From Melas Summer 1999
Morrison's Beloved: Allegorically Othering "White" Christianity
Peggy Oocha

An exegetical reading of Morrison's novel seems almost inevitable since she chooses a New Testament reference, one which--not incidentally--involves a male speaker and a beloved female, as the epigraph to her novel: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved" (Romans 9:25).(4) In the original context of Romans, this quotation refers to God's claiming the Gentiles as part of his beloved people, a group which had historically been restricted to Jews. As Mae G. Henderson notes, in her insightful "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text," the passage from Romans "repeats with little difference a passage from the Old Testament" (64). The passage to which Henderson refers but does not quote directly reads, "I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God" (Hosea 2:23). Although there appears to be little difference in the wording of the two Biblical passages, this slight difference in semantics does not diminish the immense difference in the historical relationship between Jews and Christians when the passage is read allegorically and in Biblical context. (1)

Recognizing the dynamics of "othering" can lead to an appreciation for the deeper levels of meaning in the allegorical relationship Morrison creates through her use of Paul's epistle to the Romans. According to another of Paul's epistles, this one to the Ephesians, God extended His offer of acceptance in the beloved to Gentiles who became Christians (1:6).(5)

Morrison here aligns her "beloved" blacks with early Christian martyrs, while simultaneously making an analogy between the hypocrisy of the self-righteous Pharisees and that of white Christian Americans, in effect, strategically "othering" white Christianity as less than the ideal defined by Scripture. (7)
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...just as early Christians separated their religious observances from those of the Jews who refused to accept them as part of God's beloved people, freed blacks set up their own type of worship services separate from white society and the organized white Christian church....

And from her Bibilogrpahy

Bowers, Susan. "Beloved and the New Apocalypse." Journal of Ethnic Studies 18 (1990): 59-77.
Mitchell, Carolyn A. "`I Love to Tell the Story': Biblical Revisions in Beloved." Religion and Literature 23.3 (1991): 27-42.

Roni Horn on Emily Dickinson

Dickinsons invention was multipaction, her self and emprical reach: everything that could be felt, ehard, seen or smelt, everything precetpible, everything discenible from 280 main street, ahmerst Mass. Perceptible inclused the library, somehow dickionson used the library as an emperical source, somehow she learned to consme its contenst sensorially. HEr library ws not a source of aquired knowledge not a tool of the intellect. GEr library was simply another perceptile thing becoming another entracne, confirmation fo all she sense in the world. Even her poems about God and dEd are eyewitnesses.
qouted by Phiadon, Roni Horn , Pooling Waters.