severe arthritis and and had for quite some time. So and everybody assured me it was time to put him down, but the vet gave him the first shot, and after he'd given him, he struggled to get up and leave, and so then the vet had to give him another shot, and he was still struggling to try to get out, and so I felt I had made this choice for a sentient being. All of us that have pets know that they're persons, that they have thoughts and feelings and personalities, and I didn't feel good about my decision to put down, uh, Jojo. And so that's how I started reading about animals and dogs. And started reading, I guess, a very scholarly kind of thing to deal with grief is to start reading about dogs. And I started reading animal studies scholars and and they were referring to the Bible. But I realized that there weren't very many people in Biblical Studies engaging with animal studies, and there was huge potential there. I had for a long time been involved in the ecological hermeneutics section and the earth Bible project, and was really grateful as as a younger scholar, when Norman Habel had asked me to contribute to the first of those volumes, and then I got involved in ecological hemaritics because it gave me a community in which to do what I was interested in doing. And so I thought, well, I've chaired an SBL group before I could start an animal studies animals in the Bible group at SBL to see if to provide a community and see if there is other other scholars. So it's actually quite gratifying for me to hear that it functioned that way for Susanna and and it has been a nice part of the project for me a number of the contributors to this volumes are younger scholars who either I also decided to have an animals and religion conference. So some of them, like Dong and Beverly came to that first animals and religion conference that I gave. And then And then more more like Suzanna arrived in the animals in the Bible consultation. So, so and I, I've been really grateful that Suzanna offered to help me, because, as anyone who knows who's done an edited volume, it's, it's a huge amount of work, and she has compensated for lacks of mine. And it sort of worked well in that when one of us didn't have time the other and maybe had time to do things.

Chip Gruen: 11:05

Well, great. Thanks for that. So you've mentioned animal studies, and when we think of this, depending on who you ask, this is either a field that emerged in the 1970s in the wake of the postmodern turn, or it's a really nascent field that's continuing to develop and build its questions and methods. And I guess my take on this is that it's probably somewhere in between those, or simultaneously both of those. What is your take on this category, or on this field, animal studies, and how it represents something distinct from the other fields that we work in.

Suzanna Millar: 11:43

I mean, it's a, it's a huge question. And I think, I think the quote, unquote, field of animal studies is in a constant process of, kind of trying to dispatch define itself. And as you've said, different people have different takes on its origin story and its particular distinctiveness and things like that. So I think you'll probably get a different answer from whoever you ask on this question. And I think I think you're right that part of it is this kind of post modern turn away from sort of conventional methods of doing scholarship within Western humanist discourse, and so ties in with things like post structuralism and the kind of dissolution of like binary thinking and stuff like this. But I think another aspect of it which has really been important, particularly as the field has developed in recent years, has been this kind of edge towards ethics and justice, which I think has come up a lot through things like feminist and post colonial scholarships as well, which have quite strongly influenced animal studies in recent years. And so I think while there is this kind of more like post modern theory aspect to it, I would also want to press quite heavily on the more justice oriented angle to it as well. And of course, there's lots of debates within that of whether justice struggles for non human animals are the same as justice struggles for different human groups, or whether they're different in what ways they intersect, and things like that. So I think that, at least from from my understanding, a lot of that really kicked off in the 90s with the work of ecofeminists particularly, and then has continued on and very recent work in this area as well.

Chip Gruen: 13:27

Yeah, I wonder. I want to jump ahead just a little bit, because this does emerge alongside more explicitly activist movements that work towards the care and protection of non human animal species. Would you say that animal studies is, I mean, what is relationship between, between the subfield and ecological rights, animal rights movements? I mean, I am all the time, sort of negotiating this in lots of ways, about talking about like we're not like what we do might inform activism, but it might not be, you know, training activists itself. How do you see the dance between those two things?

Suzanna Millar: 14:06

Yeah, well, I think there is some animal studies scholarship that is explicitly activist. So sometimes that gets called critical animal studies, which is quite confusing, because you think that would be more kind of theoretical, actually, that the activist wing. And so there is some scholarship which explicitly does this. And I also potentially would want to push back a little bit on the framing of this within a kind of animal rights discourse, which I know is is traditionally how animal ethics has been conceived in the West. But I think quite a lot of contemporary scholars is problematizing whether rights is the best way to think about this, but that's a kind of caveat. And to go back to the main point, I think there is a lot of crossover with things like feminist scholarships in the way that structures of domination and oversubordinate groups work. So be they sort of women or ethnic minorities or, I would say non human animals. I think there is a deep connection between those things. You ask also about ecological hermeneutics. I know that Art has done a lot in ecology, so I wonder whether he might jump in on that question.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 15:15

Yeah. I mean, I, I had been involved in ecological hermeneutics, and although looking back, I realize animals have always been part of my ecological hermeneutics, I noticed that it was possible from for some people to think about ecological issues and not think about the other species that were involved. And so in a way, thinking about it in a very human centered concern about ecology. And you can see in the volume that there are some of the authors that locate themselves within ecological hermeneutics and relate what they're doing to the earth Bible series and commentaries, partly because we ran a joint session with the ecological hermeneutics section. So they were presenting for that, that that section, I sort of think of of different streams that sometimes come together and sometimes separate. And I'm not exactly sure about the chronology, but And Suzanne and I had had a discussion early about on, about whether we would talk, have a discussion in the introduction of different terminology, I had chosen animal studies to be kind of a neutral umbrella term that would take in a lot of things, so that it would include animal rights. The different authors in the volume use different terminology. So critical animal studies is often concerned with issues of justice, usually means explicitly vegan. So I had sort of avoided critical animal studies to avoid the implication that this was somehow vegan studies. And I guess there is a separate vegan studies now started by people who thought critical animal studies was not vegan enough. We haven't mentioned animality studies. Brian Tipton uses that that language and this also interrelates with the way the volume is set up. Is that I, I felt that quite a bit had been done in Biblical studies with Derrida and animality studies, and coming from an ecological perspective that seems sort of anthropocentric to not ask about to focus just on human animality and not ask about animal other animals. I mean, my interests were political and ethical around animals, but I wanted to provide an umbrella term that would also allow people to do cultural or biological studies that would not necessarily be interested but could I mean would necessarily inform political and ethical concerns around other species.

Suzanna Millar: 18:04

So I just wanted to jump off Art's reflections on the use of terminology in this area. And I think I would echo what he said about potential problems with animal term animality, which, on the one hand, is, I think is a very useful term because it's generally used to speak about human animality. That is to say that humans are animals, and so it's kind of intrinsically animal nature. So in that sense, it's really helpful for breaking down the binary between humans and non humans. But then, on the other hand, it often becomes a kind of way for anthropocentrism to slip, to slip in through the backdoor. You talk about human anonymity, you talk about humans. So I think that that's problematic terminology from that perspective. But then I would also say that the term animal studies can be very problematic in itself, particularly because the term animal is problematic, and this is discussed all the time in animal studies, that the term animal kind of sets up a binary opposition already with the term humans, and it assumes, in the way that it's used conventionally, that humans are not animals, even though we obviously are. So it kind of creates us both binary and then it also homogenizes all the vast variety of different different species. And when you're thinking about how to relate this into Biblical studies, I mean, there's no singular Hebrew word which maps precisely onto the English word animals. So then that throws up another set of issues and how you relate these fields together. And so yeah, I think the terminology is is very difficult to negotiate as well.

Chip Gruen: 19:44

Yeah, although it's funny how much that difficulty just echoes the difficulty we have in English in our sort of cultural landscape, anyway, that we can that the you know, sort of person on the street can say animal and that can include a worm and a chimpanzee, but not a human...

Suzanna Millar: 20:04

Precisely.

Chip Gruen: 20:05

...you know. So that there's, yeah, there's something, there's something that is actually true about the problems with these categories, because they're mapping onto the world that we live in. I believe,

Suzanna Millar: 20:13

Yeah, the respondent in one of the respondents to our volumes both about Western cultural zoo ontologies, which I think is a really interesting way to think about it, that even the way our zoo ontologies, the way we categorize the animal world, even that is cultural, there's no such thing as a kind of objective categorisation of animals. It's all sort of refracted through our cultural frameworks in the way that we think about the world, rather than being a sort of, quote, unquote, true representation of the world.

Chip Gruen: 20:45

Right, right. The platonic form of animal is not something that we would sign on to right?

Suzanna Millar: 20:50

Exactly, exactly.

Chip Gruen: 20:52

So. So let's Yeah, so let's go back and let's think also about, sort of the breadth of fields like animal studies are almost always described as interdisciplinary, though we'll get to the Biblical Studies and the religious studies angle in a minute, which both can be described as interdisciplinary fields as well. So unsurprisingly, in this volume in Ask the Animals, there are articles that incorporate perspectives from a wide range of epistemologies and methodological frameworks. Can you talk about the breadth of the collection, what can readers expect to find from among all of these essays? From a methodological perspective?

Suzanna Millar: 21:28

I think Art mentioned the way that the volume is structured, and I think that's a kind of helpful way to explore the breadth, because you're right, it's a really diverse volume, and we structured it, and this was Art's idea, a very good idea, I think, to structure it according to a framework drawn from an animal study scholar called Matthew Calarco. And he talks about some methodologies look at the identity between animals and humans the way they're really similar to each other. Some methodologies look at the differences between not only between animals and humans, but also between different animals, as we've just been talking about, and the way that ethics is structured by otherness rather than by similarities. And then some methodologies and epistemologies and perspectives just do something very different and talk about he calls it indistinction approaches. We referred it to it as alternative stories, just different ways of thinking about it. And so we kind of tried to map the essays into those three broad categories, which, in themselves, are very diverse. They didn't always map precisely, but I think that's testament to some of the ways that actually there's lots of exciting diversity and breadth

Chip Gruen: 22:42

Great. So I want to jump to sort of a different going on here. question that sort of is, on the one hand, thinking about discipline, and the other hand thinking about this category of animal studies. This might just be semantics. It might not be particularly interesting. And if not, you can let me know it's not an interesting question. But it seems like most of us are dealing in what we would describe as humanities disciplines, right? Like, if you think about the broad range of what happens in the academy, have the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and maybe the arts as distinct from the humanities. But it's interesting the basic assumptions that go into animal studies or or however we describe this subfield, or however we label the subfield, is a moving away from that centering of the human right within our scholarship. And I wonder how you you think about this right, because, Lord knows, the humanities are embattled enough we don't need to, you know, chop at its foundations and think about that, that that label and question that label too much. But I wonder how you deal with the semantic or categorical problems that the humanities might offer for this burgeoning field.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 23:56

Yeah, so the I mean, in North America, the humanities are under threat, and I don't know if universities here will continue and colleges will continue to be structured that way, that there'll be the sciences, social sciences and humanities, or however it's constructed in individual institutions. But I think this field is, to me, an example of why whatever we call them, but the things that are done within the humanities are essential to education. So Michael Gilmore has an article where he traces the way that literature and appeals to the Bible in literature were very important for the development of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and movements against cruelty to animals. So the function that the humanities literature plays in our thinking as a society and imagining what kind of ethics, what kind of politics, what kind of society we want to have. And so that's going to to me is it's almost a religious function to me that education has, though it's not framed that way, but in increasingly secular society, education is the only place where we have common formation of citizens of the society. And there's ways in which I think the humanities needs to do that better. Maybe I'm getting way away from animal studies here. I'm haunted by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education from a number of years ago that said, the reason in North America that English had split into English and rhetoric, or English and English writing departments, was that if you did contemporary criticism, it's as it's done in English departments, it incapacitated your ability to write. Like you became too worried about whether you were being patriarchal or specious or whatever, so you couldn't be creative anymore. So to me, there's a problem in the way we do criticism, it needs to somehow take into in more positive creative but it's to get back to animal studies the literature like Black Beauty that was important in the development of the movement to stop cruelty to animals. Culture continues to have that to be that place where we as a society, imagine what kind of future we want to have. And the Bible, surprisingly, even in a secular society, and I have to say, in my own training in Biblical Studies, I'm not very good at analyzing the way the Bible works and functions... in society, I was sort of trained to think about the Bible and theology, not the Bible and culture, but it seems to me, the Bible, even in a secular society, continues to play a major role in politics and ethics and what kind of futures we are imagining. And that's tremendously important work and the Robert McKay's piece on cultural zoo ontologies, as he calls it, I think, points to this important function of the humanities. So he's pointing out that science also is open to cultural critique. It's not objective, and people in the humanities come with those skills that they can offer to scientists. Scientists sometimes don't appreciate it, but to me, it feels like a really important cultural and political work for us to be doing, and a reason why the human humanities will remain important.

Suzanna Millar: 27:37

And I would also, I mean, I completely agree. I'm completely sold on the value of those traditions, those disciplines that have traditionally been called humanities. I think they're incredibly invaluable. To the question of whether humanities as a term is the right way to think about them, is something that I struggle with. I'm actually working on a book at the moment, and was discussing with an editor for publication and the series has humanities in the title of the series, and there's part of me which really pushes back against publishing something which is has human when I'm thinking about animals, and it's like because I don't want to constrain it feels like an [inaudible] starting point to say that what we're doing is humanities, and there have been some moves towards thinking about this as the post humanities. But then that itself is a is a loaded term, and post humanities, as well, often gets, is often spoken about in terms of the way that technology is, is integrating with humanhood, and you have cyborgs and things like this. So it's in some ways similar, but some ways different from what folks in animal studies are doing. And also, I think this traditional binary that we have between the quote, unquote, humanities and natural sciences is an artificial binary. Art just spoke about how the sciences are themselves cultural and can be open to cultural critique. The opposite is also true in that the natural sciences can really influence the way that we work in the humanities. So in our volume, for example, many of our authors draw explicitly from the natural sciences to try and understand the lives of these non human species in the text.

Chip Gruen: 29:21

So one of the things we keep kind of coming back to, but haven't dealt with explicitly, is not only the place of this in animal studies, but the place of this in Biblical studies as well. So I'd mentioned that the subtitle, which again to me, seems rather daunting, Developing a Biblical Animal Hermeneutic, it sounds like that is a big promise, but given the wide range of perspectives in the volume, and, you know, the relative messiness of the term, you know, animal studies, as we've been talking about, what does a hermeneutic look like? In what ways can this contribute to that goal? Is that a singular thing? Is that, um, you know, is that a multiplicity of things? What, what is loaded into that subtitle?

Suzanna Millar: 30:05

Yeah, it's a difficult question. And people always ask, Oh, what is an animal hermeneutic? When you say that that's the title? I'm always a little bit stumped. It's a really difficult question to answer. I think, at its most basic, it's a way of interpreting text that explicitly vocalizes non human animal lives. I think that at its most basic, that's what it is. But as we've already said, in practice, that can be really, really varied. I think one of the interesting things when we were putting together the volume was despite the fact that despite all that diversity, there were some common threads that came through. So, for example, this concern for justice, which you've already spoken about, which often becomes integrated with drawing on feminist and post colonial analysis, or things like problematizing the human boundary that comes up repeatedly throughout the volume as a as a kind of helpful way for us to interrogate difficult texts. Equally things like sort of recovering the agency of marginalized players in the narrative, which for us would be the animal players in the narrative, but parallels the way that feminists recover the voices of women in the text and things like this. So I think it is a very broad hermeneutical frame. And yet, in in the way of this practice, you often do find these common threads running through the work of people who who self define within this framework.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 31:33

Yeah, we say in the introduction that we we discussed this. We had hesitated to define animal hermeneutics from the beginning that we wanted to see what a row arose and leave it open. And we do try to highlight things at the end that we some of which Suzanna's mentioned already, that we think will be and just a focus on animals as as as subjects and voices in the in the narrative is and with with agency is probably going to be part of all forms of animal hermeneutics, but we wanted to leave it open to develop in whatever way in scholars thought it thought best to them.

Chip Gruen: 32:17

Yeah. So moving on. I mean thinking about that, that category of Biblical Studies. And again, it is, you know, I think our listeners will grow tired of us saying that. It depends on who you talk to, how these things are defined. But thinking about this as a Biblical Studies volume, it includes studies from both Hebrew Bible or treatment of materials from both Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And though, without a lot of thought, that makes sense. I mean, from a theological perspective, that makes sense from kind of a you know, certainly the way that we divide and think about religions, it makes sense. The cultural milieu of the Near East and Roman Empire, respectively, are very different. So thinking through the lens of that animal studies perspective. How do the articles that span these two very different chronological contexts fit together? How does this, you know, does animal studies help us see these things as a more unified whole than than we might think about if we were just thinking from a historical perspective?

Arthur Walker-Jones: 33:20

I was struck by that, that we we frame the history in terms of human empires, and began wondering about how we might frame things differently. And I think actually what we see, and there are continuity, a lot of continuities, if you look from the view of animals. And I just started to wonder if, if you arrange things instead, according to...Israel, Palestine, is quite unique in that there are several ecological zones all within a very small area. And then that means also with different types of relationships with between humans and other species. And I think running across both Testaments you have, older, almost indigenous, closer to whatever kind of agriculture is is being carried on, forms of understanding. You can disagree with me as a New Testament scholar, if you want Chip but to me, I see the difference in the difference between Jesus and Paul, in that in Jesus, you see a closeness to an agricultural lifestyle, and in Paul, you see more of an urbanite who's more separated from those metaphors and experiences, but that, I think that's true in both and it would interrelate with economics. So you know, in both Testaments, you have colonial powers, and they have a different more exploitative relationship with other species than maybe individuals still living within smaller so I guess I'm also suggesting, instead of being linear, you would have older, more indigenous forms of understanding in each area that are being overlain by broader colonial understandings.

Chip Gruen: 35:24

Yeah, so I'll throw my hat in here a little bit too, just because when I teach a class Animals and the Sacred have taught it for a very long time, and have used Richard Bulliet, a Columbia historian who talks about domesticity as sort of the dividing line, pre domesticity, domesticity, and then post domesticity. And it seems to me that I mean the colonial angle, I think is a really great one. But the other thing is just the mode of production, right? The I the way that you know, the milieu of of Jesus, or the milieu of, I don't know, take your pick, Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, which, whichever epic you want to deal with, there are, do you know the majority of people are connected to land for the production of their own food. That you know, has a very different ring than, I think, your comparison here to Paul, the sort of Paul the urbanite. I think there's a lot a lot less going on there. I mean that being said, what's what's interesting, and I promised my wife this morning I wouldn't say, Okay, now let's talk about about my article in the collection. But you know that, on the one hand, I think the most important thing going on with animals here is the domestic but what I want to do is highlight when you have not domesticated animals, and what does that mean, mean as well in this whole, in this whole landscape. So anyway, I don't know. What do you think? What do you think about domesticity as sort of, or, as you say, economic, both economic and political and social models, sort of holding some of this material together as well.

Suzanna Millar: 37:00

Yeah. I mean, I think the whole topic of domestication is a really fascinating and very disputed one. I know that David Carr, that is a really important work on the Bible and domestication, both kind of the domestication of animals in the Bible and kind of the domesticating legacy of the Bible. And his line on this, and I hope that I'm not misrepresenting him here, but he would press quite strongly on the domestication as domination, kind of thing that by by domesticating non human species, humans are taking control of the life worlds of these non humans in ways that are fundamentally to the benefit of those humans. And so he draws on people like Tim Ingold for this, who's a seminal writer in this area, who speaks about domestication as a move from a relationship of trust with animals to a relationship of domination over animals. And that's that's one very well thought out and sensible set of ideas. Others, and I think I would put myself more in this camp, actually stress that domestication itself involves a kind of a relationship with a non human species. And the agriculturalists who lived every day with their sheep probably had some sort of a relationship with their sheep. And so scholars like Kristen Armstrong-Oma, for example, talk about practices of care as being really fundamental to domestication and the establishment of some sort of a social contract between species, rather than it simply being humans dominating non humans. And so I think we see little glimpses of this all the way through. I mean, I'm a Hebrew Bible scholar, I can't particularly speak to the New Testament, but I believe in both Testaments, little glimpses of this kind of relationship of care, whether it's the shepherd going after the sheep um or, in the book of Samuel, they've got a little vignette about a poor man who feeds his sheep in his arms and this sort of thing. So I think the domestication issue is is a very disputed one, and can kind of cut in both ways, as it were.

Chip Gruen: 38:58

Yeah. And I think the other part of that too, is that we are, of course, reading these from at least what Bulliet, if I can continue to use him for a minute, from a post domesticated, you know, post domestic world. So, you know, when you talk about that ethic of care, and then think about industrial farming, or, you know, the sort of the manufacturing of meat and eggs and things like that, like we're in a very different place. You know, that both sort of culturally and ethically vis a vis animals non human animals as well.

Suzanna Millar: 39:29

Yeah, and I think that really shapes the way that we think about these texts when we're reading them. That I should say most of us don't come from the context where we're having daily interactions with non human species. We think in human frameworks, and we don't consider animal to be members of our societies in the way that probably the biblical authors would have thought about them. And I think I've been personally challenged in this regard recently, because I've um so I've just adopted two cats, two little kittens. They're the best the Coco and Sol, which is short for Qoheleth and Solomon, which, for any sort of Biblical Studies, people, is funny because Qoheleth was the author of Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of ostensibly Proverbs...Solomon. But anyway,[inaudible], The point is that through kind of my actual daily interactions with non humans, it sort of forces you outside of your I mean, actually, one response is to humanize your animals. I think, well, they're just like little fluffy versions of children. And another response is to try and think about what it might actually be like to be a cat or to be the classic example is a bat actually, of course, and I think we don't do that very much, maybe a little bit with pets, but very few of us actually think about what it would be like to be a sheep on a farm or a chicken on a factory farm or whatever. So yeah, so I think we're in a really different context where animals just aren't part of our social world in the same way that they were in these agro pastoral societies of the ancient world.

Chip Gruen: 41:02

Yeah, and it's interesting, I mean, from a Biblical Studies perspective, to sort of push this further, if you have a milieu where not only animals are considered and thought about differently, but your metaphors for God and the way that you think about the Divine is predicated on agricultural images that we can't get or don't understand because of our sort of different mode of production. I mean, it's, I don't know. There has to be something lost in translation there I think.

Suzanna Millar: 41:32

Yeah.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 41:33

I've often thought the or in recent years, that the pastoral imagery is I've wondered whether people realize that that's troubling. Like if you say that Lord is my shepherd, you really mean that at some point God is going to decide to kill you for meat. Probably Suzanna will say we shouldn't take the metaphor so literally. But I suspect that ancient pastoralists who were caring for their sheep and and and goats, and had a relationship with them and recognized that eventually, that they were, they would be killed but were caring caring for them were okay with the with that metaphor for God and what it what it in implied, I just wanted to say about I liked your your categories you had because they had domestic in the first two, which indicates a mode of production that relates us to other species, and it disappears in the last one, which sort of feels represented our period in time where It's not that we're any less related to other species, but it's just not part of our consciousness. We're very human centered in the way we think and talk. But just to concur with what Suzanna was saying with about domestication, I think a view that, although I'm sympathetic to it, a view that sees domestication at just as domination, is maybe not politically useful, because it would imply we needed to do away with all domestication. It might be more political and realistic to instead talk about different different types of domestication and how exploitative they may or may not be to the species involved. And I think that's what the cultural feminist, Marxist cultural critic Donna Haraway has been doing with her studies of agility dogs and dogs themselves are interesting, and it doesn't seem like humans forced dogs into subservience. It seems that dogs started following humans around, and co created an ecological niche where they were benefiting from their association with humans. And so I'm sort of interested since Suzanna is being pushed back, I kind of push back against the wild, domestic binary, and look at all the cases where that's kind of a little slippery, that we're in association with a lot of other species that we have co evolved with, that we're co creating ecological niches with. Certainly, we need to ask about domination and be aware of domination, exploitation. But to go back to Donna Haraway's agility dogs, I think she's recognized in the problem of understanding what's going on in agility, an agility dog's mind, but when they seem to be enjoying working with her in agility, even to have joy in doing it, and in some ways be better than her at doing it, and put her in situations where she has to follow the dog because she can't think and react as quickly as the dog if they want to be successful and but anyway, just that. The dog appears to love doing this, to take joy in in agility competitions. So again, it's problematic to try to think that we can know what's going on in a in a in a dog's mind, but they are also mammals. And so biologists are also saying, and it's been part of the recognition that other species suffer. If they're making having all the neurological responses to stimulus that we have, and expressing the same kind of things that we would when we're suffering, then we can probably say they're suffering too. Anyway, there's all kinds of theoretical problems there. But I think there's interesting conversations to have about different modes of production, different ecological niches, and to what extent the other species are. You know what the ethics? It means a more complex and ambiguous discussion about what the ethics is. If it's just domination, you just need to get rid of it. It's simple, but I guess I'm suggesting it's not quite that, that simple. It's a complex issue about the species we've co evolved with, and how we go forward to relationships that are less exploitative, in which all species can flourish.

Chip Gruen: 46:21

So in the concluding remarks that you both co authored to the volume, you express your hope that this book will be widely used in college classrooms. You even go to introduce classroom exercises and really imagine a world in which this is not only a book on the shelf of an interested person, but also something that is being, you know, used to develop syllabi and to develop, you know, classroom activities. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that? I mean, that's not something you see at the end of every scholarly volume, right? So that the fronting of that pedagogical, the fronting of the use of this within classrooms in our higher educational institutions, really stood out to me. And I'd love to hear your comments on why you chose to do that and what your hopes for the book are.

Suzanna Millar: 47:15

Yeah, and I think, Well, I think both Art and myself are quite passionate teachers that I certainly wouldn't see myself as just a researcher like I'm very much also a teacher, and I think some of the best conversations happen with students. And I think we also didn't want the book to be something which was just for just the old academics sitting on the shelf somewhere, as you say, or in a library somewhere, or just for the occasional PhD students, and I think it matters that these issues are spoken about in classrooms. And I think also students care. Students care about these issues. They care about animals. They care about what's happening with the climate crisis and the way that's impacting on other species. They care about social justice, whether that's social justice for non humans or other marginalized groups, and so I think it's the sort of thing that actually students could really get on board with. I mean, the other aspect of it is because, because it is so diverse and so kind of imaginative in many ways and innovative, it almost gives students a bit more license to think, think a bit more outside the box, maybe not to say that you should sort of totally get away with sort of traditional Biblical Studies training or whatever, or religious studies training, but that it explores the scope of what's possible and new ways of thinking and not just hemming itself into these very traditional forms of knowledge that have sort of been very tried and tested in the classroom, and actually possibly opens, just a new opening into other ways of thinking and doing and being, which I think potentially could be quite exciting. And obviously the book is only just out. It's not been used in any classrooms so far to my knowledge, but I really hope that it might be, and that that might impact some students somewhere.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 49:02

Let me just acknowledge that it's a little dangerous in academia, where it's of secondary value, often in promotion. So it was Suzanna who suggested putting this in here, and I was glad that she did, because I think it's important.

Chip Gruen: 49:16

That's great. I mean, I teach at, I mean, Muhlenberg College is a, you know, liberal arts college in the Northeast, where teaching is incredibly important. So I for one, found it super edifying. You know that you all called out and highlighted right the importance of the work we do, not just as writers and researchers, but as you know, interacting with these 18 to 22 year olds in many cases, or non traditional students as well, and that this can be a benefit, like you say, not only to researchers and scholars, but to them as well. So I thank you for including that. So I know we're about at time, and I want to value your time, but I like to end up by asking the question. I want both you all to chime in on this one, what am I not asking about? What is the you know, I am very aware of my own myopia in lots of ways. So what is the thing that is really important to you about this project, or about this field, or about the work that you've done in animal studies in its conjunction to biblical studies, that I haven't, that I haven't highlighted or asked you about, that you think we should, we should make sure that we mention?

Suzanna Millar: 50:23

I think, I think we've covered a lot in this conversation. I think most of the things that I'd want people to know about book we've already said. I just have one kind of reflection, which I don't quite know what to do with, but sort of often comes back to me. And I think I've mentioned a few times that I've been inspired a lot by feminist scholarship and other scholarships that centralized as marginalized humans. And oftentimes what that scholarship does is to a feminist scholarship, tries to get women to do the scholarship and or scholarship with disadvantaged communities, empowers those communities themselves to speak out and to do the stuff themselves, which I would love to say we could do an animal studies, but it's really hard to know how to do that. Like, how on earth do we get a dog or a cat or a maggot? I know my chapter in the book about maggots, like, how on earth do we, quote, unquote, hear their voices? Um, within, within scholarship. And so I think that's a kind of insoluble issue that I don't know what to do with, but I think potentially warrants further reflection within our field.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 51:27

Yeah, I would agree with that. That's a unique problem of this field, and so within ecological hermeneutics, the anthropocentrism has been questioned as as a category, and I think even more so in animal studies, it's useful, but our our perspective on other species is also always going to be, to some extent, anthropocentric. So how we deal with that is is going to be ongoing question. This isn't nothing that you've missed Chip, but something that we didn't say in the book, that I think is maybe an implication. It's an implication for the Humanities broadly, but I think this kind of work, and also ecological hermeneutics. I mean both fields I find difficult in that I have to study science as I can't even keep up with biblical studies, and now I'm having to study other fields too. So although I was trained in very kyriarchal individualistic ways, it's made me aware of the need for research to be done in interdisciplinary teams, which I see some places, but I think we we need to develop more communal, interdisciplinary research projects to effectively do this kind of work.

Chip Gruen: 52:57

Well, that seems like a good call to action and maybe a good place to end so Arthur Walker-Jones and Suzanna Millar, thanks again for coming on ReligionWise. This has been fun.

Suzanna Millar: 53:08

It's been great. Thank you so much.

Arthur Walker-Jones: 53:09

Thank you so much for having us.

Chip Gruen: 53:14

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise, wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.