Discovery Summer Sundays
Sundays at 10am
June 7–July 26
The Garden of Eden. The Great Flood. The Tower of Babel. The first chapters of Genesis contain some of the most spectacular, and consequential, stories in the Bible. But what if it’s time to reexamine our modern-day interpretation of these ancient narratives?
This summer, join a parishioner-led study of Genesis 1–11. Together, we’ll rediscover a text that frames our differences not as a defect of humanity but a divine imprint — ultimately revealing diversity as God’s original blessing and intention from the very beginning.
Hebrew Bible scholar Theodore Hiebert, member of the Mennonite Church and professor of Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, kicks off our series on June 7.
No meeting July 5.
Additional Resources
Watch a video overview of Genesis 1–11 from BibleProject.
Poet Paul Hoover’s “Have You Eaten of the Tree?” retells the stories of Genesis 1–3 in one kaleidoscopic vision.
Contemporary French composer Camille Pepin’s song “Laniakea” is named for the galactic supercluster that contains our own Milky Way Galaxy — and it evokes the chaos and beauty of creation.
Just as the Book of Genesis uses the Tower of Babel to critique the Babylonian Empire in its day, so Pieter Bruegel the Elder incorporates into his 1560 painting elements of the Coliseum in Rome as a famous monument to empire and persecution.
The Visual Commentary on Scripture explores various paintings, illustrations, and woodcuts that have depicted the Great Flood across the centuries.
The mosaics of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Monreale, Sicily, detail several scenes of Noah’s story, culminating in the dove returning with a sign of hope.
Tani Schwartz-Herman from the Jewish Theological Seminary describes how Genesis 9 and subsequent interpreters have transformed the rainbow from a sign of hostility into a sign of hope.
In this written meditation, Will McDavid works through the sometimes enigmatic elements of the Cain and Abel story, culminating in a call for empathy as the antidote to violence and enmity.
Speakers
Theodore Hiebert writes about biblical views of identity and difference in his book The Beginning of Difference: Discovering Identity in God’s Diverse World, which challenges exclusivist cultural interpretations of the Book of Genesis and reveals a text that embraces, and celebrates, ethnic identities and differences; it contains a reinterpretation of the story of Babel as positive account of the origin of the world’s cultures. God’s Big Plan, which he co-authored with Elizabeth Caldwell, is a children’s story of Babel based on this new interpretation. Ted was the lead translator of the Book of Genesis and one of the editors for the Common English Bible (CEB). He wrote the notes to Genesis for the CEB Study Bible and for the New Interpreter’s Study Bible. He is the Old Testament editor for Abingdon Press’s Covenant Bible Study. Ted holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, a PhD from Harvard University, and has been a research fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He has taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo and lectured at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. He is Francis A. McGaw Professor of Old Testament and Dean of the Faculty Emeritus at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He currently lives in Hamden, CT.
