This collection of essays continues the investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity begun in Experientia, Volume 1, by addressing one of the traditional objections to the study of experience in antiquity. The authors address the relationship between the surviving evidence, which is textual, and the religious experiences that precede or ensue from those texts. Drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, social memory theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, they explore a range of religious phenomena including worship, the act of public reading, ritual, ecstasy, mystical ascent, and the transformation of gender and of emotions. Through careful and theoretically informed work, the authors demonstrate the possibility of moving from written documents to assess the lived experiences that are linked to them. The contributors are István Czachesz, Frances Flannery, Robin Griffith-Jones, Angela Kim Harkins, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, John R. Levison, Carol A. Newsom, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Colleen Shantz, Leif E. Vaage, and Rodney A. Werline.

An investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity.

This book begins by arguing that early Greek reflection on the afterlife and immortality insisted on the importance of the physical body whereas a wealth of Jewish texts from the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism and early (Pauline) Christianity understood post-mortem existence to be that of the soul alone. Changes begin to appear in the later New Testament where the importance of the afterlife of the physical body became essential, and such thoughts continued into the period of the early Church where the significance of the physical body in post-mortem existence became a point of theological orthodoxy. This book will assert that the influx of Greco-Romans into the early Church changed the direction of Christian thought towards one which included the body. At the same time, the ideological and polemical thrust of an eternal tortuous afterlife for the wicked became essential.

Green technologies are no longer the “future” of science, but the present. With more and more mature industries, such as the process industries, making large strides seemingly every single day, and more consumers demanding products created from green technologies, it is essential for any business in any industry to be familiar with the latest processes and technologies. It is all part of a global effort to “go greener,” and this is nowhere more apparent than in fermentation technology. This book describes relevant aspects of industrial-scale fermentation, an expanding area of activity, which already generates commercial values of over one third of a trillion US dollars annually, and which will most likely radically change the way we produce chemicals in the long-term future. From biofuels and bulk amino acids to monoclonal antibodies and stem cells, they all rely on mass suspension cultivation of cells in stirred bioreactors, which is the most widely used and versatile way to produce. Today, a wide array of cells can be cultivated in this way, and for most of them genetic engineering tools are also available. Examples of products, operating procedures, engineering and design aspects, economic drivers and cost, and regulatory issues are addressed. In addition, there will be a discussion of how we got to where we are today, and of the real world in industrial fermentation. This chapter is exclusively dedicated to large-scale production used in industrial settings.

This work demonstrates the value of applying the insights of cognitive science to biblical studies, mirroring the so-called cognitive turn seen in disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy as well as the more recent emergence of the cognitive science of religion.

The discourse of prayer responds to the abiding lure of transcendence. From Gilgamesh to the primordial human beings in Eden to Odysseus, the quest for ultimate truths has summoned forth all manner of human effort - courageous, desperate, pious, impious, successful, failed, invited, forbidden - and like all such lures, one can never be certain whether the glimmer of transcendence is that of a bright and shining star that illuminates the shadows or only a shiny object that seduces one into an inescapable darkness (a fishing lure, for example). In this study, Samuel E. Balentine demonstrates how prayer's invocation of God transgresses the limits of human beings. The author shows how inviting, let alone commanding God to speak may be the "acme of bardic pretention," but in the ancient world such transgression characterizes the audacity of prayer.