Mark Glanville: ‘Where are Your Roots?!’: Biblical Ethics & Jazz (a Jazz-Talk from the Piano and a Bar Stool)

One of the highlights of Regent Summer Programs is our free Evening Public Lectures. This series always features a wide range of professors and topics, and this year is no exception. All lectures will be streamed online, so invite a friend and join us!

“Where are your roots?!” jazz-master Mike Nock would shout to us as we played. My brother and I became jazz professionals while studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Our teacher would call this phrase out in the middle of a jazz performance, urging us to dig more deeply into the jazz tradition. We might liken the jazz tradition that runs deep within every good jazz performance to the ethical tradition that is expressed throughout the narrative arc of scripture in all of its variety. Biblical ethics, of course, reflects the loving and generous personhood of God. Our task is to discern the tradition, so to speak; the core ethical trajectories within the biblical story that also echo the loving character of God. Then we must ask: what fresh creativity is required of us today? What fresh and beautiful sounds and rhythms should the tradition birth in us? Let’s explore what can jazz teach the church about appropriating our scriptural tradition, with both creativity and also deep roots.

Dr. Mark Glanville is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College. Prior to coming to Regent, he pastored for 14 years in both Canada and Australia. Mark has been bi-vocational, combining reflective missional pastoring with biblical scholarship, and is also a trained jazz pianist who plays on the Vancouver jazz scene.  Mark has authored three books, Adopting the Stranger as Kindred in Deuteronomy (SBL, 2018); Exodus: Society Reshaped as Family (Lexham, 2020); and Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship in Global Politics (IVP Academic, 2021). Mark’s recent scholarship explores dynamics of kinship, focusing on the book of Deuteronomy in particular, on the Old Testament more broadly, and also on the synoptic gospels.

Dr. Glanville will be teaching the course A Biblical Ethic of Kinship: Christ’s Invitation to Belonging from July 5-9 as part of Regent’s 2021 Summer Programs.