Reading the Burning Bush: Voice, World and Holiness

The story of Moses' encounter with God at the Burning Bush has played a central role in the evolution and development of Christian metaphysics. This essay presents a reading which seeks to pay greater attention to the dynamics of the text itself and to the modes of reading which it engenders. These, it is argued, can be shown to be unique in that they confront the reader with an apparatus of attentiveness to the sensible real of the empirical world which, far from being suppressed by the act of reading, is actually foregrounded as a place and time of possible divine disclosure.