An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas - The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation - Angela Kim Harkins
Experiencing the Journey
An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas - The Book of Visions and its Role in Moral Formation - Angela Kim Harkins
Angela Kim Harkins [+]
Boston College
Harkins has authored or edited eight books and more than 40 journal articles and essays on prayers, emotions, and religious experience in ancient Jewish and Christian texts.
She is the author of Reading with an "I" to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (De Gruyter, 2012), and Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period (Peeters, 2022). She is the co-editor of several volumes, the most recent of which are Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, with Harry O. Maier (De Gruyter, 2022) and Selected Studies on Deuterocanonical Prayers, with Barbara Schmitz (Peeters, 2021). Angela Kim Harkins and Jonathan Klawans are the co-editors of the Journal of Ancient Judaism (Brill).
Description
Chapter Four is divided into two sections. The first discusses how cognitive literary theory’s understandings of spatiality and journeying can be understood strategically to heighten a reader’s watchfulness for what will happen in the narrative. Hermas’s nighttime journey and waiting in the field function purposefully to prepare the reader for the vision of the Tower in Vis. 3. This strategic framing is found in other apocalypses and has not been appreciated by modern scholars who rush to interpret the Tower vision. The second part of the chapter applies cognitive literary theory’s understanding of narrative worlds and spaces, including approaches known as ecocriticism and wayfinding, and applies them to Hermas’s fourth vision of the beast. This chapter argues that reading the Book of Visions in a bookroll format allows for the accumulation of affect and anticipation within the reader as he or she moves from this portion of the Shepherd into the later sections of ethical instruction.