Editorial introduction: What mean these stones? Essays in honor of Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford

“What mean these stones?” The influence of popular and transformative professors often exhibits itself in how students share memories from their classrooms. This is certainly the case with Dr. Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford, a pre-eminent Psalms scholar and professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology for over two-and-a-half decades. Since I first began teaching with her at Mercer, I would hear students recalling this question from her lecture on Joshua 4, always repeating it with the same intensity, intonation, and cadence they heard in her voice. In each instance, their imitation was certainly the sincerest form of flattery. Students have referred to their beloved teacher in many ways over the course of her tenure at Mercer. Some name her as Dr. Nancy, others as Dr. DcW, and some more formally as Dr. deClaissé-Walford. In this introduction, I refer to her as Nancy. Not only do I consider her a mentor for my own teaching and scholarship, but she is also a caring friend to all her colleagues, many of whom have offered tributes to her in this volume. Whatever the reference, her students, former students, peers, and colleagues always ascribe a tremendous respect for her interpretive skills, her scholarship on the Psalter and wisdom traditions, and her dedication to passing on her passion for Hebrew and the Old Testament to future generations of pastors, ministers, and scholars.

Along with all her accolades, Nancy also has left an indelible mark on Review & Expositor itself. She served over 20 years as a member of the editorial board for the journal. In addition to writing manifold articles and book reviews, as well as editing issues, Nancy also was an associate editor, the managing editor, or the book review editor for the journal for most of that time. Ever mindful of how the history of something impacts its future, Nancy contributed several articles to the Summer 2002 issue, Review and Expositor: A Retrospective Look. In her essays in the volume, she examined the first issue of the journal, the next 90 years of its history, the transitions in the journal from 1996 to 2002, and a history of the editors who served the journal. The volume, which she also edited, includes four essays from past editors.

Nancy treated her roles for the journal as teaching and learning experiences, shepherding issue editors (including myself) and authors as they navigated their first experiences writing, soliciting, collecting, and editing articles for the journal. In these roles, she often served as a mentor for talented students, involving them in the nitty-gritty tasks of the publication, including copy-editing, corresponding with authors, and sending out books for review. Nancy also advocated for her academically minded students to review books, serving as a co-author for their reviews on several occasions. Some of these students, after graduating, would contribute to the journal on their own. The contributors to this volume represent only a handful of the people she has influenced as a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, and each gives, in their offering, a glimpse of how she uniquely impacted their lives and scholarship.

In “A word about . . . White Christian nationalism and one Womanist’s invitation into a deeper story,” Angela N. Parker invites readers to examine their own deep stories and those of their institutions. This examination, which Parker applies to biblical studies as a discipline, requires a deconstruction of eurocentrism, currently rearing its head in the United States in the form of White Christian nationalism. She offers a deeper reading of the story of the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21–28) or the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24–30) as an antidote to such nationalistic trends. Parker suggests that through his encounter with the Canaanite woman, Jesus “comes away with a healed understanding of his own identity and a push to provide a more inclusive mission and ministry.” Parker concludes that the invitation to this deeper story of Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite woman prompts Christians to take definitive and specific postures against White Christian nationalism. ¹

Graham B. Walker Jr., Nancy’s colleague for over two decades at Mercer, has often over the years discussed with Nancy texts from Genesis to Job, the pair even co-teaching a seminar on Genesis from time to time. In his contribution to this issue, “Cain finds his voice,” Walker expands the Genesis 4 dialogue between Cain and God to include philosophers and theologians such as Aristotle and Plato, René Girard, Martha Nussbaum, H. Richard Niebhur, and Elie Wiesel. Walker ultimately wonders if a space for honest dialogue has existed between Cain and God, in which Cain could have expressed his lament through prayer, whether violence could have been abated.

Nancy’s colleague on the Review & Expositor editorial board and successor as the managing editor, Mark E. Biddle, in “I am finite, faulty, and frail, just as you made me: Scrupulosity and an unhealthy image of God,” offers a tribute to Nancy’s work on both the Psalter and the wisdom traditions by placing Psalm 39 in conversation with the book of Job. For Biddle, both the psalmist and Job exhibit the dangers of religious perfectionism. Both ultimately wish God would turn God’s condemning gaze away from them, though Job offers his protests more radically. In his contribution, Biddle highlights the danger of theological traditions that depict God as demanding ethical perfection, wishing on the psalmist’s and Job’s behalf that they could have been freed from such unrealistic expectations.

In the spirit of mentoring students, Denise Massey, another long-time colleague at Mercer, invited her and Nancy’s mutual student at the time, Averee Madison Gentry, to co-author a contribution. In their offering, “Insights for pastoral care inspired by Dr. deClaissé-Walford’s writings about the Psalms,” they mine Nancy’s teachings on the Psalms for insights about pastoral care. Massey and Gentry find the themes of the Psalter and the range of emotions it presents, from joy and praise to sorrow and lament, to be particularly relevant to pastoral caregivers who must minister to persons experiencing these same emotional extremes throughout the course of their lives. Moreover, Massey and Gentry highlight not only the content they learned from Nancy about the Psalms, but also how Nancy models pastoral care in her teaching methods, her way of being in the world, and in her interactions with both students and colleagues.

R. Alan Culpepper, the founding dean of Mercer’s McAfee School of Theology, is fond of telling the story of a conversation he overheard between two students at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. He noticed their excitement for a particular course and asked the students to name the course. When they said Hebrew, he was astounded that students would express such enthusiasm for a language course. When assembling the founding faculty of the school, he remembered that encounter and invited Nancy to be one of the founding faculty members. In “Women in Second Temple fiction,” Culpepper honors Nancy with a presentation on Jewish heroines in Second Temple fiction, noting the prominence of women in narratives written during the tumultuous times between the second century BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Nancy mentored many students who went on to pursue PhD work in theology and other fields. One of her earliest thesis advisees was Angela Yarber, who wrote a thesis titled Embodied Liberation: The Role of Women in Ancient Israelite Dance. Here, in “Dance in the Christian tradition,” she contributes further work on this topic. For Yarber, embracing the embodiment of dance in the biblical, historical, and theological traditions potentially empowers those who have never used their bodies in worship, as well as those excluded from worship leadership because of their gender or sexuality.

In the expository words, long-time friend and colleague Karen Massey offers “All nature sings: A sermon inspired by Psalm 98,” reflecting on how the COVID pandemic of 2020 forced her to slow down, disconnect from the technological distractions of “normal” life, and re-engage with creation. As she listened to babbling brooks and chattering squirrels, her thoughts turned toward hymns of praise including “This is my Father’s World” and Psalm 98. Inspired by the psalm and her experiences, Massey encourages the listener/reader to first notice creation, then attend to the Holy within creation, and finally, to care for creation. These steps will help us recognize that humans are not above creation, but are part of it. Attending to and caring for creation, in turn, becomes an act of praise itself.

C. Gregory DeLoach, the current dean of the McAfee School of Theology and the dean when Nancy retired, explores the themes of death and dying throughout the Psalter in his contribution, “Discomforting consolations: Death and dying in the Psalter.” Drawing upon his significant pastoral experience, DeLoach lauds the Psalms for their honesty and sees them as a possible antidote for the death-denying culture in which we often find ourselves. DeLoach finds these psalms as discomforting consolations that invite the reader into a community that can prevent having to face the realities of death in isolation.

In my own contribution, “Frolicking in the Storm Lord’s garden: Encountering the Creator and creation in Psalm 104,” inspired by Nancy’s influence on my pedagogy, as well as a reconnection with creation through our shared interest in gardening, I offer a teaching approach to Psalm 104 that can be adapted to various types of classrooms, church Bible studies, and spirituality retreats. I offer guidance on how to engage students in an interactive reading of the psalm, as well as a brief commentary to help those who might wish to facilitate a similar activity within their ministry contexts.

Finally, Michelle Brooks Garber, who has been at one time or another Nancy’s student, mentee, Hebrew tutor, student assistant, and eventual colleague in various capacities, has compiled “A select bibliography of Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford’s contributions to Review & Expositor and beyond,” highlighting her specific contributions to R&E before offering a selected bibliography of contributions Nancy has made, and continues to make, to the field of biblical studies.

In her essay on “Four Influential Managing Editors” of R&E and toward the beginning of her tenure as managing editor, Nancy writes, “I stand on broad shoulders, shoulders without which this journal would never have survived for nearly one hundred years.” Even without counting her years serving the journal in other capacities, Nancy’s 11 years as the managing editor is second only to W. O. Carver, who served from 1920 to 1942. ² May the contributions from this volume and the catalog of her service to the journal and beyond stand as testimony that she, too, is among the most influential managing editors of the journal, even as she continues to impact the lives, scholarship, and vocation of her students, colleagues, and peers in the academy.