Cursing with God

The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer TREVOR LAURENCE

Drawing together redemptive-historical biblical theology and narrative ethics, Trevor Laurence’s Cursing with God assesses the imprecatory psalms and the viability of their performance by the Christian church. Laurence argues that prayerful enactment of the imprecatory psalms is an obligatory exercise of the church’s God-given calling as a royal priesthood in God’s story. This study evaluates the imprecations within their intertextually constructed narrative world, presenting a biblical theological reading of their petitions as the faithful prayers of the royal-priestly son of God whose vocation is to guard God’s temple-kingdom from the forces that would defile it and to subdue the earth as sacred space. Attention to the New Testament’s polyvalent interaction with the imprecatory psalms discloses how the New Testament narrates God’s work in Christ with reference to the figures and structures of the imprecations. With the resultant biblical theological synthesis as a narrative framework for ethical reflection, Cursing with God culminates with a proposal for faithful Christian cursing that coheres with the church’s royal-priestly vocation and inter-advent location in God’s narrative and contends that imprecatory performance has the dynamic capacity to stimulate faith, hope, and love while galvanizing the church to work for a more just world. With scholars, students, and trained clergy in view, Cursing with God aims to generate a recovery of the imprecatory psalms in Christian worship and piety.

Trevor Laurence is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence and Executive Director at the Cateclesia Institute. The Theopolis Institute awarded Laurence's doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based, the 2021 James B. Jordan Prize for outstanding work in biblical theology

In the Image of Her Recovering Motherhood in the Christian Tradition

AMY E. MARGA

Fifty years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords signaled the final withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the war’s mark on the Pacific world remains. The essays gathered here offer an essential, postcolonial interpretation of a struggle rooted not only in Indochinese history but also in the wider Asia Pacific region. Extending the Vietnam War’s historiography away from a singular focus on American policies and experiences and toward fundamental regional dynamics, the book reveals a truly global struggle that made the Pacific world what it is today.

Amy E. Marga is Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary.

November 2022

416 pages

Religion / Biblical Studies / Old Testament

Rights: World

October 2022

207 pages

Religion / Christianity / History / Social Science / Women's Studies

Rights: World

August 2022

230 pages

Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Religion / Biblical Meditations Rights: World