Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

The cognitive science of religion : a new alternative in biblical studies / István Czachesz and Risto Uro -- Past minds : evolution, cognition, and biblical studies / Luther H. Martin -- How religions remember : memory theories in biblical studies and in the cognitive study of religion / Petri Luomanen -- Rethinking biblical transmission : insights from the cognitive neuroscience of memory / István Czachesz -- The interface of ritual and writing in the transmission of early Christian traditions / Risto Uro -- Computer modeling of cognitive processes in biblical studies : the primacy of urban Christianity as a test case / István Czachesz and Anders Lisdorf -- "I was El Shaddai, but now I'm Yahweh" : God names and the informational dynamics of biblical texts / Gabriel Levy -- Is Judaism boring? : on the lack of counterintuitive agents in Jewish rituals / Tamás Biró -- Ritual system in the Qumran movement : frequency, boredom, and balance / Jutta Jokiranta -- A cognitive perspective on magic in the New Testament / István Czachesz -- From corpse impurity to relic veneration : new light from cognitive and psychological studies / Risto Uro -- Why do religious cultures evolve slowly? : the cultural evolution of cooperative calling and the historical study of religions / Joseph Bulbulia, Quentin Atkinson, Russell Gray, and Simon Greenhill -- Empathy and ethics : bodily emotion as a basis for moral admonition / Thomas Kazen -- A socio-cognitive perspective on identity and behavioral norms in Ephesians / Rikard Roitto -- Emotion, cognition, and social change : a consideration of Galatians 3:28 / Colleen Shantz.

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? Mind, Morality and Magic draws 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.