Books published by Sheffield Phoenix Press

When the Lukan Jesus stands up to read in the Nazareth synagogue, he unrolls and rolls up a scroll. At this moment-which scholars have read as programmatic for the Gospel of Luke-the material text frames the written and spoken word. Here reading is an engagement with the senses of touch, sight and hearing. The organs of sense-skin, eyes, ears and mouth-function as mediators of the material text.By contrast, our contemporary practices of reading as biblical scholars and critics commonly ignore the underlying materiality that is given to writing. In an ecological context where the mass production of Bibles is part of a consumerist economics that does not walk lightly on the Earth, and in an Australian postcolonial context where Bibles arrived as material artefacts of European colonizers, this book asks what modes of reading might best be suited to the materiality of the text.Engaging with the Gospel of Luke and the five senses, The Matter of the Text enacts a mode of reading that attends to the underlying materiality of the text. Reading with the senses offers a way of imagining the mutual touching of artefact and writing and the absent presence of the material text, where matter is given to the word as a visible voice.

In the twenty-first century, religious belief is undergoing change, driven in part by new communication technologies. Such technologies have often given rise to notable changes in religion, some of the most revolutionary of them being apocalyptic in character. What, then, is the nature of the changes in religious belief created or enabled by the Internet? In this collection, the first of its kind, nine scholars consider whether the empowerment offered by Internet communication generally encourages the exchange of ideas or whether, rather, it allows individuals to seal themselves off into ideological ghettos of the like-minded. These nine essays explore those possibilities by documenting and analysing the diversity of apocalyptic belief online.Andrew Fergus Wilson looks at those using the Internet to explore the syncretism that lies at the heart of the 'cultic milieu'. William A. Stahl examines the online discourse about climate change to find the apocalyptic structures undergirding it. Dennis Beesley examines End Times discourse on the video-sharing Web site YouTube. J.L. Schatz explores how the apocalyptic imaginings of science fiction set the trajectory of our shared future. Amarnath Amarasingam documents how the Internet is encouraging the belief that President Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Salvador Jimenez Murguia analyses an Internet-based service offered to those wishing to communicate with their loved ones who might be 'left behind' after the anticipated 'Rapture'. David Drissel documents how social networking facilitates connections among Muslims who share a belief in a nearing apocalypse. James Schirmer examines an apocalyptic computer game individuals use to explore personal ethics. Robert Glenn Howard documents the first Internet-based new religious movement-reflected in the beliefs of the suicidal 1997 'Heaven's Gate' group, extant in their archived websites.

It is often said that the inner life of characters in the Hebrew Bible is inaccessible to us, and that we can know little or nothing about how they felt and thought. In this study, original in both its scope and its method, Barbara Leung Lai shows how wrong that assumption is. She directs our attention to the many places where her chosen characters, Daniel, Isaiah, and Yahweh, speak of themselves, using the first-person 'I' voice, and finds those to be a unique point of entry, or window, into the interiority of the characters.To construct an interior profile of these characters, Leung Lai develops an integrated methodology of psychological exegesis, drawing upon psychological perspectives of personality, Bakhtinian views of polyphony and dialogism, current studies of emotion, self and selfhood, and the empirics of reading under the rubric of reader-response literary criticism.From these perspectives, Leung Lai can identify in Daniel two primary realms in his inner identity-seeing and emotive experiencing -- and can characterize Daniel's interior world as a world of paradoxes, of seeing without comprehending, hearing without the capacity to respond. Isaiah, on the other hand, exhibits a broad spectrum of emotions, from love, intimacy, joy and empathy to a sense of being under divine constraint, and to mourning, lament, doubt, distress, helplessness and despair. The prophet exhibits a profound sense of selfhood and subtle inner depths. The character of Yahweh is found to be most striking for its inner conflicts, with its frustrations, disappointments, pain and suffering.

Left Behind - twelve novels that dramatize one evangelical perspective on the end of the world - is now established as the best-selling fictional series in American literary history. But it has been met with a range of critical receptions. This volume gathers essays by new and established critics of the series to interrogate the series' significance and its cultural and commercial success, and includes, for the first time, a response to these criticisms written on behalf of one of the series' authors.Mark S. Sweetnam considers the challenge that the organically theological nature of Left Behind has posed for cultural scholars. Amy Frykholm situates the novels' discussion of gender within wider traditions of sentimental and domestic fiction. Jennie Chapman nuances the general assumption that the series' conspiracy plots have been poached from secular accounts of subversion that emerged from the radical Right. Crawford Gribben contextualizes the treatment of Jews and Muslims in the rapture fiction tradition. Jarlath Killeen identifies a profoundly ambiguous attitude to Catholicism in the novels, accounted for by the emergence of lobbying and campaigning alliances between evangelicals and Catholics on a range of social issues. John Walliss outlines the manner in which rapture films speak to an evangelical audience, and addresses the failure of these films to gain significant crossover appeal. Katie Sturm interrogates the series' ecumenical reflections. Marisa Ronan traces the role of Christian fiction in the shaping of evangelical identity. Thomas Ice addresses the theological background of the novels. Writing on behalf of Jerry B. Jenkins, Kevin Zuber responds to the criticisms provided by the volume's contributors.