Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, and liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, as well as the political and social import of such work.
Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical literature, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the women’s Mosque Movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, queer historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry.
Contributors: Mathew Arthur, Amy Hollywood, Wonhee Anne Joh, Dong Sung Kim, A. Paige Rawson, Erin Runions, Donovan O. Schaefer, Gregory J. Seigworth, Max Thornton, Alexis G. Waller

Karen Bray is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy, and the chair of Religious Studies and Philosophy, at Wesleyan College. Her research areas include continental philosophy of religion; feminist, critical disability, and black studies; and queer, political, and decolonial theories and theologies. Her work has appeared in such journals as The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, and Palgrave Communications, and several edited volumes. Her book on political theology, affect, and counter redemption, tentatively titled Unredeemed, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

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Stephen D. Moore is Edmund S. Janes Professor of New Testament Studies at the Theological School, Drew University. He is author or editor, co-author or co-editor, of around thirty books, most recently Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism (SBL Press, 2017). With Jennifer L. Koosed he co-edited Affect Theory and the Bible (Brill, 2014), and with Kent L. Brintnall and Joseph A. Marchal he co-edited Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (Fordham University Press, 2018).

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Mathew Arthur is an information designer and community education activist in Vancouver, Canada. He is co-editor in chief of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, and he co-organized the 2018 conference, Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space. He recently lectured on anticolonial approaches to affect studies at the Affective Societies’ “Power of Immersion” Spring School, Freie Universität, Berlin.

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Amy Hollywood is Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), which received the Otto Gründler Prize for the best book in medieval studies from the International Congress of Medieval Studies; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is the co-editor, with Patricia Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012). She is currently completing, with Constance Furey and Sarah Hammerschlag, Don’t Touch Me: Essays on Difficulty and Faith.

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Wonhee Anne Joh is a professor of theology and culture at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. She is also the director of the Asian American Ministry Center as well as an associate faculty affiliate in the Departments of Religious Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Her publications include Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization (co-edited with Nami Kim; Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Trauma, Affect, and Race: A Postcolonial Theology of Hope (Fordham University Press, forthcoming); and In Proximity to the Other: Decolonial Theological Anthropology (Westminster John Knox, forthcoming).

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Dong Sung Kim is a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible at Drew University. His recent publications include “Queer Hermeneutics: Queering Asian American Identities and Biblical Interpretation,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Asian American Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2019) and “Children of Diaspora: The Cultural Politics of Identity and Diasporic Childhood in the Book of Esther,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World (Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark, 2019).

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A. Paige Rawson is a visiting assistant professor of religion at Wingate University in Wingate, North Carolina. She spent eight years in the ministry before transitioning into academia in order to study the Bible through feminist, queer, and poststructuralist theories. Paige’s research is animated by her commitment to social justice and antiracist epistemological activism and Africana and Afro-Caribbean philosophies; it eschews traditional Western European methodologies in favor of oraliturary interpretations of the Bible in a hermeneutic she refers to as bibliorality.

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Erin Runions is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. She explores how biblical teaching and citation shape political subjectivity, gender, sexuality, U.S. national sovereignty, and biopolitics. Her most recent book is The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (Fordham University Press, 2014). Her next book is on the Bible and the prison-industrial complex.

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Donovan O. Schaefer is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which he joined in 2017 after three years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. His first book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke University Press, 2015), considered the relevance of affect theory for questions of religion, politics, and subjectivity.

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Gregory J. Seigworth is a professor of communication studies at Millersville University. He has published widely, including in Antithesis, Architectural Design, Cultural Studies, Culture Machine, Radical Philosophy, and Theory, Culture and Society. He is co-editor, with Melissa Gregg, of The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), and co-editor, with Mathew Arthur, of the online journal Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry.

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Max Thornton is a PhD candidate in theological and philosophical studies in religion at Drew University. He is an alumnus of University College London and the Graduate Theological Union. His work focuses on disability, gender, technology, and theological anthropology. He is a recipient of UC Riverside’s Holstein Dissertation Fellowship.

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Alexis G. Waller is a ThD candidate in religion, gender, and culture at Harvard Divinity School. She received an MDiv in New Testament and early Christianity from Union Theological Seminary. Her work focuses on the intersections of the study of the New Testament, queer historiography, and arts-based pedagogies.

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