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The integration of the field of disability studies with biblical scholarship has grown rapidly since the 1990s. This essay provides an overview of some of the main developments and explores some directions for the future. The essay suggests that the primary challenge is integrating disability studies and health care into standard college introductions to the Bible.

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This chapter demonstrates the viability of a new theory for the role of religion in violence by applying it to cases ranging from the ancient to the modern world, and in the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). It also describes how scarce resource theory can help elaborate religious violence. Moreover, the chapter reports how religion produces scarce resources, and then concentrates on: 1) access to the divine will, particularly through inscripturation, 2) sacred space, 3) group privileging, and 4) salvation. It is noted that religion is not the cause of all violence. Violence against scriptures can engage all sorts of permutations within the Abrahamic traditions. Sacred space is the source of violence in Abrahamic religions. The fact that religious violence is always immoral, and the fact that non-religious violence is not always immoral, is the key ethical distinction between religious and non-religious violence.

In his Libro de las Profecías, Christopher Columbus collected numerous scriptural passages that he believed supported and prophesied his explorations. According to Delno C. West and August Kling, editors of a recent edition, translation, and commentary on the book, Columbus, his son Ferdinand, and Gaspar Gorricio, a Carthusian monk, completed their transcriptions of most of these sources in 1501/1502, although a few additions may have been made as late as 1505.

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‘Ineffabilis et summi patris’ (1 June 1497), a little-known letter from Alexander VI to Manuel i, king of Portugal (1495–1521), plays an important role in Joel Panzer's The popes and slavery (1996). For Panzer, ‘Ineffabilis’ clarifies the voluntary nature of submission by newly-encountered peoples to Iberian monarchs. A new and complete translation of ‘Ineffabilis’ shows that it is part of a legal tradition wherein voluntary subjection was one mode of enslavement. ‘Ineffabilis’ also reflects Manuel's broader attempt to gain an advantage over Spain in light of Vasco da Gama's impending voyage to India in July 1497.