We Are All Witnesses: Toward Disruptive and Creative Biblical Interpretation

by Mitzi J. Smith, Michael Willett Newheart

We Are All Witnesses is a remarkable, sassy, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal textbook. It is like no other text on biblical interpretation. Smith and Newheart have produced a groundbreaking milestone book about how to do biblical interpretation that prioritizes justice and the reader’s context. It is both memoir and metatestimony! The layperson, college students, and seminary students will find this book accessible. It is indeed creative, witty, and wayward!

174 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2023

Reviews

[David Alonzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose this book to read because it was co-written by someone with whom I went to college. To be frank, it is not like most books that I pick up and read.

I’m not sure there can be any real spoilers in my comments about it. I believe it very empowering. It is all about a new way - at least to me - to read Scriptures. You know all those Bible verses that you either hated or disagreed with (surely you have some of those) might be valid. We are witnesses to our own lives and there may be a relevant, justifiable why what we think we are reading in a Scripture is at odds with the way we feel about a certain topic. I do not mean that we can twist the meaning to justify every thought we have, but this book helps give us a framework to dig deeper into why we may think the way we do - and we may find that our feeling was right after all.

[Mary]

Smith and Newheart invite the reader into their lively and important conversations through their interdisciplinary and intersectional readings of biblical stories. They model for us how to claim our agency as readers of biblical texts through learning to question from our own social locations. They also show us a variety of ways to consider both texts and contexts, historical and contemporary, and they challenge traditional assumptions and interpretations by calling out unjust readings."
--Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College