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Using Mark as a test case, scholars address questions like: How should my research and my approach to the text play out in the classroom? What differences should my academic context and my students' expectations make? How should new approaches and innovations inform interpretation and teaching? This resource enables biblical studies instructors to explore various interpretative approaches and to begin to engage pedagogical issues in our changing world.

Features:

• Ideas that may be adapted for teaching any biblical text
• Diverse perspectives from nine experts in their fields
• Essays include tips, ideas, and lesson plans for the classroom

Jairus’s Daughter and the Female Body in Mark demonstrates that ubiquitous and significant depictions of children in the literature and material culture of the first century CE shaped the mindsets of the Gospel of Mark’s original audience. Through a detailed analysis of the story of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5 and of the archaeological remains depicting female children, Janine E. Luttick reveals how ancient hearers of this story encountered an image of a female child that communicated ideas of hope to Jesus’s followers and in turn how readers today can understand the authority of Jesus, the domestic structures of early Christianity, and the suffering and loss experienced by some early Christians.

An incitement to re-assess how society relates to persons with poor mental health

Mainwaring explores the societal contexts of those who suffer poor mental health, and in particular the relational dynamics of how identity, agency, and dialogue are negotiated in personal encounters. This work seeks to serve as an experiment, such that interested readers might better understand the dynamics of relational power that pervade encounters with persons with poor mental health.

Features:

• Foucauldian analysis of the relational dynamics of poor mental health used to re-imagine hegemonic relational dynamics
• Close readings of encounters between individual characters to evaluate how mutuality operates in those encounters
• Study of mutuality as it has emerged in mental health literature, feminist theologies, and theologies of disability

A collaborative project with a variety of critical essays

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

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.

Explores social and cultural transformations among the indigenous communities of western Mexico, especially the indios fronterizos (Frontier Indians), preceding and during the struggle for independence

In The Mark of Rebels Barry Robinson offers a new look at Mexican Independence from the perspective of an indigenous population caught in the heart of the struggle. During the conquest and settlement of Mexico’s Western Sierra Madre, Spain’s indigenous allies constructed an indio fronterizo identity for their ethnically diverse descendants. These communities used their special status to maintain a measure of autonomy during the colonial era, but the cultural shifts of the late colonial period radically transformed the relationship between these indios fronterizos and their neighbors.

Marshalling an extensive array of archival material from Mexico, the United States, and Spain, Robinson shows that indio fronterizo participation in the Mexican wars of independence grafted into the larger Hidalgo Revolt through alignment with creole commanders. Still, a considerable gulf existed between the aims of indigenous rebels and the creole leadership. Consequently, the privileges that the indios fronterizos sought to preserve continued to diminish, unable to survive either the late colonial reforms of the Spanish regime or creole conceptions of race and property in the formation of the new nation-state.

This story suggests that Mexico’s transition from colony to nation can only be understood by revisiting the origins of the colonial system and by recognizing the role of Spain’s indigenous allies in both its construction and demolition. The study relates events in the region to broader patterns of identity, loyalty, and subversion throughout the Americas, providing insight into the process of mestizaje that is commonly understood to have shaped Latin America. It also foreshadows the popular conservatism of the nineteenth century and identifies the roots of post-colonial social unrest.

This book provides new context for scholars, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and anyone interested in the history of Mexico, colonization, Native Americans, and the Age of Revolutions.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.