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The first-ever monograph on the history of queer biblical interpretation of a controversial biblical passage

Since the 1950s, homoerotic readings of the pericope in which Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s slave have been built upon three of the account’s features: the specific Greek word pais, which can refer to youth, slave, or the junior partner in a sexual relationship between two men; Luke’s characterization of the young man as “dear” (entimos) to the centurion; and commonplace homoeroticism in the Roman army. Rather than affirming or denying the historical reality of a sexual relationship between the centurion and the young man, Christopher B. Zeichmann instead traces the shifting patterns of queer readings of the text and the influences of the sexual, political, and theological discourses of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Europe, the United States, and Australia. Readers will see how distinct political contexts have led interpreters to find very different meanings about the sexual subtexts of this story.

Speaking of Real Animals and Their History offers an interdisciplinary exploration of animal lives across time, from dinosaurs and long-extinct cave bears to contemporary animals like the giant panda and bald eagles. Drawing on iconography, palaeozoology, zooarchaeology, osteobiography, and textual accounts that document animals’ natural behaviors, Linda Kalof reconstructs in vivid prose a synthesis of interdisciplinary research on the life histories of animals through a realist lens, presenting true‑to‑life portraits of the creatures who have lived on Earth across time.