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Karla G. Bohmbach

Karla G. Bohmbach

Professor of Religion

Susquehanna University

Karla G. Bohmbach is a feminist biblical scholar at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion at Duke University and holds a graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Her published work includes a critical study of the concubine of Judges 19 and an article on names and naming in the biblical world.

Published Articles

Article

Of Fathers and Feminism: How One Lutheran Woman Came to a Vocation

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 14 · Summer 2002

Bohmbach, a recently tenured Susquehanna University feminist biblical scholar one month shy of forty, traces her vocation back through a Vacation Bible School injury, an LCMS upbringing in which only men could preach or preside, her father’s contradictory message that she could do anything while modeling a church that limited women, St. Olaf’s revelation of a Lutheran female face, and a Duke graduate seminar on the History of Feminist Thought with Carol Meyers. Her published feminist work on biblical daughters and on the concubine of Judges 19 is read alongside Kathleen Norris’s account of word-bombardment in church, Michel Tournier on childhood as “ardent confusion,” and her own recent participation as both student and teacher in an Authorized Lay Worship Leaders Program.
Article

A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.
Book Review

In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Bohmbach reviews Thomas O. Buford’s In Search of a Calling: The College’s Role in Shaping Identity (Mercer University Press, 1995), which diagnoses a meaning-crisis among college students and traces two historical aspects of “calling”: the biblical, communitarian aspect rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the practical, individualistic aspect rooted in the Renaissance. She praises Buford’s reconstruction of imago dei as imagination rather than copy of God’s rationality, his broad disciplinary range (biblical studies, theology, educational psychology, business management), and his identification of the tension between freedom and limitation as the field of calling. She is sharply critical, however, of his final chapter’s wariness of canon-revisionists and multiculturalists, his caricature of “special-interest groups,” and his presumption of a homogeneous student body—a presumption that, she argues, never matched American college reality and matches it less today.

Karla G. Bohmbach

Published Articles

Of Fathers and Feminism: How One Lutheran Woman Came to a Vocation

A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar

In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity