Scriptures Everywhere:
A monthly (virtual) seminar and podcast

SEASON FOUR – FALL 2026 – HAS BEGUN! NEXT SESSION IS SEPTEMBER 18.

Our Season Four first episode is now live! Find it at our Scriptures Everywhere website, and also at Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

We also hope that you can tune in on Friday, September 18, for the second of our fall conversations. We began with “Election” as a sign of choice and chosenness, and will continue our conversations duing this U.S. midterm election cycle about scriptures, election(s), democracy, and social life. Each month, a different host will lead a discussion that explores meaning-making and power through the theme of election.

Thank you to those who have followed our prior seasons. Please follow us each month as we prepare for our next ISS meeting in Lawrence, Kansas (February 2028).

Season Four, Episode 1 Description/Summary:

For the Fall 2026 season, we explore how scriptures, textual and otherwise, inform the meaning of election and its sociopolitical practices. In this first episode, Richard Newton, Nick Pumphrey, and Arthur Carter take up election as a sign of choice and chosenness. Prompted by R. S. Sugirtharajah’s “Known Knowns and Unknown Unknowns: Scriptures and Scriptural Interpretations” in Vincent Wimbush’s Theorizing Scriptures (Rutgers, 2008), and Peter Baker’s recent reporting in the New York Times on the president’s re-litigation of the 2020 election results, we consider who is authorized to mediate what a public knows, from all it has never thought or learned to ask. Where Sugirtharajah, borrowing Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, traces the entanglement of biblical studies with empire, we extend his analysis to the political season and ballot box, where voting turns out to be less a matter of choosing than of performing who belongs among the chosen.

Brief Bios of Week 1’s Speakers:

Richard Newton is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He holds a PhD in Critical Comparative Scriptures from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox, 2020) and co-editor of Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2023), and curator of Sowing the Seed.
Nicholaus Pumphrey is Professor of Religious Studies at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, where he also curates the Quayle Bible Collection. He holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Claremont Graduate University and is the author of Superman and the Bible. His interests include popular culture and religion, and comparative Near Eastern literature.
Arthur Carter is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Director of Black Church Studies at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in Religion (New Testament) from Vanderbilt University. A contextual biblical scholar, his work addresses New Testament hermeneutics, historiography, and early Christian identities. With transdisciplinary training in diaspora studies, he brings insights from Black Atlantic cultural and discursive traditions to bear on ancient texts and their historical reconstructions.

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Registration closes the day before the event.

If you miss an event and would like to catch up on the conversation, you can listen to the podcast version of the conversation, released the third Friday of every month.

To listen to previous seasons, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and our Libsyn page.