The Enslaved at the Banquet: A Womanist Reading of Luke’s Parable of the Great Supper

by Richetta Najuma Amen

The Enslaved at the Banquet develops a theory of reading the parables of Jesus based on the works of African-American feminist novelist Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) and applies this theory to the Lukan Parable of the Great Supper (Luke 14:15-24) to create a short narrative recontextualized reading of resistance. This book advances the scholarship on Octavia E. Butler by extracting from Butler’s work a theory of reading biblical parables and adapts this theory and brings it into the discourse on parable theory; and this book advances the body of work on slavery and resistance to slavery in biblical texts. Furthermore, this book can serve as a resource for African American faith communities to unlearn the allegorical interpretation of biblical parables and to reappropriate scripture as a means to resist modern structures of oppression.

133 pages, Hardcover

Published August 5, 2024