Hal Taussig

Maia Kotrosits

Jared Calaway

Celene Lillie

Justin Lasser

This is the first book-length treatment in English of the Nag Hammadi text, The Thunder: Perfect Mind – a poem of “I am” statements that has garnered a strong following in mainstream culture. This book offers a fresh, current translation (with detailed Coptic annotations) and ten chapters of introductory analysis of the text. Approaching the text from socio-historical, literary, and postmodern gender-theoretical frameworks, the editors situate Thunder as an early Christian text - away from the now suspect category of “Gnosticism” - and offer conclusions on its possible ancient meanings, as well as its interpretive possibilities for the present moment.

A New Translation and Introduction

The Thunder: Perfect Mind

This essay offers an intellectual history of affect theory within biblical studies. Rendered as an ecology of thought, it describes the landscape of biblical studies through some frictions and discontentments with its legacies, as well as some meaningful encounters under its auspices.

Affect Theory, Biblical Studies, and the (Im)Personal

How Things Feel

"Judaism and Christianity as condensed illustrations of how people across time struggle with the materiality of life and death. Speaking across many fields, including classics, history, anthropology, literary, gender, and queer studies, the book journeys through the ancient Mediterranean world by way of the myriad physical artifacts that punctuate the transnational history of early Christianity. By bringing a psychoanalytically inflected approach to bear upon her materialist studies of religious history, Kotrosits makes a contribution not only to our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity, but also our sense of how different disciplines construe historical knowledge, and how we as people and thinkers understand our own relation to our material and affective past"--

Maia Kotrosits

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