Bible and Cultural Studies – serie

This book attempts to read the character of Mary in the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew alongside the lives of experiences of the Indian surrogate mother living a postcolonial India. Reading Mary through these lenses helps us see this mother and her actions in a more ambivalent light, as a mother whose love is both violent and altruistic.

Bridging the fields of Religion and Latina/o Studies, this book fills a gap by examining the “spiritual” rhetoric and practices of the Chicano movement. Bringing new theoretical life to biblical studies and Chicana/o writings from the 1960s, such as El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and El Plan de Santa Barbara, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo boldly makes the case that peoples, for whom historical memories of displacement loom large, engage scriptures in order to make and contest homes. Movement literature drew upon and defied the scriptural legacies of Revelation, a Christian scriptural text that also carries a displaced homing dream. Through the slipperiness of utopian imaginations, these texts become places of belonging for those whose belonging has otherwise been questioned. Hidalgo’s elegant comparative study articulates as never before how Aztlán and the new Jerusalem’s imaginative power rest in their ambiguities, their ambivalence, and the significance that people ascribe to them.

This book presents the first three Christian centuries through the lens of what Foucault called “the care of the self.” This lens reveals a rich variation among early Christ movements by illuminating their practices instead of focusing on what we anachronistically assume to have been their beliefs. A deep analysis of the discourse of martyrdom demonstrates how writers like Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp represented self-care. Deborah Niederer Saxon brings to light an entire spectrum of alternative views represented in newly-discovered texts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere. This insightful analysis has implications for feminist scholarship and exposes the false binary of thinking in terms of “orthodoxy” versus “heresy”/”Gnosticism.”