Tom Matrullo has posted a lovely and insightful review of AKMA’s Faithful Interpretation, along with incisive and engaged comments from The Happy Tutor. They dig deep into perhaps the central question AKMA’s book poses: If we accept the idea that interpretations are only right or wrong within a community, do we then have to embrace ideas of interpretation—say, a literal fundamentalism—that (a) dispute this interpretation of interpretation and (b) may be dangerously wrong? One of the many things I like about AKMA’s approach is the insistence that interpreting is a moral act, but the content of that morality is similarly situated within a particular community.

This is a big, big issue. If it’s taken as a criticism of AKMA’s argument, it’s important to remember that it was an issue before AKMA and before postmodernism. It is the issue of sharing a world with people with whom we seriously disagree so seriously that a failure to act is itself an act.

AKMA replies to Tom and the Tutor here, refusing to let us have a standpoint from which we can simply declare others wrong. But are there complex ways we can declare others wrong sufficiently that we may act against them?

The Berkman Center this morning has posted a 45 minute podcast of me asking AKMA about how all of this applies to the Web, since what AKMA says about Biblical interpreters—thousands of years of experience shows us that smart, wise, well-intentioned people are not going to come to agreement—applies also to our experience of the Web. [Tags: akma tom_matrullo faithful_interpretation hermeneutics berkman happy_tutor philosophy theology postmodernism podcasts]

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