Reading with feeling : affect theory and the Bible The psychological approach known as affect theory focuses on bodily feelings depression happiness disgust love and can illuminate both texts and their interpretations. In this collection of essays scholars break new ground in biblical interpretation by deploying a range of affect theoretical approaches in their interpretations of texts. Contributors direct their attention to the political social and cultural formation of emotion and other precognitive forces as a corrective to more traditional historical critical and linguistic interpretive methods and response essays push the conversations into profitable directions for future research