Bridging the Interpretive Abyss

As readers and interpreters, how might our understanding of the New Testament change if, unlike historicism with its colonizing agenda and its focus on ancient contexts, we took contemporary global crises, including mass incarceration, a pervasive culture of torture, the HIV pandemic, and the legacies of enslavement, as our starting point for reading biblical texts? Luis Menéndez-Antuña demonstrates how a cultural studies approach that centers twenty-first-century queer existence and experiences of suffering illuminates rather than obscures ancient New Testament contexts. Each chapter weaves together a biblical text, different works of art, and a political crisis. This hermeneutical approach bridges the abyss between the past and present, the Global North and the Global South, biblical scholarship, humanities, and social sciences. Readers coming to the New Testament text with political and ethical concerns will find new emancipatory strategies, making this volume essential reading for scholars and students.