Description: "A study of the significance of certain emotions-joy, sadness, envy, disgust, and love-in the writings of Christians between the first and fourth centuries CE"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description:
Andrew Crislip is Blake Chair in the History of Christianity at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity, Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity, and Emotion in Early Christianity.
Review Quotes:
"The great benefit of Crislip's work, however, is that he provides a much more robust and textured understanding of our emotions than is commonly exhibited in the flurry of recent work appealing for a more emotionally healthy Christianity. . . . Crislip has shown that there's often a normative direction for our emotional lives, that God wants and requires us to steer our feelings toward righteousness. This is a challenge other Christians thinking and writing about emotion must now take up with care."
--Christianity Today
"As surely as 'faith without works is dead, ' so is faith without feeling. Expertly navigating a wide range of primary texts and deeply informed by interdisciplinary theories of emotion, historian Andrew Crislip provides a stimulating account of what it felt like to be a Christian across the first five centuries. I especially appreciate Crislip's keen social-historical focus on 'emotional communities' as key crucibles for forging faithful Christian feelings. This pacesetting book marks a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of emotion studies in early Christianity."
--F. Scott Spencer, New Testament general editor for The SBL Study Bible
"In the study of early Christianity, emotion is often reduced to passing references to joy, sorrow, or anger, leaving unexplored the deeper ways that ancient people understood, experienced, and expressed feeling. Crislip's Emotion in Early Christianity examines emotion not as universal, timeless states but as dynamic, culturally embedded processes--shaped by ancient Mediterranean thought, embodied practices, and theological imagination. Both rigorous and accessible, this volume opens a fresh path for biblical scholarship that bridges contemporary emotion theory with close textual analysis, inviting scholars, students, and interested readers alike to consider what it means to feel Christian."
--Clare K. Rothschild, professor of Scripture studies, Lewis University
"Emotional communities, affect theory, constructed emotions--such concepts are increasingly applied to studies of early Christianity, often with conflicting and puzzling results. Andrew Crislip provides both a reliable guide to this scholarly terrain and a rich reconstruction of five key emotions in early Christian thought and practice."
--David Brakke, Joe R. Engle Chair in the History of Christianity and professor of history, Ohio State University