Bible and Emotion

Call For Papers: The Bible and Emotion Section will host four sessions in 2024. The first session is OPEN. We invite proposals related to the critical study of emotion across the full range of biblical literature and closely related literature. We are interested in papers that examine divine and/or human emotions in a biblical text, set of texts, book, or genre. The second session will be devoted to the comparative study of emotion: how do the emotions within the Hebrew Bible and New Testament corpora resemble, differ from, appropriate, resist, sublimate, and/or transform the emotions of the wider cultural world? The third session will be an invited panel focusing on the interplay between cognitive approaches to emotions and affect theory. We will also host a joint session with the Ritual in the Biblical World section. The social nature of ritual necessarily engages in both individual emotional experience and communal emotional experience. Ranging from joy to disgust, emotional experience is often described as one of the primary outcomes of the ritual behavior as presented in the biblical text. By examining the close relationship between emotion and ritual, the efficaciousness of the ritual behavior may be explored as well as the manner by which ritual was used to form, maintain and excise social structures. This session is the first of a series of joint sessions in which the relationship between ritual and emotion as presented in the biblical texts and surrounding Levantine cultures will be explored with a hoped for volume following the conclusion of the series.

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