New Books In Religion

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relationship. Indeed, throughout human history the technological and supernatural, the scientific and the spiritual have repeatedly interacted, informing each other’s respective discourses and reinventing themselves based on encounters with new ideas. In the nineteenth century, when a period of sustained and rapid scientific advancement transformed the human understanding of the universe, new discoveries about the invisible forces that shaped our lives – from the electromagnetic spectrum to soundwaves and the subatomic universe – encouraged many to believe that the invisible realm of the supernatural could be similarly under

Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).  The essays in this volume look at a variety of topics ranging from Shaivite religious texts to biographies, novels, and dance forms to show how Hinduism cannot be understood only through texts, but also through the way its lived traditions are informed by changing socio-economic and political conditions. Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Darcie Fontaine pursues this crucial question while refusing the notion of a homogeneous Christianity at any stage after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Emphasizing the ways religious ideas and practices were subject to change and deep contestation, the book attends to important differences—between Catholics and Protestants; between institutions and individuals; between Christianity as a tool and ideology of the settler state on the one hand, and a site of resistance to its many injustices on the other. A social history of theology that considers the interaction between religion and politics in Algeria and France, Decolonizing Christianity traces the movement of Christians, their beliefs and activisms, across the Mediterranean in both directions. While the book tracks broad shifts at the leve

Ramon Harvey‘s new book The Qur’an and the Just Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) tackles a topic as big and meaningful as the title of the book suggests. What is justice? What words does the Qur’an use to explore the meaning of justice? How did the social context of the Qur’an exist in its time as compared with later time periods? To what extent does the Qur’an give specific guidance for realizing justice, and to what extent does it give more general principles? Dr. Harvey treats these questions and others as he guides the reader through his erudite yet accessible and clearly organized monograph. He draws smoothly from numerous modern and premodern thinkers and engages closely with the Qur’anic text throughout the book; the extensive glossary also aids in the reader in making sense of the material. Given the broad relevance of justice in the Qur’an to any number of fields, the book should interest not only Islamicists and Qur’anic studies scholars, but also political scientists, scholars of ex

The recent Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling showed the on-going debate between religious conservatives and advocates of LGBTQ rights. Much of this debate has been about the definition of religious freedom and how to balance religious rights against other important individual rights. This is the topic of the new book The Rhetoric of Religious Freedom in the United States (Lexington Books, 2017). Eric Miller has brought together over a dozen scholars to consider the language used to argue over these rights claims. Chapters focus on everything from Conservative Evangelicals to environmental policy to Fundamentalists response to Donald Trump. Eric C. Miller is assistant professor of communication studies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Douglas L. Winiarski is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and winner of the 2018 Bancroft Prize in American history for his book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth Century New England (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Winiarski has written a masterful and detailed narrative of the Great Awakening ushered in by the evangelical and charismatic preacher George Whitfield.  Beginning with the established churches of New England, he offers a clear portrait of a highly structured and regulated communal and religious life centered in the Congregational churches. From birth to death parishioners found their place and the meaning of life by participating in prescribed religious and social practices. Whitfield, and many itinerate preachers following in his wake, renounced the establish churches as false and proclaim individual direct experience of the Holy Spirit unleashing a torrent of dramatic conversions, ecstatic expression, cha

A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although the United States has long been viewed as a fervently religious Christian nation, survey data shows that more and more Americans are identifying as “not religious.” Drs. Joseph Baker and Buster Smith claim that despite there being more non-religious Americans than ever before, social scientists have not adequately studied the various secularities, and that the lived reality of secular individuals in America has not been astutely analyzed. In an effort to fill this lacuna, they have published a book called American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief (New York University Press, 2015) in which they explore secular Americans’ thought and practice to understand secularisms as worldviews in their own right, not just as negations of religion. Drawing on empirical data, the authors examine how people live secular lives and make meaning outside of organized religion. They address the contempora

Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in precolonial times. Drawing on Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil sources, Fisher argues for a uniquely South Asian form of religious pluralism, evidenced by religious performances in the public space.  Her work is crucial for considering the development of Hinduism in the early modern era, and that era’s legacy on modern constructions of Hinduism, calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term ‘sectarianism’.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Katharine Gerbner asks these questions as she traces how religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the early modern period, as Anglicans, Quakers, and Moravians settled and missionized the Protestant Atlantic world. Katharine Gerbner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2017) by Sophia Rose Arjana (with Kim Fox), takes us on a riveting journey through the world of superheroes and villains from the streets of New York to Pakistan. The book is a creative, masterful, and fascinating analysis of female Muslim superheroes in popular comic books and animation.  Through the use of global examples, such as Ms. Marvel, Burka Avenger and Bloody Nasreen, just to name a few, Arjana engages her readers beyond reductive discussions of the veil, sexuality, and gender to highlight the ever-complex ways in which female Muslim superheroes can help us engage constructively with ideas of Islamic feminism, the Muslim female body, intersectionality, and even notions of violence. With supernatural powers, such through the mystical arts (i.e., Sufism), or human qualities of courage and bravery, the Muslimah superheroes featured in this study capture the real and complex lives of Muslim women globally, and the vast negotiatio

Those looking for deeper understanding of why the socially conservative, evangelical Christian community has been so loyal of Donald Trump will find answers in the book God and Donald Trump (Frontline, 2017). Author Stephen Strang provides an insider’s perspective on how evangelical leaders who initially backed Sen. Ted Cruz for Senate were persuaded to get behind the eventual Republican nominee, and how some Pentecostal and Charismatic leaders had been quicker to get behind Trump than other Christians. Strang addresses why Trump’s reputation as “morally libertarian,” which troubled some evangelicals, was outweighed by what was considered a greater imperative to defeat the “secular Left,” “political correctness” and “global government.” And Strang sheds light on the belief by some in the evangelical community that God played a direct role in Trump’s election. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New

Often when people think of Tibetan Buddhism they have a limited vision of that social reality, perhaps one that imagines monks sitting in meditation or focused on the Dalai Lama. Rarely is the historical role of female Buddhist masters central to one’s understanding of contemporary Tibetan life. In Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2016), Holly Gayley, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, centers women’s leadership through an introduction to the important Tantric master, Khandro Tāre Lhamo (1938–2002). Through an examination of hagiographic literature, the personal letters between Tāre Lhamo and her husband Namtrul Rinpoche (1944–2011), and field research, Gayley offers an in depth study of the role of Buddhism in the revitalization of Tibetan culture and identity in the post-Maoist period. Central to her analysis is understanding how hagiography aids in healing cultural trauma brought on by the minority policies o

This episode will feature a conversation between former presidential advisor David Gergen, Rabbi Melissa Weintraub of Resetting the Table, and Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core, taken from Humility and Conviction in Public Life’s event Faith & Politics which was held on April 25, 2018 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut with the CT Forum. The conversation was moderated by John Dankosky of Connecticut public radio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The American West has always been home to many deities, argues Jennifer Graber in The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018). Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas-Austin, tells the story of the Kiowa over the course of the long nineteenth century. For Kiowas, the continuation of well-established spiritual beliefs and practices sustained them in the face of great challenges, but at times these same elements were dynamic enough to change and adapt to fit new realities. Among the new realities were alliances with powerful neighbors such as the Comanche, with whom the Kiowa shared the Sun Dance ritual. Another was a growing rivalry and at times widespread bloodshed with Americans, whose Christian missionaries fought as much amongst themselves as they did for Native converts. Missionaries often operated under the guise of being “friends of the Indian,” even when their purposes were ultimately dispossession an

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the par

“It is difficult to characterize this fascinating book,” George Tanabe writes in his short preface to The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), “Not just because it concerns thousand-year-old Burmese Buddhists who fly but also because its author has chosen, almost by necessity, unusual procedures for studying and writing about this strange topic.” Indeed. Not only Guillaume Rozenberg’s topic but also his book is itself unusual and intriguing. First published in French and now available in English thanks to the work of Ward Keeler, this is the second in a planned tetralogy on the extraordinary in Burmese Buddhism. Variously a thrilling narrative of raining coconuts and candles, a how-to guide for budding alchemists, and an account of people rendering their bodies impervious to swords and blows, at its twists and turns The Immortals also offers uncommon insights into the relationship of belief to political and social order. At the same time, it reflects frankl

In When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017), Michal Kravel Tovi, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, offers an intimate, insightful ethnography of the current field of Jewish conversion in Israel. It highlights the complex and often conflicted nature of an intimate, individual religious performance that is at once and the same time also one of the most pressing political issues in contemporary Israeli sociopolitics. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her fascinating and path paving new book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad (I. B. Tauris, 2017), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont reorients our understanding of the 1857 rebellion in India, while offering a nuanced theorization of religion, religious identity, and questions of violence. The title of this book announces the key terms and conceptual pillars that sustain it throughout: religion, rebels, and jihad. The brilliance of this book lies in the way it raises and addresses a number of critical questions regarding memory, formations of religious identity, and conceptions of religion as a category through the close and energetic reading of a single event. This book is intellectual history at its fiercest. Nimbly written, it will also make an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuse

David A. Hollinger‘s Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World and Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017) offers a history of how American missionaries, their children, and associates shaped U.S. foreign policy and multicultural awareness at home. An imperialistic and ethnocentric project inspired by religion in the late nineteenth century resulted in a missionary cosmopolitanism instrumental in shaping U.S. policy toward Asia in the twentieth. The missionary effort evolved from a religious one to secular service projects offering a model for foreign aid and cross-cultural engagement. Missionaries from liberal denominations, inspired by the social gospel and with language and cultural skills, were a primary source of information about foreign peoples. As an influential group of children of missionaries, returning to secular educations and careers at home, shaped American culture and politic through popular writing, scholarship on foreign lands, and diplomatic service. Ho

Mira Balberg‘s Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2017) delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. Balberg traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, reinventing them as a site through which to negotiate intellectual, cultural, and religious trends and practices in their surrounding world. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to generate a non-sacrificial version of Judaism, she argues that the rabbis developed a new sacrificial Jewish tradition altogether, consisting of not merely substitutes to sacrifice but elaborate practical manuals that redefined the processes themselves, radically transforming the meanings of sacrifice, its efficacy, and its value. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville,