"Reading First Peter with New Eyes" is the second of four volumes that incorporate essays examining the impact of recent methodological advances in New Testament studies of the letters of James, 1 and 2 Peter and Jude. It includes rhetorical, social-scientific, socio-rhetorical, ideological and hermeneutical methods, as they contribute to understanding First Peter and its social context. Each essay has a similar three-fold structure, ideal for use by students: a description of the methodological approach; the application of the methodological approach to First Peter; and a conclusion identifying how the methodological approach contributes to a fresh understanding of the letter. "Reading First Peter with New Eyes" follows on from the first volume in the series, "Reading James With New Eyes", edited by Robert, L. Webb and John S. Kloppenborg.

Through a close and informative reading of seven key texts in Acts, Kauppi analyses the appearances of Graeco-Roman religion, offering evidence of practices including divination and oracles, ruler cult and civic foundation myth. "Foreign But Familiar Gods" then uses a combination of these scriptural texts and other contemporary evidence (including archaeological and literary material) to suggest that one of Luke's subsidiary themes is to contrast Graeco-Roman and Christian religious conceptualizations and practices.

Healing Verses of the Psalms is a must-have reference of excerpted verses of the Book of Psalms from the King James Version of the Bible that carries an impactful healing quality. It will serve as your ready reference to find verses that bring healing, relaxation and invigoration in times of stress or for life enhancement.Healing Verses of the Psalms includes beautiful illustrations and easy-to-understand suggestions for use along with insights, all of which can provide greater application and understanding for how this book can benefit you.It also comes complete with an index, making it easy to find a verse that applies to a specific need you may have.

The book reads the descriptions of the body in the Song of Songs as grotesque, as an alternative way of interpreting perplexing imagery and as a means to investigate the Song's politics of gender and love. The lovers' expressions of mutual affection and desire in the Song of Songs include intimate and detailed poetic descriptions of the body. These are challenging to interpret because the imagery used is cryptic, drawing on seemingly incongruous aspects of nature, architecture and war. Biblical scholarship frequently expresses some discomfort or embarrassment over this language, yet largely maintains the view that it should be interpreted positively as a complimentary and loving description of the body. If read without this hermeneutic, however, the imagery appears to construct nonsensical and ridiculous pictures of the human form, which raise interesting questions, and pose definite challenges, for the Song's readers. Fiona Black addresses the problematic nature of the Song's body imagery by using the artistic and literary construct of the grotesque body as a heuristic. The resulting reading investigates some issues for the Song that are often left to the margins, namely, the Song's presentation of desire, its politics of gender, and the affect of the text. The book concludes with the identification of some implications of this reading, including the creation of a new framework in which to understand the relevance of the Song's imagery for its presentation of love.

Although it opens with an argument that the earth, and not humanity, is the real subject of Genesis 1-11, this collection of essays focuses first on female personalities in Genesis (Eve, Hagar, Rebeccah, Tamar and the four tribal matriarchs), then on male characters (Abraham, Ishmael, Pharaoh). The treatment ranges from historical-critical analysis, through discourse analysis and narrative, ideological and psychological analyses, to postmodern autobiographical exegesis. Among the many delights of this selection are the mingling of traditional and contemporary perspectives, especially the interplay of gender at the level of the biblical text and of the modern author-and perhaps also of the modern reader of this fascinating assortment of studies on tales of human ancestry.>

"Cats help me pray," says Herbert Brokering. This collection of whimsical, insightful psalms, or prayers, is based on Brokering's observations of cats he has known through his life - farm cats, house cats, alley cats. Each psalm expresses an observation about a cat's nature, written in the "voice" of the cat, followed by a prayer in which the human spirit speaks of its cat-like nature to God. Cat Psalms is for those who wish to pray more deeply, with more imagination and understanding, and offers fresh ways to see ourselves and new ways to pray.

The Book of Job functions as literature of survival where the main character, Job, deals with the trauma of suffering, attempts to come to terms with a collapsed moral and theological world, and eventually re-connects the broken pieces of his world into a new moral universe, which explains and contains the trauma of his recent experiences and renders his life meaningful again. The key is Job's death imagery. In fact, with its depiction of death in the prose tale and its frequent discussions of death in the poetic sections, Job may be the most death-oriented book in the bible. In particular, Job, in his speeches, articulates his experience of suffering as the experience of death. To help understand this focus on death in Job we turn to the psychohistorian, Robert Lifton, who investigates the effects on the human psyche of various traumatic experiences (wars, natural disasters, etc). According to Lifton, survivors of disaster often sense that their world has "collapsed" and they engage in a struggle to go on living. Part of this struggle involves finding meaning in death and locating death's place in the continuity of life. Like many such survivors, Job's understanding of death is a flashpoint indicating his bewilderment (or "desymbolization") in the early portions of his speeches, and then, later on, his arrival at what Lifton calls "resymbolization," the reconfiguration of a world that can account for disaster and render death - and life - meaningful again.