Events

Join us in Room 100 for a lecture and Q&A session with Associate Professor of Old Testament Brittany Melton. Brittany will discuss "The Hope of Place: Placedness in Lamentations and Song of Songs."

About the Lecture

In this lecture, Brittany Melton will examine Lamentations and Song of Songs in order to offer further insights on "placedness," a concept discussed in J. Gordon McConville's book Being Human in God's World (Baker Academic, 2016). Brittany will argued that, in the Old Testament, these two books serve as the epitome of placelessness and placedness, respectively. The textual observation that each book constructs bodies out of places informs her analysis of their poetics, which, taken in tandem, illustrate how a vision of the inseparable flourishing and languishing of people and place is imparted. Join us to see how Brittany's reading of two underexplored Old Testament texts can help us understand the hope of place.

About the Speaker

Brittany N. Melton received her PhD in Old Testament from the University of Cambridge in 2017, an MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a BA in biblical languages from Oklahoma Baptist University. She has known a calling to ministry since her teenage years, working in various church and parachurch contexts. Her love of the Old Testament is rooted in a passion for the church to rediscover the riches of Old Testament theology for the life of faith. Before coming to Regent in 2023, she taught in Cambridge, for Ridley College (Melbourne), and at Palm Beach Atlantic University in South Florida. She currently serves as Research Fellow at the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa) and as Chair of the Tyndale Fellowship’s Old Testament Study Group (Cambridge, UK). Brittany is the author of Where is God in the Megilloth? A Dialogue on the Ambiguity of Divine Presence and Absence (Brill, 2018) and co-editor of Reading Lamentations Intertextually (2021) and Reading Esther Intertextually (2022) in the LHBOTS series. She is also the co-editor of Reading the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets (Lexham, 2022). Her research interests include: divine presence and absence, the Megilloth, wisdom literature, and hospitality. Her forthcoming work includes the New Handbook on Wisdom Books and Psalms (Baker Academic, 2024) as well as commentaries on Esther, Job, and Ruth. She is married to Drew Melton, and they have two children.

About Regent Forum

Regent Forum offers opportunities to connect with Regent faculty as they share research on theological topics that matter to them. Designed to foster enriching dialogue among faculty, students, and the wider community, each forum features a 40-minute paper presentation followed by a 20-minute Q&A session. Regent Forum is free, open to the public, and available exclusively onsite. Visit rgnt.net/forum to view the Winter 2024 schedule.