Thomas L. King Lecture in Religious Studies

Lecture Title: "The Disappointing Prophet: What the book of Haggai can tell us about how we read," presented by Laura Carlson Hasler.
Why read the Bible's prophets? What do we want from them? For generations, readers from many traditions (including scholars) have asked these texts to inspire them and even to predict the future. But what is a biblical prophet made a prediction that was wrong? Why keep or read a failed prophet?
In this talk, Carlson Hasler will introduce Haggai, a short collection of disappointing prophecies. Brief, unpoetic and (arguable) wrong. Haggai doesn't sound like the kind of prophet we want in our Bibles - and yet, he's there! This lecture will explain how a disappointing prophet reveals the power of our own expectations: in this case, that biblical prophecy must be good, beautiful and true in particular kinds of ways. With our own biases in mind, Carlson Hasler will argue that Haggai still does surprising and valuable work for us. Instead of offering inspiration or accurate prediction, this "unpoetic," failed prophecy helps us rethink divine violence, human bodies and human speech.