By 1990, biblical criticism as a primarily historical discipline changed into a group of disciplines with often conflicting interests. New perspectives from different ethnicities, feminist theology, Catholicism and Judaism offered insights previously overlooked by the majority of white male Protestants who had dominated biblical criticism from its beginnings. Globalization also brought different worldviews, while other academic fields such as Near Eastern studies, sociology, and anthropology became active in expanding biblical criticism as well. These new points of view created awareness that the Bible can be rationally interpreted from many different perspectives. In turn, this awareness changed biblical criticism's central concept from the criteria of neutral judgment to that of beginning from a recognition of the various biases the reader brings to the study of the texts.