When you're going through a season of grief, it's hard to fathom that there will be a day when you won't be hurting. Throughout Scripture we are taught to humble ourselves and love one another because empathy is born from loving our neighbor. If you've ever experienced loss, you're able to help others turn their grief into grace and create hope and purpose from what feels devastating and heartbreaking. When Grief Goes Deep, Where Healing Begins is a devotional that helps those mourning:  build from "lasts," those cherished memories of your life with your loved one. remember that they're not alone. understand that it's okay to be sad and learn how to process feelings in a healthy way. The collection of devotions and prayers warmly offers inspiration and hope based in God's Word and his promises to those who have experienced loss. Each devotion includes a Scripture verse and a prayer for healing.

Religious encounters with mystery can be fascinating, but also terrifying. So too when it comes to encounters with the monsters that haunt Jewish and Christian traditions. Religion has a lot to do with horror, and horror has a lot to do with religion. Religion has its monsters, and monsters have their religion. In this unusual and provocative book, Timothy Beal explores how religion, horror, and the monstrous are deeply intertwined. This new edition has been thoughtfully updated, reflecting on developments in the field over the past two decades and highlighting its contributions to emerging conversations. It also features a new chapter, "Gods, Monsters, and Machines," which engages cultural fascinations and anxieties about technologies of artificial intelligence and machine learning as they relate to religion and the monstrous at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Religion and Its Monsters is essential reading for students and scholars of religion and popular culture, as well as for any readers with an interest in horror theory or monster theory.

Religious encounters with mystery can be fascinating, but also terrifying. So too when it comes to encounters with the monsters that haunt Jewish and Christian traditions. Religion has a lot to do with horror, and horror has a lot to do with religion. Religion has its monsters, and monsters have their religion. In this unusual and provocative book, Timothy Beal explores how religion, horror, and the monstrous are deeply intertwined. This new edition has been thoughtfully updated, reflecting on developments in the field over the past two decades and highlighting its contributions to emerging conversations. It also features a new chapter, "Gods, Monsters, and Machines," which engages cultural fascinations and anxieties about technologies of artificial intelligence and machine learning as they relate to religion and the monstrous at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Religion and Its Monsters is essential reading for students and scholars of religion and popular culture, as well as for any readers with an interest in horror theory or monster theory.

Every person needs to know the core Bible stories - those stories that have cultural, historical, or literary significance-that lie at the foundation of Western civilisation. Whether watching political candidates quote from Jesus or tracking court cases on how the stories of Adam and Eve should be taught in the schools, we are surrounded by the legacy of the Bible in our contemporary world. Professor Tim Beal argues that without knowing these core stories, we cannot fully participate in the popular, political, and especially spiritual worlds that surround us. Beal has selected the Bible stories that have shaped history and our world and provides the key information we need to understand their significance and meaning. Whether atheist or believer, readers will benefit from this entry-level course into the heart of the most influential book ever written.

Celebrating the five hundredth volume, this Festschrift honors David M. Gunn, one of the founders of the Journal of Old Testament Studies, later the Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, and offers essays representing cutting-edge interpretations of the David material in the Hebrew Bible and later literary and popular culture. Essays in Part One, Relating to David, present David in relationship to other characters in Samuel. These essays demonstrate the value of close reading, analysis of literary structure, and creative, disciplined readerly imagination in interpreting biblical texts in general and understanding the character of David in particular. Part Two, Reading David, expands the narrative horizon. These essays analyze the use of the David character in larger biblical narrative contexts. David is understood as a literary icon that communicates and disrupts meaning in different ways in different context. More complex modes of interpretation enter in, including theories of metaphor, memory and history, psychoanalysis, and post-colonialism. Part Three, Singing David, shifts the focus to the portrayal of David as singer and psalmist, interweaving in mutually informative ways both with visual evidence from the ancient Near East depicting court musicians and with the titles and language of the biblical psalms. Part Four, Receiving David, highlights moments in the long history of interpretation of the king in popular culture, including poetry, visual art, theatre, and children's literature. Finally, the essays in Part Five, Re-locating David, represent some of the intellectually and ethically vital interpretative work going on in contexts outside the U.S. and Europe.

The life and times of the New Testament's most mystifying and incendiary book Few biblical books have been as revered and reviled as Revelation. Many hail it as the pinnacle of prophetic vision, the cornerstone of the biblical canon, and, for those with eyes to see, the key to understanding the past, present, and future. Others denounce it as the work of a disturbed individual whose horrific dreams of inhumane violence should never have been allowed into the Bible. Timothy Beal provides a concise cultural history of Revelation and the apocalyptic imaginations it has fueled. Taking readers from the book's composition amid the Christian persecutions of first-century Rome to its enduring influence today in popular culture, media, and visual art, Beal explores the often wildly contradictory lives of this sometimes horrifying, sometimes inspiring biblical vision. He shows how such figures as Augustine and Hildegard of Bingen made Revelation central to their own mystical worldviews, and how, thanks to the vivid works of art it inspired, the book remained popular even as it was denounced by later church leaders such as Martin Luther. Attributed to a mysterious prophet identified only as John, Revelation speaks with a voice unlike any other in the Bible. Beal demonstrates how the book is a multimedia constellation of stories and images that mutate and evolve as they take hold in new contexts, and how Revelation is reinvented in the hearts and minds of each new generation. This succinct book traces how Revelation continues to inspire new diagrams of history, new fantasies of rapture, and new nightmares of being left behind.

In the summer of 2002, Timothy K. Beal loaded his family into a twenty-nine-foot-long motor home and hit the rural highways of America in search of roadside religious attractions-sites like the World's Largest Ten Commandments and Precious Moments Chapel. "Roadside Religion" tells of his attempts to understand the meaning of these places as expressions of religious imagination and experience, and to encounter faith in all its awesome absurdity.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has always excelled at making the Bible approachable and engaging. Drawn from a series of public conversations with Brueggemann and his former student and longtime friend Clover Reuter Beal, An On-Going Imagination explores Brueggemanns most influential biblical-theological concepts and methods: Why should we still bother with the Bible today? What is the purpose of prayer, and what can it do for our lives? How is keeping the Sabbath countercultural? What does it mean to say that the God in the Bible is a God in recovery? Intimate, provocative, and challenging, An On-Going Imagination offers an enlightening introduction to Brueggemanns work for readers who want to learn more and a way back into the Bible for people who feel alienated from it by those on the right and the left who claim to have it all figured out. Brueggemann and Beal reawaken us to the fascinating strangeness of biblical tradition and its incredible power to help us imagine new ways of seeing and being in the world.

Celebrating the five hundredth volume, this Festschrift honors David M. Gunn, one of the founders of the Journal of Old Testament Studies, later the Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, and offers essays representing cutting-edge interpretations of the David material in the Hebrew Bible and later literary and popular culture. Essays in Part One, "Relating to David," present David in relationship to other characters in Samuel. These essays demonstrate the value of close reading, analysis of literary structure, and creative, disciplined readerly imagination in interpreting biblical texts in general and understanding the character of David in particular. Part Two, "Reading David," expands the narrative horizon. These essays analyze the use of the David character in larger biblical narrative contexts. David is understood as a literary icon that communicates and disrupts meaning in different ways in different context. More complex modes of interpretation enter in, including theories of metaphor, memory and history, psychoanalysis, and post-colonialism. Part Three, "Singing David," shifts the focus to the portrayal of David as singer and psalmist, interweaving in mutually informative ways both with visual evidence from the ancient Near East depicting court musicians and with the titles and language of the biblical psalms. Part Four, "Receiving David," highlights moments in the long history of interpretation of the king in popular culture, including poetry, visual art, theatre, and children's literature. Finally, the essays in Part Five, "Re-locating David," represent some of the intellectually and ethically vital interpretative work going on in contexts outside the U.S. and Europe. >

A religious scholar and former evangelical Christian explores the history of the Bible, from the ancient Hebrew scrolls that Jesus read to the big business of Bible publishing today, debunking the myth of the Bible's infallibility and revealing a richer and more authentic way to read it. "Personal and accessible . . . The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal's attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book." -- Adam Kirsch, Tablet In this revelatory exploration, a noted religion scholar and former evangelical Christian takes us back to early Christianity to ask how a box of handwritten scrolls became the Bible, and forward to see how the multibillion-dollar business that has brought us Biblezines and manga Bibles is selling down the Bible's sacred capital. Among his surprising insights: *Christianity thrived for centuries without any Bible. Early congregations used collections of scrolls; there was no official canon of scriptures and no book existed that was big enough to hold them.* "The idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God is only about a century old." *There is no "original" Bible behind the thousands of Bibles on the market today.The further back we go in the Bible's history, the more versions we find." In The Rise and Fall of the Bible Beal offers a chance to rediscover a Bible, and a faith, that is truer to its own history -- not a book of answers but a library of questions. "Part autobiography, part social scientific research, part shrewd discernment, and part theological interpretation -- Tim Beal has written a zinger of a book about the cultural history of the Bible. This welcome and important book will cause a pause before we make glib claims for 'the Word of the Lord.' " -- Walter Brueggemann "Beal . . . makes a compelling case against the idea of a fully consistent and unerring book, positing instead a very human volume with all the twists and foibles of the human experience, truly reflecting that human experience. He presents a convincing case for a radical rereading of the text, an honest appreciation of this sacred book. An engrossing and excellent work, highly recommended." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review