Overview

Ancient Christians and their non-Christian contemporaries lived in a world of 'magic.' Sometimes, they used curses as ritual objects to seek justice from gods and other beings; sometimes, they argued against them. Curses, and the writings of those who polemicized against curses, reveal the complexity of ancient Mediterranean religions, in which materiality, poetics, song, incantation, and glossolalia were used as technologies of power. Laura Nasrallah's study reframes the field of religion, the study of the Roman imperial period, and the investigation of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Her approach eschews disciplinary aesthetics that privilege the literature and archaeological remains of elites, and that defines curses as magical materials, separable from religious ritual. Moreover, Nasrallah's imaginative use of art and 'research creations' of contemporary Black painters, sculptors, and poets offer insights for understanding how ancient ritual materials embedded into art work intervene into the present moment and critique injustice.

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9781009405737

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Laura Salah Nasrallah, the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale University, is author of An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (2003); Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (2010), and Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (2019).

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