Mihailo Antovi (PhD), associate professor, teaches cognitive linguistics in the Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Niš, Serbia. He has presented papers on music, language, meaning and cognition at more than 20 conferences in Austria, Greece, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States. He was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Case Western Reserve University and research scholar at the University of Freiburg. His articles have appeared in a number of journals, including Metaphor and Symbol, Language and History, Musicae Scientiae, Language and Communication, and Music Perception. In addition to several contributions to international edited volumes, he has also recently co-edited a volume on oral poetics and cognitive science for De Gruyter. He currently heads the Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Niš.
Full Professor at the University of Córdoba, Spain (formerly at University of Murcia, Spain), Antonio Barcelona has lectured extensively on metaphor, metonymy and cognitive linguistics in Spain and elsewhere. He is author of nearly a hundred articles and author or editor of several books on these topics, and is head researcher or member of the research team in fourteen government-funded research projects, mainly on cognitive linguistics. He was founder and first president of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association (AELCO) and has been a board member of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (1997-2001), Associate Editor of Cognitive Linguistics (2009 and 2011), of the Review of Cognitive Linguistics (since 2010), and of Cognitive Linguistic Studies (since 2013). He has also served on the editorial boards of several other international journals and book series. His two most recent books are: Panther, K.-U., Thornburg, L. and A. Barcelona (eds.) 2009. Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins; and Reka Benczes, Antonio Barcelona and Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (eds.). 2011. Defining Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ralph Bisschops (PhD 1992, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) is research associate at the Philosophy Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and retired staff member of the Brussels Education Center. He was also visiting professor at the University of Duisburg (Germany) and research associate at the University of Ghent. He is the author of a book on metaphorical language and ethics (Die Metapher als Wertsetzung, 1994) and together with James Francis he edited the volume Metaphor, Canon and Community - Jewish, Christian and Islamic Approaches (1999). He has published about hundred articles, essays and reviews on theory of metaphor, biblical exegesis, Judaism, literary criticism and philosophy.
Lieven Boeve is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. As of August 1, 2014, he has been appointed the Director-General of the general office of Catholic Education in Flanders (Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen <http://www.katholiekonderwijs.vlaanderen/>). His research concerns theological epistemology, philosophical theology, truth in faith and theology, tradition development and hermeneutics. From 2005 till 2009 he served as president of the European Society for Catholic Theology. He is the author of Interrupting Tradition. An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context (2003), God Interrupts History. Theology in a Time of Upheaval (2007), Lyotard and Theology (2014) and Theology at the Crossroads of University, Church and Society (2016). He has co-edited various volumes, of which the most recent are: Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century (2014) and The Normativity of History. Theological Truth and Tradition in the Tension between Church History and Systematic Theology (2016). On September 17, 2015, the European Society for Catholic Theology awarded him the biennial prize for the best theological book of the past two years, for his monograph Lyotard and Theology.
Paul Chilton is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University and a visiting Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick. His current research lies in the field of cognitive linguistics and in cognitive approaches to discourse analysis. His most recent book is Language, Space and Mind, which develops a theory of language structure based on spatial cognition. He has also published on religious literature in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period.
David Cram is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. By background and training he is a theoretical linguist, but the bulk of his research has concerned the history of ideas about language in the seventeenth century, on topics including philosophical language schemes to theories of the origin of language. Of relevance in the immediate context is his paper 'Linguistic eschatology: Babel and Pentecost in seventeenth-century linguistic thought" (Language and History, 2013, Vol. 56, pp. 44-56).
David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. He read English at University College London, specialized in English language studies, then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, then at Reading, where he became professor of linguistics. He received an OBE for services to the English language in 1995. Relevant books include Linguistics, Language and Religion (1965), Begat: the King James Bible and the English Language (2010), and anthologies of the prolific missionary poet John Bradburne (selected from his edition of the complete works at <www.johnbradbnurnepoems.com>).
William Downes is a Senior Fellow in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., and Adjunct Professor of English and Linguistics at Glendon College, York University, Toronto. Educated at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, the University of Toronto and University College London, he taught at York University, Toronto, and in England at the London School of Economics and the University of East Anglia. He has been a Northrop Frye Fellow at Victoria College and Resident at Massey College, Toronto, and Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University. His research employs linguistics, broadly understood to include cognition, pragmatic theory and philosophy, as a method for understanding culture. He is the author of a major sociolinguistics textbook, Language and Society (2nd ed. 1998), Cambridge University Press. His most recent book is Language and Religion: A Journey into the Human Mind (2011) also from Cambridge.
Ahmad El-Sharif is an assistant professor of linguistics at Al al-Bayt University, Jordan. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from Queen Mary-University of London in 2011. In his PhD thesis, from which this chapter is extracted, El-Sharif embarked upon on the implications of using conceptual metaphors in Prophet Muhammad's discourse and its persuasive power within the framework of Islamic religious discourse. Currently, El-Sharif's research interests and academic contributions is mostly oriented towards the applications of contemporary approaches to critical discourse analysis, language and identity, and persuasion on different genres of discourse.
Kurt Feyaerts is Professor of German Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research interests emerge at the intersection between cognitive and interactional linguistics and include: aspects of multimodal, interactional meaning making; aspects of music & cognition; aspects of humour and creativity; metaphor, metonymy and blending. He has authored several articles and co-edited various volumes on these topics: Cognitive Linguistic Humor Research. Current Trends and New Developments (2015), Creativity and The Agile Mind: A Multidisciplinary Approach to a Multifaceted Phenomenon (2013), Cognitive linguistic approaches to humor (2006), The Bible through Metaphor and Translation: A Cognitive Semantic Perspective (2003), Metaphor and God-talk (1999, with Lieven Boeve).
Gao, Xiùpíng, is a lecturer of English at Beijing Language and Culture University and a Ph.D. candidate of cognitive linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University. His Ph.D. project compares the conceptual metaphors in the Christian Bible and the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, with an emphasis on five pairs of concepts, i.e. Christian space vs. Buddhist space, Christian time vs. Buddhist time, Christian life vs. Buddhist life, kingdom of heaven vs. nirvana, and God vs. Buddha.
Magda Giordano is a researcher at the Instituto de Neurobiología-UNAM. The focus of her research has been the study of changes in behavior as a result of insult or injury to the central nervous system, the search for reparation strategies, such as neural transplants, and the evaluation of the effects of environmental toxicants. The basal ganglia have been her model of study. She is currently interested in the possible participation of these nuclei in cognitive function in humans, in particular in the neural and cognitive basis of pragmatic language using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. With her fellow researchers in neuroscience she has published on in vivo GABA release, dopaminergic markers, and, in the field of philosophical psychology, on aspects of historical consciousness.
Ellen D. Haskell is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and has been honored with an AAUW American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship. She is the author of Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar's Conversations with Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Suckling at My Mother's Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism (SUNY, 2012).
Glen Alexander Hayes is Professor of Religion at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, N.J., U.S.A. He received his Ph. D. in History of Religions from The University of Chicago in 1985, where he studied Sanskrit with J.A.B. van Buitenen and Bengali with Edward C. Dimock, Jr. His dissertation examined body symbolism and cosmology in medieval Bengali Tantric traditions. Author of numerous essays on the Vai??ava Sahajiy? Tantric traditions of Bengal, he has published several collections of original translations of Bengali Tantric texts. In addition to his specialization in medieval Bengali Tantra, his research interests include contemporary metaphor theory and the cognitive science of religion. He is author of "Conceptual Blending and Religion," in Religion: Mental Religion (Macmillan 2016). He serves as Chairperson of the Steering Committee of The Society for Tantric Studies (STS), and was a founding Co-chair of the Tantric Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
Monika Kopytowska is assistant professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of ?ód?, Poland. Her research interests revolve around the interface of language and cognition, identity, and the pragma-rhetorical aspects of the mass-mediated representation of religion, ethnicity and conflict. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes (e.g. with Yusuf Kalyango (eds.) Why Discourse Matters, Peter Lang Publishers 2014) and is the co-editor of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (de Gruyter), the assistant editor of CADAAD Journal, and editorial board member of The University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics. She is the board member of the European Network for Intercultural Education Activities.
Hubert Kowalewski is an assistant professor at Maria Curie-Sk?odowska University in Lublin, Poland. His main professional interests include cognitive linguistics, non-linguistic semiotics, methodology of linguistics, and philosophy of science. He has published papers on motivation in language and visual signs, Conceptual Blending Theory, and speculative fiction.
Lán, Chún, is professor of linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she teaches courses in linguistics and English language. Her main research interests are in cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and rhetoric. Her books include A Cognitive Approach to Spatial Metaphors in English and Chinese (2003), Cognitive Linguistics and Metaphorical Studies (2004), A Pragmatic Approach to A Dream of the Red Chamber (2007), Towards an Understanding of Language and Linguistics (2009) and Rhetoric: Theories and Practice (2010).
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He was a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He delivered the Samuel Gee lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in 2014. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of Against Criticism (Faber 1982), The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning; Why Are We So Unhappy? (e-book short) and is currently working on a book entitled The Porcupine is a Monkey, or, Things Are Not What They Seem to be published by Penguin Press. He lives on the Isle of Skye.
Patrick McNamara is Associate Professor of neurology in the Dept of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine. He has authored dozens of papers and several books on the neurology of religious experiences, including his 2009 Neuroscience of Religious Experience (CUP), as well as Spirit possession and history: History, psychology, and neurobiology (Westford, 2011) and The cognitive neuropsychiatry of Parkinson's Disease: A theory of the agentic self. Cambridge (MIT Press, 2012). He co-founded the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion (www.ibcsr.org) and the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior.
Christoph Unger is a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research focuses on pragmatic theory and its implications for natural language semantics, stylistics and cross-cultural communication. He was previously affiliated with SIL International, where he was involved in training and consulting Bible translators. He is the author of "Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence", a monograph published in 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Anna Wierzbicka, born and educated in Poland, is a Professor (Emerita) of Linguistics at the Australian National University, Canberra. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work spans a number of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics, Slavic studies and English studies. She is the author of many books, including Understanding Cultures Through Their Keywords (OUP, 1997), Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (CUP 1999), What Did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts (OUP 2001), English: Meaning and culture (OUP 2006), Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English (OUP 2010), Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language (OUP 2014), and Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures (with Cliff Goddard, OUP 2014).
