Politicians and pundits regularly invoke the Bible in social and political debates on a host of controversial social and political issues, including: abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the death penalty, separation of church and state, family values, climate change, income distribution, teaching evolution in schools, taxation, school prayer, aid for the poor, and immigration. But is the Bible often used out of context in these major debates? This book includes essays by fourteen biblical scholars who examine the use of the Bible in political debates, uncovering the original historical contexts and meanings of the biblical verses that are commonly cited. The contributors take a non-confessional approach, rooted in non-partisan scholarship, to show how specific texts have at times been distorted in order to support particular views. At the same time, they show how the Bible can sometimes make for unsettling reading in the modern day. The key questions remain: What does the Bible really say? Should the Bible be used to form public policy?

Politicians and pundits regularly invoke the Bible in social and political debates on a host of controversial social and political issues, including: abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the death penalty, separation of church and state, family values, climate change, income distribution, teaching evolution in schools, taxation, school prayer, aid for the poor, and immigration. But is the Bible often used out of context in these major debates? This book includes essays by fourteen biblical scholars who examine the use of the Bible in political debates, uncovering the original historical contexts and meanings of the biblical verses that are commonly cited. The contributors take a non-confessional approach, rooted in non-partisan scholarship, to show how specific texts have at times been distorted in order to support particular views. At the same time, they show how the Bible can sometimes make for unsettling reading in the modern day. The key questions remain: What does the Bible really say? Should the Bible be used to form public policy?

Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Rodney A. Werline shifts the scholarly approach to New Testament prayer from source and genre analyses to seeing prayer as a cultural practice, bringing new dimensions of the prayers to light. Assisted by ritual theorists such as Catherine Bell, Pierre Bourdieu, Talal Assad, and Roy Rappaport, Werline illuminates the genius of the New Testament authors and the members of their communities who, through years of embodied practice, acquired an aptitude which humans uniquely possess-the ability through ritual practice to navigate and maintain their relationships with one another and, together, with their God. Werline especially focuses on how their actions brought cultural memory to life, assisted in receiving revelations, protected them from demonic powers, and established and fulfilled their obligations to one another and to that God. The full import of these observations, however, is not possible without placing the prayers within their Second Temple Jewish context. Jewish prayers outside the New Testament should not function as mere "background," but as evidence of a grand cultural enterprise taking place, in which members of the early church actively participated.

Werline encourages us to look at prayer in the following way: to attempt to understand how prayers are tied to particular cultural and social settings. Prayers are part of and expressions of a collection of cultural ideas that have been arranged within a system that seems coherent and obvious to those writings the biblical texts. Prayers participate in and express a person's worldview. Werline shows the ways that - though many biblical prayers are familiar to us - biblical texts and contemporary readers come from different worlds. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament contain many prayers. Large volumes have been written on prayer within a single book, or within the writings of one author, like Paul, or an individual prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer. Werline does not examine every prayer in the Bible or even write exhaustively on a single prayer. He has highlighted a few significant features of each prayer, and some of the prayers vividly exhibit the influence of a particular society's vision. For example, he examines the prayers of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles because of the ways they are tightly tied to the authors' views of history. The writers' interpretation of history profoundly influenced significant portions of the Bible as well as the literature of early Judaism.