Minds, Bodies, and Power: Rethinking Social Scientific Approaches to the Bible

Minds, Bodies, and Power assesses where social scientific criticism of the Bible as a subfield is today, how it got here, where it is heading in the foreseeable future, and whether scholars currently working in the discipline think this is the right direction. This is the first volume in over ten years to address these questions as they pertain to both Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies. Given how the global challenges of the past decade are so enmeshed with social and religious issues—the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing nationalism, and the increased urgency of climate change, to name just a few—it is vital that biblical scholars not only attend to these matters but also (re)evaluate the tools they use to do so. The essays in this book provide up-to-date examples of how Hebrew Bible and New Testament scholars are responding to this need.

Rosanne Liebermann is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the author of Exile, Incorporated (2024) and coeditor of Divinity in Ancient Israel and Beyond (forthcoming). Her research primarily focuses on the role of the body in identity formation, pain, and illness. Marianne Bjelland Kartzow is Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Gossip and Gender (2009), Destabilizing the Margins (Pickwick Publications, 2012), and The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse (2018). Kartzow has recently edited and coedited many volumes, including The Ambiguous Figure of the Neighbor in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Texts and Receptions (2022).