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Jordan Peele's horror movie, Us, takes moral ambiguity to its logical extreme by creating a world, or, rather, two worlds, in which good and evil mirror each other on multiple planes—the narrative, the visual, the spatial, the racial, the ethical—and by its use of a biblical verse—Jer 11:11. The Wilsons, who inhabit "our" world, view the "Tethered", who inhabit a nether world, as evil insofar as they have emerged from the shadows to terrorize and kill them. The Tethered, however, view the humans as evil, insofar as they take for granted the ability to enjoy and act in the world. Like the prophet Jeremiah, the film draws the audience's attention to its own iniquity—and the consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature marks my last as General Editor. On December 31, 2018, I will conclude a sixteen-year stint with the Journal: nine years as [...]

Contrary to the usual practice, this issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature begins with an editor s foreword. There is no particular occasion for this unusual step. This issue--134.3--does [...]

Despite the distance in time and space that separates twenty-first century readers from the people in biblical stories, our own everyday experience equips us to understand these events as traumas. In this essay, trauma theory will be applied to illuminate the much-contested process by which the Johannine community developed an identity different from, and in opposition to, the Jews among whom they apparently lived. Keywords John, Gospel of; Synagogues, Expulsion from; Incarnation; Trauma theory, The New Testament recounts numerous traumatic situations, shocking events that arouse strong emotions of fear and that abruptly change the lives and even identities of those who experience them. In [...]

In his 2014 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, Fernando Segovia called for 'a fusion of the critical and the political, the biblical and the worldly' (JBL 134.1 [...]

The Quiet Revolution brought an end to Catholic hegemony in Québec culture and society. Despite the Church's fall from power, Catholicism did not disappear from Québec society after the Quiet Revolution. The continued importance of Catholicism in conjunction with the dramatic shift to secular institutions and values creates a palpable tension in Québec public and private life. One film that explores this tension explicitly is the 1995 drama, Le Confessionnal. The film was written and directed by Robert Lepage, one of Québec's, and Canada's, most versatile artists. This article explores the primary existential theme -- the relationship between the Catholic past (1952) and the secular present (1989) -- by examining plot, character, and symbolism, particularly the use of color. Just as the main characters cannot escape their family history, so too, the film implies, must Québec come to terms with its past, within which the Catholic Church played such an important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the role of gender in the apocryphal novels of Greek Esther, Susanna, and Judith, by means of comparison with the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. Just as E.T’s E.T-ness – his identity as an alien non-human creature exiled on planet earth – is central to the story of his exile, so too is the femaleness of Esther, Judith and Susanna germane to the stories of exile that their stories recount. The argument is structured around four points: the exilic setting; the role of the “alien”; the phone call, and the message, and will conclude with some reflections on the role of gender in stories about exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]