Sandra Hack Polaski introduces readers to the letters and world of Paul, encouraging a critical appreciation of Paul and his writings that does not require a choice between commitment to the scriptures and integrity as a modern feminist. In conversation with the leading interpreters of Paul and considering possible responses to Paul-conformist, resistant, rejectionist, and transformational-Polaski forges her own theory of how to interpret Paul. She reads, emphasizes, and reinterprets overlooked, neglected, misintegrated, or differently interpreted Pauline texts, making visible the invisible and challenging the accepted readings. Polaski uncovers both the ideologies behind the text and the ideologies the text seeks to suppress. She traces the trajectories toward which the texts point even if Paul did not fully follow the trajectories to their logical end. Such a program leads Polaski to find God's New Creation as the operative center of Pauline thought.

'This is a wonderful, thoughtful, balanced yet provocative book. It sparkles with insight and brims over with passion-not for Paul's letters as they have often been read, not even for those letters as Paul may have wanted them to be read, but for the possibilities they open if we are attentive to the 'growing edges' of Paul's theology and explore where those trajectories can take us and the church today.'
-Jouette Bassler, Perkins School of Theology