Current Project

Laura’s current book project is provisionally titled, Scriptural Affordances: Literary Use and Value in the Postexilic Prophets. It uses one small and largely overlooked book in the biblical prophetic corpus—the book of Haggai—as a site to stage major questions about the status of biblical and religious studies as humanistic disciplines and about the value of ancient texts, writ large. The first part of Scriptural Affordances demonstrates the enduring power of 19^th century ethical and aesthetic sensibilities in biblical scholarship. The second half offers an alternative way of reading Haggai, not by “redeeming” its style or content but by formulating a new lens focused on literary affordance: a term that takes seriously Haggai’s propositional claims and structure while avoiding conventional appeals to normative or singular meaning. In her book, Haggai furnishes complex (and importantly, for contemporary readers, provisional and non-unitive) theories of economics, temporality, and violence. This project investigates the extent to which 19^th century devotional values, claims, and worries structure current scholarly inquiry. Instead of demanding that Haggai offer pristine windows into late first-millennium history or palatable theology, Scriptural Affordances understands it as crafting complex contributions to humanistic discourses about harm, time, and exchange.