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This reading approach notes the importance of social location and attempts to rethink the role of biblical interpretation towards rehumanizing the other. In so doing, Wan casts Paul as belonging to a hyphenated community negotiating identity in the shadow of the empire.

Jeremy Punt provides a helpful synopsis of postcolonial biblical criticism in chapter 10, noting its indebtedness to postcolonial thinkers such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha Along the way he notes the convergence of multiple factors that play into the construction of colonial identity gender, politics, sexuality, economics, religion, etc.

He offers a postcolonial reading of 1 Thess 4—5, noting the ambivalence of Paul as a colonized individual who can simultaneously subvert the empire and support and reinscribe its power.

This approach seeks to destabilize all attempts at constructing a naturalizing and normalizing interpretation of Paul or any other texts that make the claim to be authoritative and therefore normative, normalizing, and naturalizing.

Each of the essays call for a greater sense of critical, reflexive engagement with Paul. The collection as a whole represents reading strategies that go against the grain of traditional theological or confessional readings of Paul.

Thus while the collection evidences a deconstructionist trajectory, in varying degrees, it is not antithetical to or dismissive of theological or confessional approaches to Paul or his letters.

Then again, the approaches that are presented share a visible parentage, so one can hardly expect the need for any of the contributors to persuade the reader to buy into his or her approach.

The essays are written with clarity and depth of thought. Having used the text in one of my undergraduate classes, it is clear to me that Marchal has succeeded in drawing students in the twenty-first century into the world of the first century in ways that invite fresh questions and new wrestling with the range of challenges facing students of religion today. Blanton IV. RBL Review of J. Studying Paul's Letters. Joseph A. Marchal leads a group of scholars who are also experienced teachers in courses on Paul.

More than a series of "how-to" essays in interpretation, each chapter in this volume shows how differences in starting point and interpretive decisions shape different ways of understanding Paul. Each teacher-scholar focuses on. Appalling Bodies. The book concludes with the topics of postcolonial and queer criticisms by Jeremy Punt and Joseph Marchal.

Postcolonial criticism, covering the period from the outset of colonization to its termination and beyond, studies the responses of the colonized in the forms of resistance to the imperial hegemony and the power-struggle among the conquered groups.

The image of Paul as a mother in labor Gal. As an edited volume, this book is to be commended for its extensive selection of topics, eleven in all, and uniformity across the essays.

Each chapter begins with the aims and contributions of a particular approach, followed by a discussion of its tenets and presuppositions, which are then applied to a specific passage in Paul. Due to the large number of perspectives presented in this volume, a reader unfamiliar with these approaches may wish to start with one or two topics of interest.

One should not feel the need to accept these approaches wholesale but should interact with them critically, recognizing a degree of subjectivity in the postmodern approaches to interpretation. However, this reviewer, who is also an Asian American, has received the same comment numerous times but never took it the same way.