ALT Queer Bibles, Queer Scriptures? An Introductory Response One cannot engage questions of sexuality, race/ethnicity, and gender these days and not be aware of—and to some degree feel responsible to—the fraught status of “the Bible” in ongoing debates over the status of sexual minorities within communities around the globe that take this peculiar collection of texts as “Scripture.” —Ellen T. Armour

ALT Queer Theory and Historical-Critical Exegesis: Queering Biblicists—A Response I believe that queer readings will have a longer lasting impact and will speak to a greater audience if they are framed as a reading strategy that adds new layers to our appreciation of the Bible. This will require queer theorists to allow themselves to land for even a moment in the world of meaning making and, perhaps more challenging, it will require more traditional biblicists to heed the voice of Jewish textual tradition that “these and these are the word of the living God” (b. ‘Erub. 34a). —S. Tamar Kamionkowski

ALT Penderecki’s Iron Maiden: Intimacy and Other Anomalies in the Canticum canticorum Salomonis Details of music history fortify my appropriation of this tale of love as emblematically queer and postmodern. For it is a product of rebellion not just within postwar political/cultural history but within modern music history as well. —Heidi Epstein

ALT Paul, the Goddess Religions, and Queer Sects: Romans 1:23–28 The cumulative evidence suggests that Paul's context for the entire pericope of Rom 1:18-32 is idolatry, and that w. 26-27 refer to the gender and sex-variant practices of the goddess cults. —Jeramy Townsley

ALT Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña From a historiographical perspective, a queer optic offers an intercontextual reading that explores virtual connections across periods, frustrating the grasp that historical-critical, literary, and sociological studies hold on the biblical text. Queer historicism here seeks to transcend authorial intention and intended audience as the exclusive criteria to understand, explain, or expand textual meaning, and it does so through the lens of artistic representation

ALT Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke The optimistic attachments πίστις forged bound subjects in relations structured kyriarchically, such as enslaved persons to enslavers, loyal subjects to their emperor, or Jesus to God. πίστις in Rome and Romans required faithful submission.

ALT Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Interpreting as Queer or Interpreting Queerly? “I am interested in how material objects, such as collars and fetters, contributed to the enslaved body as an assemblage and how this relates to queerness.... Do we see Paul (or other New Testament and early Christian authors) ever using rhetoric that draws on these material aspects of enslavement?” —Lynn R. Huber

ALT Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña The Bible, after all, represents our cultural past as much as our political present. This is an invitation to complexify the historiographical mandate by way of strengthening the weakest link of the hermeneutical processes: past and present, text and interpreter, history and culture.

ALT Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke In attempting to unstick Rom 1:18–32 from these harmful affective effects, queer biblical scholarship itself gets stuck in Rom 1:18–32. How can a queer and feminist affective critique of Romans address these sticky verses of its opening chapter—without getting stuck in them for the remaining pages?

ALT Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Monstrous Bodies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians “Inside this broader frame of subject and abject, female, and specifically maternal, bodies function in a powerful way to define monstrosity.” —Valérie Nicolet

ALT Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña Historicism relies on inextricable links between exegesis, objectivism, and scientificism. As a virtual solution, from a global perspective, I explore what models of knowledge are available to scholars disinvested in the afterlife of the Enlightenment.

ALT Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke Far too often in patriarchal and even in feminist history, equality has been heralded as having arrived (reminiscent, perhaps, of Caesar’s triumphal processions [παρουσίαι] that ushered in justice, equality, and πίστις to the nations he conquered). Yet these announcements have always been premature since, as killjoys show, equality today is still imagined in unequal terms.

ALT Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Wasting Time at the End of the World: Queer Failure, Unproductivity, and Unintelligibility in 1 Corinthians “I suggest that a hermeneutic of queer time deconstructs purpose and productivity as the foundations of authority, thereby dismantling the social hierarchies constructed on political and spiritual economies.” —Lindsey Guy

ALT Book Review Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn Luis Menéndez-Antuña “People and scholars of privilege must read this book.” —A. L. Kolp, Baldwin Wallace University Reprinted with permission from CHOICE http://www.choicereviews.org, copyright by the American Library Association.

ALT Book review book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke “Hoke’s monograph is an important contribution to the scholarship on Romans, not least because it dares to ask different questions of the epistle and include a diversity of addressees.” —Valérie Nicolet, Review of Biblical Literature

ALT SBL Press Spring Sale Time is running out for 30% off! Use code SP2026 through 5 June Book cover of Narrative Mode and Theological Claim in Johannine Literature: Essays in Honor of Gail R. O’Day edited by Lynn R. Huber, Susan Hylen, and William M. Wright IV

ALT Book Review Book cover Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor “a wider, more creative range of strategies for reading gender and sexuality in Paul.” —Matthew V. Novenson, Journal for the Study of the New Testament

ALT SBL Press Spring Sale Time is running out for 30% off! Use code SP2026 through 5 June Book cover of Women and the Society of Biblical Literature edited by Nicole L. Tilford