We are proud to inform that Mind, Morality and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies has been released. The book is a comprehensive volume on the application of cognitive science to biblical materials.

The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts?

The fifteen chapters of Mind, Morality and Magic draw on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind – including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship – such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics – as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.

István Czachesz & Risto Uro (eds.), Mind, Morality, and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies. Durham: Acumen 2013. ISBN: 1844657337. Discount price £ 60. Visit publisher’s website.

Read a free sample including the introduction here.

Open book cover image here.