Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"-understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language-as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis.

Vincent L. Wimbush is the director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures and is past president of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Introduction: Scriptural-izing: Analytical Wedge for a Critical History of the Human Vincent L. Wimbush 1. Literally Creative: Intertextual Gaps and Artistic Agency James S. Bielo 2. The Bible in North American Folklore Brian Malley 3. Fragmenting the Book of Mormon Imaginary Daymon Mickel Smith 4. Simultaneity in Global History José Rabasa 5. Cast out of the Garden: Edenic Scripturalization, Flowers, and Fallen Africa Grey Gundaker 6. Authorities of Scriptural Technologies in America Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo 7. From Sanskritization to Vernacularization: Subaltern Inscriptions of Bodies and Landscapes Barbara A. Holdrege 8. Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England's Early Imperial Imagination Miles P. Grier 9. Copts, Scripturalization, and Identity in the Diaspora Saad Michael Saad and Donald A. Westbrook