Search results for ""Author Carol A. Newsom""

This collection of essays by Carol A. Newsom explores the indispensable role that rhetoric and hermeneutics play in the production and reception of biblical and Second Temple literature. Some of the essays are methodological and programmatic, while others provide extended case studies. Because rhetoric is, as Kenneth Burke put it, "a strategy for encompassing a situation," the analysis of rhetoric illumines the ways in which texts engage particular historical moments, shape and reshape communities, and even construct new models of self and agency. The essays in this book not only explore how ancient texts hermeneutically engage existing traditions but also how they themselves have become the objects of hermeneutical transformation in contexts ranging from ancient sectarian Judaism to the politics of post-World War I and II Germany and America to modern film criticism and feminist re-reading.

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The first full-length study of the evolution of self and agency in ancient Israelite anthropology Conceptions of “the self” have received significant recent attention in philosophy, anthropology, and cultural history. Scholars argue that the introspective self of the modern West is a distinctive phenomenon that cannot be projected back onto the cultures of antiquity. While acknowledging such difference is vital, it can lead to an inaccurate flattening of the ancient self. In this study, Carol A. Newsom explores the assumptions that govern ancient Israelite views of the self and its moral agency before the fall of Judah, as well as striking developments during the Second Temple period. She demonstrates how the collective trauma of the destruction of the Temple catalyzed changes in the experience of the self in Israelite literature, including first-person-singular prayers, notions of self-alienation, and emerging understandings of a defective heart and will. Examining novel forms of spirituality as well as sectarian texts, Newsom chronicles the evolving inward gaze in ancient Israelite literature, unveiling how introspection in Second Temple Judaism both parallels and differs from forms of introspective selfhood in Greco-Roman cultures.

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The Womens Bible Commentary gathers the best feminist scholars in the field today to produce a commentary on every book of the Bible, including the apocryphal books, with additional articles on the reception history of biblical women, feminist critical method, and womens religious life in ancient Israel and the early Church. The commentary explores the ways in which women and other marginalized people are portrayed in the Bible, and raises questions about gender roles, sexuality, political power, and family life, while challenging long-held assumptions about how biblical texts should be read and appropriated for today.

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