Full Description
Social and Cognitive Perspectives on the Sermon on the Mount offers fresh readings of themes and individual sayings in the Sermon on the Mount (SM) using socio-cognitive approaches. Because these approaches are invested in patterns of human cognition and social mechanisms, the resulting collection highlights the persistent appeal and persuasiveness of the SM: from innate moral drives, to the biology of emotion and risk-taking, to the formation and obliteration of in-group/out-group distinctions. Through these theories the authors show why--even across cultures and history--the SM continues to grip both individual minds and groups of people in order to shape moral communities. Classical historical-critical readings interpret the sermon according to the conventions of literature, seeking a relationship to other texts and ideas. By contrast our volume explores the SM not so much for the logical and historical relationships to other literary traditions, but also--and perhaps more importantly--for the ways it stimulates emotional, biologically, culturally habituated, evolutionarily preconditioned, and socially sanctioned characteristics of humans. In short, the volume shines a light on the action-inducing properties of the text. The volume will introduce a broader group of scholars, students, and clergy to the relevance of social scientific and cognitive studies for interpretation of the Bible, by applying these approaches to possibly the most read and discussed text in the Bible.
Contents
1. Social and Cognitive Perspectives on the Sermon on the Mount: Introduction
Rikard Roitto, Colleen Shantz and Petri Luomanen
PART 1: INDIVIDUAL COGNITION
2. It's All in How You Look at It: The Eyes and Morality in Matt 6:22-23
Colleen Shantz
3. Perception of Risk in the Sermon on the Mount
Rikard Roitto
4. Altruism and Prosocial Ideals in the Sermon: Between Human Nature and Divine Potential
Thomas Kazen, University College Stockholm
5. Ritual Acts in the Sermon on the Mount
Rodney A. Werline, Barton College, USA
PART 2: TEXT AND COGNITION
6. Emotional Repression and Physical Mutilation? The Cognitive and Behavioural Impact of Exaggeration in the Sermon on the Mount
Thomas Kazen
7. Parables in the Sermon on the Mount: A Cognitive and Rhetorical Perspective
Lauri Thurén, University of Eastern Finland
8. Is There a Reason to Worry? A Pragma-Dialectical Analysis of Matthew 6:25‒34
Niilo Lahti, University of Eastern Finland
PART 3: SOCIAL DYNAMICS
9. Hypocrites and the Pure in Heart: Religion as an Evolved Strategy for In-Group Formation
John Teehan, Hofstra University, USA
10. "Whoever is kind to the poor lends to Yahweh, and will be repaid in full" (Prov 19:17): Patterns of Indirect Reciprocity in the Book of Proverbs and in the Sermon on the Mount
Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, University of Copenhagen
11. Macarisms and Identity Formation: Insights from the Comparison of 4QBeatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount
Elisa Uusimäki, University of Helsinki
12. Remembering the Sermon in the Mountains of France
Alicia Batten, University of Waterloo
