This article seeks to answer how Paul’s Roman audience, composed mostly of non-Jews, would have understood Rom 1:3–4. It argues that the closest available frameworks would have been the myths of heroized demigods and the more recent imperial propaganda of deified emperors. This reading makes good sense of a number of emphases within Rom 1:3–4, aligns with others throughout the remainder of the Epistle to the Romans, and coheres with Paul’s concepts of the resurrected body and glorification elsewhere in his epistolary corpus (e.g., 1 Cor 15; Phil 2:5–11). The article then discerns three key reasons why Paul would have characterized Jesus in this way: 1) to draw from an existing religious grammar, 2) to justify cultic veneration of Jesus, and 3) to position Paul as a purveyor of divine truth or mysteries.

With empathy under reevaluation, this study analyzes its place at the beginnings of the Jesus movement. As a capacity to resonate with the condition of another, “empathy” entails vicariously feeling or acting as though their situation is one’s own. Related concepts in antiquity, more often under the terminology of sympatheia (συμπάθεια) and cognates, concern interactions between body, soul, and cosmos. In this context, the Apostle Paul 1) formulated the cosmic significance of Christ’s empathetic embrace of human suffering; 2) urged humans, in turn, to embody Christ’s death and resurrection as their own; and 3) conceptualized the community as Christ’s body, empathetically uniting individuals and the creation itself. Hebrews adds a cognitive dimension: Christ’s experience of human suffering enables him to aid them in their own suffering, and members of the community should each imagine themselves in place of the other. Finally, Matthew identifies Christ as “the least of these,” making compassion toward him the basis for apocalyptic judgment.

This article revisits the evidence for the inclusion of Clementine writings in Syriac Biblical manuscripts—1 and 2 Clement, the two epistles De virginitate, and the Eight Books of Clement—introduces a series of new witnesses, identifies a likely cause for this inclusion (medieval rather than early Christian), and contends that, despite current assumptions in the field to the contrary, this is a case where the later, pseudepigraphic works influence and determine the reception of the older, “genuine” writing, rather than the other way around.

This article examines the ontological perception of YHWH as a cornerstone in the theosophy, theurgy, and mysticism of 13th-century kabbalistic literature. Drawing on several examples from dozens of largely unpublished and understudied commentaries on the Tetragrammaton, it presents a fresh perspective on early kabbalistic theosophy. These texts illuminate the role of divine appellations as a framework for theurgical practices, particularly cleaving to and unifying the divine name. The study critiques the marginalization of linguistic theosophy in scholarship and challenges the dominant focus on the corresponding theosophical discourse of the sefirot. It reevaluates Gershom Scholem’s interpretation, contending that his emphasis on the “Gnostic” nature of the sefirot and symbolic approach to the Tetragrammaton distorted understanding of the kabbalistic godhead and its theurgical dimensions. Finally, it explores how R. Abraham Abulafia’s focus on divine names in ecstatic practices and subsequent academic classifications further obscured their role in theosophical Spanish kabbalah.

Psychedelics have led neuroscientists and policymakers to employ lexicons of theology and spirituality, but scholars of religion have been strikingly absent from the conversation. Consequently, psychedelic studies draws uncritically upon classic essentializations of “religious experience” that academic religious studies abandoned decades ago for crucial phenomenological and ethical reasons. In particular, psychedelic research would benefit from paying more attention to the hermeneutical dimensions of altered states, which point beyond perennialist paradigms. This article presents a case study of neo-Hasidism (non-Hasidic Jews who draw upon Hasidism for spiritual-cultural renewal). Representations of psychedelics in neo-Hasidism reveal not only a great deal about the movement itself, but also about the interpretive interplay between psychedelic experiences and situated subjectivities. Drawing upon neo-Hasidic discourses from the mid-1950s through early-1970s, including unpublished archival materials, this article investigates how Hasidic sources impact interpretations of psychedelic experiences and also, in turn, how those experiences transform perceptions of Hasidism.

Eco-interpreters frequently use the biblical story of Noah and the flood to reckon with collective human responsibility for climate crisis. Yet such universalizing readings can inadvertently obscure the disproportionate impact of catastrophic storms on marginalized communities. This article brings disability hermeneutics to the Noah story, considering the ark from the vantage point of those not assured a place on board. It reads Jewish traditions about the flood alongside two contemporary accounts of climate injustice: reflections from a Christian theologian in the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu and the lived experiences of disabled people in the United States who faced civic abandonment during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. Certain rabbinic narratives amplify eugenicist motifs, emphasizing how the ark denies refuge to undesirable bodies. But other traditions resist this impulse, expanding the ark to encompass unruly bodies and imagining Noah striving to save those left behind as the waters rise.

This article explores the affective salience of Christian grace-talk. Developing Stanley Cavell’s account of language and Simeon Zahl’s generative work on the “affective salience of doctrine,” I analyze how the conceptual dynamics internal to Christian arguments over grace and difference structure possibilities of thought and feeling. I deploy a threefold framework for tracing these dynamics, exploring the ways in which Christians have argued over 1) how grace makes a difference to creatures, 2) differential grace, or how grace makes a difference to the differences between creatures, and 3) how these operations of grace modulate one another. Each of these shapes of contestation illuminates the deep conceptual and affective significance of Christian grace-talk. Taken together, they also frame an account of grace as recursively transforming the character of “difference” itself through the work of theological reflection.