Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Some ways to read with feeling / Fiona C. Black, Jennifer L. Koosed -- Affect and animality in 2 Samuel 12 / Ken Stone -- Echoes of how : archiving trauma in Jewish liturgy / Jennifer L. Koosed -- The affective potential of the lament Psalms of the individual / Amy C. Cottrill -- Public suffering? : affect and the lament Psalms as forms of private-political depression / Fiona C. Black -- Prophecy and the problem of happiness : the case of Jonah / Rhiannon Graybill -- The disgusting apostle and a queer affect between epistles and audiences / Joseph A. Marchal -- Not grudgingly, nor under compulsion : love, labor, service, and slavery in Pauline rhetoric / Robert Paul Seesengood -- Though we may seem to have failed : Paul and failure in Steve Ross's Blinded / Jay Twomey -- Responses. -- Palpable traumas, tactile texts, and the powerful reach of Scripture / Erin Runions -- The rage for method and the joy of anachronism : when Biblical scholars do affect theory / Stephen D. Moore.

"The psychological approach known as affect theory focuses on bodily feelings-depression, happiness, disgust, love-and can illuminate both texts and their interpretations. In this collection of essays scholars break new ground in biblical interpretation by deploying a range of affect-theoretical approaches in their interpretations of texts. Contributors direct their attention to the political, social, and cultural formation of emotion and other precognitive forces as a corrective to more traditional historical-critical and linguistic interpretive methods, and response essays push the conversations into profitable directions for future research"--