Product details
- ISBN 9780228024712
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 17 Jun 2025
- Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Paperback
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Placed in a manger as an infant, Jesus seems to have been born into a world teeming with animal life. Yet read the stories again. Does Mary ride a donkey? Does the centurion ride a horse? Animals are everywhere in the gospels, though not always in the ways we expect. Where animals are visible, their presence means more than we realize.
The Wild Word explores the gospels’ well-known, forgotten, and missing portrayals of animals. Jaeda Calaway examines the many interactions between humans and other animals in these biblical texts, first considering forms of consumption, such as eating animals, wearing animal products, working animals, and sacrificing animals. She then turns to symbolic animality: how humans assign animal traits and archetypes to other humans, how divine and demonic powers intersect with wild and domestic animals, and what queer and trans readings of gospel animals can illuminate.
Told and retold for two thousand years, the gospel stories are deeply imprinted on Western culture. The Wild Word reveals how many of their associations with animals, animality, and wildness remain with us today.
Jaeda Charlotte Calaway is a faculty librarian at Illinois College and the author of The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity.
