Sacred Circle Conversations is a new series of intimate gatherings sponsored by Round Hill Community Church that brings together members of our congregation and friends from the wider community for thoughtful conversations about faith, compassion, justice, creativity, science, the environment, mental health, education, the arts, and the great questions shaping our world.
Each gathering features an engaging guest—drawn from universities, seminaries, nonprofit organizations, community leadership, or the arts—who is doing innovative and hopeful work in the world. Rather than presenting a formal lecture, our guests begin a conversation that invites everyone to participate.
Our first Guest is Dr. Gregory Mobley, a Professor of Hebrew Bible and Congregational Studies from Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. He is especially interested in the stirring stories in the Hebrew Bible: going deep and exploring the ways in which they make meaning.
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Gregory Mobley is a Professor of Hebrew Bible and Congregational Studies at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. Mobley came to Yale in 2017 after twenty years of teaching Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Andover Newton Theological School (1997-2017) and at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1996-97). He is the author of three books: The Return of the Chaos Monsters—and Other Backstories of the Bible (Eerdmans, 2012), Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East (T & T Clark, 2006), and The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition in Ancient Israel (Doubleday, 2005). He co-authored with T. J. Wray The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots (Palgrave, 2005) and co-edited the award-winning anthology of essays on interfaith learning, My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interfaith Encounter, Growth, and Transformation (with J. Peace and O. Rose; Orbis, 2012).
Mobley’s primary interest is in uncovering in order to appreciate the meaning-making of the stirring stories under the surface of the over-edited moralistic and priestly layers of the Bible, and he is currently writing a commentary on Judges for the Illuminations series.