478 books match the query 'Bible' and 29 start with r

cover of Race and Biblical Studies: Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom

Race and Biblical Studies

Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom

Tat-siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2022

Classrooms as communities are temporary, but the racial effects can be long term.

The biblical studies classroom can be a site of personal and social transformation. To make it a space for positive change, the contributors to this volume question and reevaluate traditional teaching practices and assessment tools that foreground white, Western scholarship in order to offer practical guidance for an antiracist pedagogy. The introduction and fifteen essays provide tools for engaging issues of social context and scriptural authority, nationalism and religious identities, critical race theory, and how race, gender, and class can be addressed empathetically. Contributors Sonja Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Eric D. Barreto, Denise Kimber Buell, Greg Carey, Haley Gabrielle, Wilda C. Gafney, Julián Andrés González Holguín, Sharon Jacob, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada Jr., Shelly Matthews, Roger S. Nam, Wongi Park, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Abraham Smith, and Kay Higuera Smith share their experience creating classrooms that are spaces that enable the production of new knowledge without reproducing a white subject of the geopolitical West.

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cover of Reading 1-2 Peter and Jude: A Resource for Students

Reading 1-2 Peter and Jude

A Resource for Students

Eric F. Mason

SBL Press, 2014

An essential textbook on 1–2 Peter and Jude for readers of all levels

Scholars engage the best contemporary work on 1–2 Peter and Jude in this student-oriented book. The first four chapters in this collection—on authorship and pseudonymity, literary relationships among the three books, epistolary rhetoric, and apocalyptic elements—consider important, foundational issues related to all three epistles. These essays lay the groundwork for more focused chapters that examine theology and theory in 1 Peter as well a stylistic, theological, and thematic overlap in Jude and 2 Peter.

Features:

  • A range of theological, literary, and theoretical approaches
  • Definitions for specialized terminology
  • Historical and cultural background information
  • Explanations of methodologies
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cover of Reading Biblical Texts Together: Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Reading Biblical Texts Together

Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Tat-Siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2022

A solid and suggestive foundation for the future of ethnic-racial minority biblical criticism

This volume, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia, expands the work begun in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (2009) by focusing on specific texts for scholarly engagement and exchange. Essays by scholars of racial/ethnic minoritized criticism of the Bible highlight the various factors and dynamics at play in the formation of power relations within and through four biblical texts: two from the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 21 and 1 Kings 12) and two from the New Testament (John 4 and Revelation 18). Contributors include Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Lynne St. Clair Darden, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Mary F. Foskett, Jione Havea, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Roberto Mata, Henry W. Morisada Rietz, Raj Nadella, Miranda N. Pillay, David Arthur Sánchez, Timothy J. Sandoval, Fernando F. Segovia, Mitzi J. Smith, Angeline M. G. Song, Linzie M. Treadway, Nasili Vaka’uta, Demetrius K. Williams, and Gale A. Yee. Each essay expands our understandings of minoritization from a global perspective.

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cover of Reading Ezra 9-10 Tu'a-wise: Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania

Reading Ezra 9-10 Tu'a-wise

Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania

Nasili Vaka'uta

SBL Press, 2011

An alternative approach to biblical interpretation from a Tongan standpoint

In Reading Ezra 9–10 Tu'a-wise, Nasili Vaka'uta establishes a theoretical framework for reading that is informed by Tongan cultural perspectives—in this case the “eye-/I-s” of a Tongan commoner (tu’a). She applies a methodology for analysis of biblical texts based on the established theoretical framework and tests the methodology on Ezra 9–10. The book emphasizes contextualizing the task of biblical interpretation (using contextual or specifically indigenous categories of analysis) rather than contextualizing the Bible (applying the insights from one’s reading to one’s situation).

Features

  • Oceanic way of reading the Biblical texts
  • Critical engagement with contextual biblical interpretation
  • Practice-based interpretation
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cover of Reading Gender in Judges: An Intertextual Approach

Reading Gender in Judges

An Intertextual Approach

Shelley L. Birdsong

SBL Press, 2023

Much of the content of Judges can be understood only when read together with other parts of the Hebrew Bible. Narratives in Judges comment, criticize, and reinterpret other texts from across what became the canon, often by troubling gender, disrupting stereotypical binaries, and creating a kind of gender chaos. This volume brings together gender criticism and intertextuality, methods that logically align with intersectional lenses, to draw attention to how race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, sex, and sexuality all play a role in how one is gendered in the book of Judges. Contributors Elizabeth H. P. Backfish, Shelley L. Birdsong, Zev Farber, Serge Frolov, Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Susan E. Haddox, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, Richard D. Nelson, Pamela J. W. Nourse, Tammi J. Schneider, Joy A. Schroeder, Soo Kim Sweeney, Rannfrid I. Lasine Thelle, J. Cornelis de Vos, Jennifer J. Williams, and Gregory T. K. Wong provide substantial new and significant contributions to the study of gender, the book of Judges, and biblical hermeneutics in general. This volume illustrates why biblical scholars and students need to take the intersectional identities of characters and their intertextual environments seriously.

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cover of Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas

Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas

Matthew Levering

Catholic University of America Press, 2020

Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas is a scholarly contribution to Thomistic studies, specifically to the study of Aquinas’s biblical exegesis in relation to his philosophy and theology. Each of the thirteen chapters has a different focus, within the shared concentration of the book on Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job. The essays are arranged in three Parts: “Job and Sacra Doctrina”; “Providence and Suffering”; and “Job and the Moral Life”. Boyle’s opening essay argues that Aquinas’s commentary seeks to show what is required in the “Magister” (namely, Job and God) for the effective communication of wisdom. Mansini’s essay argues that by speaking, God reveals the virtue of Job and its value in God’s providence; without the personal revelation or speech of God, Job could not have known the value of his suffering. Vijgen’s essay explores the commentary’s use of Aristotle for reflecting upon divine providence, sorrow and anger, resurrection, and the new heavens and new earth. Levering’s essay explores the commentary’s citations of the Gospel of John and argues that these pertain especially to divine speech and to light/darkness. Bonino’s essay explains why divine incomprehensibility does not mean that Job is wrong to seek to understand God’s ways. Te Velde’s essay explores how Aquinas’s commentary draws upon the reasoning of his Summa contra gentiles with regard to the good order of the universe. Goris’s essay reflects upon how, according to Aquinas’s commentary, sin is and is not related to suffering. Knasas’s essay argues that Aquinas does not hold that the resurrection of the body is a necessary philosophical corollary of the human desire for happiness. Wawrykow’s essay explores merit, in relation to the connection between sin and punishment/affliction as well as to the connection between good actions and flourishing. Spezzano’s essay shows that Job’s hope and filial fear transform his suffering, making him an exemplar of the consolation they provide to the just. Mullady’s essay reflects upon the moral problems and opportunities posed by the passions, along with the ordering of the virtues to the reward of human happiness. Flood’s essay shows how Aquinas defends Job’s possession of the qualities needed for true friendship (including friendship with God), such as patience, delight in the presence of the friend, and compassion. Lastly, Kromholtz’s essay argues that although Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job never extensively engages eschatology, Aquinas depends throughout upon the reasonableness of hoping for the resurrection of the body and the final judgment.
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cover of Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology

Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas

Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology

Michael Dauphinais

Catholic University of America Press, 2005

This volume fits within the contemporary reappropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas, which emphasizes his use of Scripture and the teachings of the church fathers without neglecting his philosophical insight.
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cover of Reading Paul's Letter to the Romans

Reading Paul's Letter to the Romans

Jerry L. Sumney

SBL Press, 2012

In this volume, leading scholars in the study of Romans invite students and nonspecialists to engage this text and thus come to a more complete understanding of both the letter and Paul’s theology. The contributors include interpreters with different understandings of Romans so that readers see a range of interpretations of central issues in the study of the text. Each essay includes a short review of different positions on a topic and an argument for the author’s position, set out in clear, nontechnical terms, making the volume an ideal classroom tool. The contributors are A. Andrew Das, James D. G. Dunn, Victor Paul Furnish, Joel B. Green, A. Katherine Grieb, Caroline Johnson Hodge, L. Ann Jervis, E. Elizabeth Johnson, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Rodrigo J. Morales, Mark D. Nanos, Jerry L. Sumney, and Francis Watson.
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cover of Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas

Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas

Matthew Levering

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

This volume fits within the contemporary reappropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas, which emphasizes his use of Scripture and the teachings of the church fathers without neglecting his philosophical insight.
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cover of Reading Ruth in Asia

Reading Ruth in Asia

Jione Havea

SBL Press, 2015

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cover of Reading Women in the New Testament Letters

Reading Women in the New Testament Letters

Korinna Zamfir

SBL Press, 2024

This volume explores the differing views expressed in the New Testament letters about the position of women in first- and second-generation Christian communities. Contributors place the letters in their broader Jewish and Greco-Roman cultural, religious, and social contexts to better understand how gender roles, family life, and women’s responsibilities for spreading the gospel changed over time. While some essays envision the lived realities of women as wives, mothers, and widows—both the free and the enslaved, others examine the rhetorical and theological function of female metaphors. Contributors include Bernadette Brooten, Christine Gerber, Annette Bourland Huizenga, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Beate Kowalski, Dominika Kurek-Chomycz, Peter Lampe, William R. G. Loader, Elisa Estévez López, Heidrun E. Mader, Marinella Perroni, Silke Petersen, Uta Poplutz, María José Schultz Montalbetti, Michael Sommer, Angela Standhartinger, Miklós Szabó, Korinna Zamfir, and Silvia Zanconato.
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cover of Reading in These Times: Purposes and Practices of Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Reading in These Times

Purposes and Practices of Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Tat-siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2024

In this follow-up to They Were All Together in One Place? (2009) and Reading Biblical Texts Together (2022), biblical scholars from different racial/ethnic minoritized communities move beyond defining and pursing cross-cultural interpretation to investigating how spatial-geographical and temporal-historical locations affect the purposes and practices of minoritized biblical criticism today. Through an examination of a range of contemporary issues from HIV/AIDS to US immigration policy, contributors establish that how and why they engage the Bible are the result of the intersection of social and cultural factors. Contributors Cheryl B. Anderson, Hector Avalos†, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Vanessa Lovelace, Francisco Lozada Jr., Roger S. Nam, Aliou Cissé Niang, Hugh R. Page Jr., Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Fernando F. Segovia, Abraham Smith, and Vincent L. Wimbush demonstrate that interpretations carry broader implications for society and that scholars have ethical and political responsibilities to their communities and to the world.
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cover of Reading the Bible in Ancient Traditions and Modern Editions: Studies in Memory of Peter W. Flint

Reading the Bible in Ancient Traditions and Modern Editions

Studies in Memory of Peter W. Flint

Andrew B. Perrin

SBL Press, 2017

A collection of essays commemorating the career contributions of Peter W. Flint

An international group of scholars specializing in various disciplines of biblical studies—Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins—present twenty-seven new contributions that commemorate the career of Peter W. Flint (1951–2016). Each essay interacts with and gives fresh insight into a field shaped by Professor Flint’s life work. Part 1 explores the interplay between text-critical methods, the growth and formation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the making of modern critical editions. Part 2 maps dynamics of scriptural interpretation and reception in ancient Jewish and Christian literatures of the Second Temple period.

Features

  • Essays that assess the state of the field and reflect on the methods, aims, and best practices for textual criticism and the making of modern critical text editions
  • Demonstrations of how the processes of scriptural composition, transmission, and reception converge and may be studied together for mutual benefit
  • Clarification of the state/forms of scripture in antiquity and how scripture was extended, rewritten, and recontextualized by ancient Jewish and Christian scribes and communities
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cover of Reading the Book of Revelation: A Resource for Students

Reading the Book of Revelation

A Resource for Students

David L. Barr

SBL Press, 2003

The Apocalypse lends itself to multivalent readings, and this volume fills a gap for students and scholars by discussing how different methods apply to readings. Using historical, literary, and social analysis in combination with strategies such as social-conflict theory, philosophy, women’s studies, ethics, history of religions, postcolonial studies, and popular culture, the essays in this volume focus on specific texts and show not only how each helps interpret the text but also how diverse methods produce divergent readings of a text. Developed as a classroom resource for undergraduates, this work will also prove useful to graduate students, religious leaders, and others who wish to explore how methods shape our understandings of various texts, including Revelation.
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cover of Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students

Reading the Epistle of James

A Resource for Students

Eric F. Mason

SBL Press, 2019

Foundational essays for students of New Testament epistles

This accessible introduction to contemporary scholarship on the Epistle of James begins with chapters that consider possible sources and backgrounds used by the author of James, the genre and literary structure of the book, and its major theological themes. Building on this foundation, subsequent chapters examine James through social-scientific readings, perspectives of Latin American immigrants and the marginalized, and major recent developments in textual criticism. The final chapters in the volume address the relationship between the epistle and the historical James, reception of the epistle in the early church, and major Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the book in the Reformation era. The contributions in this volume distill a range of important issues for readers undertaking a serious study of this letter for the first time.

Features

  • An introduction to contemporary scholarship on this important but often-overlooked text
  • Clear explanations of all technical terms and themes
  • In-depth discussions of the importance of Jewish Scripture and interpretative traditions, Greco-Roman philosophy and Jewish wisdom motifs, and biblical perspectives on justice, wealth, and poverty
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cover of Reading the Epistle to the Hebrews

Reading the Epistle to the Hebrews

Eric F. Mason

SBL Press, 2011

This volume, designed for classroom use, reflects contemporary trends in the study of an important and complex biblical text. Essays address major interpretive issues and emphasize the importance of interpreting Hebrews in light of its ancient Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman contexts.
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cover of Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas

Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas

Serge-Thomas Bonino

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

St. Thomas Aquinas never commented on the Song of Songs. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate, however, that he meditated on it and absorbed it, so that the words of the Song are for him a familiar repertoire and a theological source. His work contains numerous citations of the Song, not counting his borrowings of vocabulary and images from it. In total, there are 312 citations of the Song in Aquinas’s corpus, along with citations of the Song that are found in citations that Aquinas makes of other authors (as for example in the Catena aurea). Understanding the purpose and placement of these citations significantly enriches our understanding of Aquinas as a theologian, biblical exegete, and spiritual master. The book contains an Appendix listing and contextualizing each citation. The study of the citations of the Song especially illuminates Aquinas’s spiritual doctrine. By citing the Song, Aquinas emphasizes the spiritual life’s path of dynamic ascent, through an ever increasing participation in the mystery of the nuptial union of Christ and the Church through love. The Song also highlights the eschatological tension or yearning present in the spiritual life, which is ordered to the fullness of beatific vision. Although Aquinas’s theology is highly “intellectual,” by citing the Song he brings out the affective character of the spiritual life and conveys the centrality of love in the soul’s journey toward Christ. He also draws together contemplation and preaching through his use of the Song.
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cover of Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible

Reading with Feeling

Affect Theory and the Bible

Fiona C. Black

SBL Press, 2019

Essays with a methodological and metacritical focus

The psychological approach known as affect theory focuses on bodily feelings—depression, happiness, disgust, love—and can illuminate both texts and their interpretations. In this collection of essays scholars break new ground in biblical interpretation by deploying a range of affect-theoretical approaches in their interpretations of texts. Contributors direct their attention to the political, social, and cultural formation of emotion and other precognitive forces as a corrective to more traditional historical-critical methods and postmodern approaches. The inclusion of response essays results in a rich transdisciplinary dialog, with, for example, history, classics, and philosophy. Fiona C. Black, Amy C. Cottrill, Rhiannon Graybill, Jennifer L. Koosed, Joseph Marchal, Robert Seesengood, Ken Stone, and Jay Twomey engage a range of texts from biblical, to prayers, to graphic novels. Erin Runions and Stephen D. Moore’s responses push the conversation in new fruitful directions.

Features

  • An overview of the development of affect theory and how it has been used to interpret biblical texts
  • Examples of how to apply affect theory to biblical exegesis
  • Interdisciplinary studies that engage history, literature, classics, animal studies, liturgical studies, philosophy, and sociology
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cover of Receiving the Bible in faith: historical and theological exegesis

Receiving the Bible in faith

historical and theological exegesis

David M. Williams

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

The book should prove helpful to students as an overview of some of the issues involved, while more advanced readers will appreciate its analysis of recent scholars as well the attempt to integrate and adapt their insights.
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cover of Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible

Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible

Christiana de Groot

SBL Press, 2007

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the usual history of biblical interpretation includes few women’s voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume presents forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women—including Grace Aguilar, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author’s contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman.

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cover of Redescribing the Gospel of Mark

Redescribing the Gospel of Mark

Barry S. Crawford

SBL Press, 2017

A collaborative project with a variety of critical essays

This final volume of studies by members of the Society of Biblical Literature’s consultation, and later seminar, on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins focuses on Mark. As with previous volumes, the provocative proposals on Christian origins offered by Burton L. Mack are tested by applying Jonathan Z. Smith's distinctive social theorizing and comparative method. Essays examine Mark as an author’s writing in a book culture, a writing that responded to situations arising out of the first Roman-Judean war after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Contributors William E. Arnal, Barry S. Crawford, Burton L. Mack, Christopher R. Matthews, Merrill P. Miller, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Robyn Faith Walsh explore the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel of Mark and provide a detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus. A concluding retrospective follows the work of the seminar, its developing discourse and debates, and the continuing work of successor groups in the field.

Features

  • A thorough examination of the relation between structure and event in social and anthropological theory that provides conceptual tools for representing the project of the author of Mark
  • An exploration of the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel, a permanent site of successive imperial regimes and culturally related peoples
  • A detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus
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cover of Reimagining Apocalypticism: Apocalyptic Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Writings

Reimagining Apocalypticism

Apocalyptic Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Writings

Lorenzo DiTommaso

SBL Press, 2023

The Dead Sea Scrolls have expanded the corpus of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and tested scholars’ ideas of what apocalyptic means. With all the scrolls now available for study, contributors to this volume engage those texts and many more to reexplore not only definitions of the genre but also the influence of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the study of apocalyptic literature in the Second Temple period and beyond. Part 1 focuses on debates about categories and genre. Part 2 explores ancient Jewish texts from the Second Temple period to the early rabbinic era. Part 3 brings the results of scroll research into dialogue with the New Testament and early Christian writings. Contributors include Garrick V. Allen, Giovanni B. Bazzana, Stefan Beyerle, Dylan M. Burns, John J. Collins, Devorah Dimant, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Frances Flannery, Matthew J. Goff, Angela Kim Harkins, Martha Himmelfarb, G. Anthony Keddie, Armin Lange, Harry O. Maier, Andrew B. Perrin, Christopher Rowland, Alex Samely, Jason M. Silverman, and Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg.
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cover of Remapping Biblical Studies: CUREMP at Thirty

Remapping Biblical Studies

CUREMP at Thirty

Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder

SBL Press, 2023

For decades, scholars of African, African American, Asian, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American heritage have employed their intellect, histories, and lived experience as a means to produce new and courageous scholarship and imagine greater in the Society of Biblical Literature. This volume celebrates the thirty years of service of SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP), a vital body in SBL dedicated to advancing the representation and work of racial and ethnic minoritized scholars in biblical studies. The volume includes the presidential addresses of groundbreaking scholars Brian K. Blount, Fernando F. Segovia, Vincent L. Wimbush, and Gale A. Yee. Gay L. Byron, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Leslie D. Callahan, Jin Young Choi, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Velma E. Love, Andrew Mbuvi, Raj Nadella, Janette H. Ok, Angela N. Parker, Abraham Smith, Yak-hwee Tan, and Ekaputra Tupamahu provide reflections and responses that honor those who have led the way and point in new directions for future generations of scholars.
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cover of Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theology and Poetics

Remembering and Repeating

On Milton's Theology and Poetics

Regina M. Schwartz

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this graceful and compelling book, Regina Schwartz presents a powerful reading of Paradise Lost by tracing the structure of the poem to the pattern of "repeated beginnings" found in the Bible. In both works, the world order is constantly threatened by chaos. By drawing on both the Bible and the more contemporary works of, among others, Freud, Lacan, Ricoeur, Said, and Derrida, Schwartz argues that chaos does not simply threaten order, but rather, chaos inheres in order.

"A brilliant study that quietly but powerfully recharacterizes many of the contexts of discussion in Milton criticism. Particularly noteworthy is Schwartz's ability to introduce advanced theoretical perspectives without ever taking the focus of attention away from the dynamics and problematics of Milton's poem."—Stanley Fish



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cover of Resurrection in Paul: Cognition, Metaphor, and Transformation

Resurrection in Paul

Cognition, Metaphor, and Transformation

Frederick S. Tappenden

SBL Press, 2016

Explore the embodied foundations of Paul's resurrection ideals

It is commonly recognized that Paul's resurrection ideals are bodily ideals, though this dictum is usually configured along literal and metaphorical lines. The realism of future resurrected bodies is disconnected from the metaphoricity of bodily transformation in the present. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this fresh and innovative study addresses this problem. By eschewing the opposition of metaphor and realism, Tappenden explores the concepts and metaphors Paul uses to fashion notions of resurrection, and the uses to which those notions are put. Rather than asserting resurrection as a disembodied, cognicentric proposition, this book illuminates the body's central role in shaping and grounding the apostle's thought and writings.

Features:

  • Close examination of Paul's letters within multiple, interlocking cultural contexts
  • Provides a novel and fresh approach to assessing (in)coherence across the undisputed letters
  • Addresses the materialist nature of early Christian and Judean resurrection ideals without compromising the metaphoricity of those ideals
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cover of Rethinking Paul's Rhetorical Education: Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians

Rethinking Paul's Rhetorical Education

Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians

Ryan S. Schellenberg

SBL Press, 2013

Winner of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies 2015 F. W. Beare Award

Did Paul have formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric, or did he learn what he knew of persuasion informally, as social practice? Pauline scholars recognize the importance of this question both for determining Paul’s social status and for conceptualizing the nature of his letters, but they have been unable to reach a consensus. Using 2 Corinthians 10–13 as a test case, Ryan Schellenberg undertakes a set of comparisons with non-Western speakers—most compellingly, the Seneca orator Red Jacket—to demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies Paul employs in this text are also attested in speakers known to have had no formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric. Since there are no specific indicators of formal training in the way Paul uses these strategies, their appearance in his letters does not constitute evidence that Paul received formal rhetorical education.

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cover of Rhetoric and Scripture: Collected Essays of Thomas H. Olbricht

Rhetoric and Scripture

Collected Essays of Thomas H. Olbricht

Thomas H. Olbricht

SBL Press, 2021

This book offers a unique overview of the development of rhetorical criticism both in North America and internationally through the work of pioneering New Testament scholar Thomas H. Olbricht. Lauri Thurén has gathered nineteen of Olbricht's essays as a guidebook to rhetorical criticism for students, clergy, and scholars. The range of essays from throughout Olbricht's career illuminate the history of rhetorical criticism and reflect the different motivations of ancient and contemporary rhetorical approaches. Essays focus on the history of biblical rhetorical analysis, the rhetorical analysis of biblical texts, the characteristics of rhetorical analysis, and types of biblical rhetorical criticism. A foreword by Thurén and a memorial essay by Carl R. Holladay contextualize Olbricht's work. Anyone interested in the rhetorical study of the New Testament will find this volume inspiring and informative.
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cover of Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark

Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark

Austin Busch

SBL Press, 2022

Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark traces the literary dynamics and explores the theological dimensions of the Gospel of Mark’s thematization of skepticism regarding resurrection. In every place where it seems to depict resurrection—Jesus's and others'—Mark evades the issue of whether resurrection actually occurs. Austin Busch argues that, despite Mark's abbreviated and ambiguous conclusion, this gospel does not downplay resurrection but rather foregrounds it, imagining Jesus’s death and restoration to life as a divine plot to overcome Satan through cunning deception. Risen Indeed? constitutes a careful literary reading of Mark's Gospel, as well as an assessment of Mark's impact on the traditions of Christian literature and theology that emerged in its wake.

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cover of Romans and the Power of the Believer

Romans and the Power of the Believer

Richard J. Britton

SBL Press, 2022

Richard J. Britton uses the critical theory of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and others to examine the financial, gift, and olive tree metaphors of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Drawing upon papyri about money, gifts, and friendship, Greek and Roman farming handbooks, and later sources, including the Book of Mormon and writings from colonized places, Britton questions the way some people understand faith, grace, and identity in the New Testament and beyond. Britton asserts that the believer is not a passive recipient of God’s grace and righteousness but rather an interpreter, reader, and decision maker actively involved in reciprocal exchange and enhancement of God’s eschatological and soteriological project. Believers, he concludes, negotiate meaning through their own interaction with texts and traditions in combination with their own personal relationship with the divine and the world. Turning to the contemporary world, Britton contends that, if we want to upend the oppression of established religion and ideology, we must first appreciate the believer as a powerful and responsible agent within God’s cosmic project.
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