New Books In Religion

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past. Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian histor

In Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022), Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of "cogency theory" to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantl

Professor Matthew Thomas returns to explain how we can place the Gospels in time and context using both internal clues (literary evidence) and the external ones (anthropological evidence). These are the first steps on a path of the many centuries of transmission toward the Bible we have today; Matthew Thomas tells why they are so important and where they have led us. The papyrus (P66) of the Gospel of John in the Bodmer Library, Switzerland, can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What does the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have to say about nomads and nomadism in the ancient Near East? This episode explores nomadism in the Judaic religious tradition through the eyes of the authors of the Old Testament. Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jonathan Fessenden and I talk about two movies, Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016) and Jerry London’s The Scarlet and the Black (1983) and what they say about how to confront evil in terrible times—seventeenth-century Tokugawa Japan in one film, and 1943 Nazi-occupied Rome in the other—how to face our shortcomings and lean on God even when He is hard to find. We also talk about Jonathan’s article about continuous prayer and his life and journey. Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, and teacher of theology. He has written about movies and worked in the industry as a composer, and continues to write music for film. Note: In this episode we refer to my earlier conversation with Makoto Fujimura about his work on the film Silence and other topics: Almost Good Catholics, Episode 14. Jonathan Fessenden, Missio Dei, “Pray without Ceasing” (October 6, 2022) Pope Francis’s recent homily on continuous prayer (September 28, 2022) All of Jonathan Fessenden’s articles on Missio Dei are here. Jonathan Fesse

In this episode, we focus the use of religious myths, icons and deities in Hindu nationalist politics in India. More specifically, we discuss the political invocation of Lord Parshuram, a deity in the Hindu pantheon who has, in recent years, become more visible as a mobilizing political symbol for the Hindu nationalist movement. But who is Lord Parshuram? Why has he now become politically salient? And what does his politicization tell us about Hindu nationalist politics in India today? We look for answers to these questions in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Goa, where Lord Parshuram has recently been a focal point for political contestation and conflict along caste and religious lines. Solano da Silva, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani in Goa. Jigisha Bhattacharya, The Faculty of English at Cambridge University. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

For two years Sr Nathalie Becquart has been in charge of the Church’s Synod on Synodality, coordinating the responses of millions of Catholics from 112 out of 114 Episcopal Conferences and from all the 15 Oriental Catholic Churches. She and I talk about the spirit of this Synod, its progress and direction, and the recently published Working Document for the Continental Stage (DCS), Enlarge the Space of Your Tent. Sr Nathalie Becquart was appointed by Pope Francis to be Undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops. She's the first woman in church history to hold that office and to vote with that body of clerics. Working Document for the Continental Stage (DCS), Enlarge the Space of Your Tent. About Sr Nathalie Becquart, Global Sisters Report, “Meet Sr. Nathalie Becquart” About Sr Nathalie Becquart, Boston College News, “Papal Appointment” About Sr Nathalie Becquart, Rome Reports, “The Synod Special” Inside the Vatican, “Deep Dive: The Synod on Synodality” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone

Matthew Thomas, theologian and biblical scholar, explains how the Bible got to be the Bible, how confident we can be in its historicity, and on what authority we can trust such judgments. We talk about the languages of the Scripture and their transmission over time, and how we see the emergence of the documents that would later become the Bible already in first-century Christian communities. Professor Thomas teaches Biblical languages and the history of the Bible, Patristics, and Early Christian interpretation of the Scriptures, especially Pauline Theology, at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

David Basile explains Thomas Aquinas's cosmological proofs for God. David is department chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana; he is also an old friend of mine so he was a natural choice to be the first guest of this new podcast. He talked about his own journey from atheism to Buddhism and finally to the Catholic Church. (He spent a decade as a Buddhist monk, where he first encountered Catholic contemplative mystics.) I asked David to explain how we know there is a God in the way he might make the case to his own students, to the skeptical—and maybe sometimes cynical—teenagers who native to our secular and materialistic society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Bill McGrath, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on this subject, and we get deep into the weeds in an academic conversation about traditional Tibetan medicine, the category of Buddhist medicine, and Bill's perspectives on magic, religion, and science. We also reminisce about the time that Bill once used a Tibetan mantra to save the day when we ran out of gas driving home from a conference! Resources mentioned in the pod: Bill's website (ww.wmcgrath.com) Yoeli-Tlalim, ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Road (2022) Gerke, Taming the Poisonous: Mercury, Toxicity, and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practic (2021) Janet Gyatso's review of Pierce's 2014 book Salguero, A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (2022) Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (2017) McGrath, Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine (2019) S

In her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like: How can we explain the fascination and intense identification of Israelis with the Bible? What does it mean to live in such close proximity with the Bible, and What kind of story can such a life tell? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Need for Creeds Today: Confessional Faith in a Faithless Age (Baker Academic, 2020) is an accessible invitation to the historic creeds and confessions makes a biblical and historical case for their necessity and shows why they are essential for Christian faith and practice today. J. V. Fesko, a leading Reformed theologian with a broad readership in the academy and the church, demonstrates that creeds are not just any human documents but biblically commended resources for the well-being of the church, as long as they remain subordinate to biblical authority. Fesko also explains how the current skepticism and even hostility toward creeds and confessions came about. For those interested, listen to an earlier conversation with J.V. Fesko on his book The Spirit of the Age (2017), which discusses 19th century debates about the Westminster Confession in the American Presbyterian church. Dr. J. V. Fesko has taught at Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) Atlanta since 2000 while he served as a pastor in Northwest A

Few countries celebrate religious and cultural festivals with greater passion, imagination and joy than India. And among the many festivals of this gloriously diverse, multicultural nation is Christmas—the night that Jesus came to earth, bringing with him the all-embracing ‘fragrance of Love’. The Christian communities of India celebrate the birth of Christ with food, music, lights, prayer, family gatherings, charity and other age-old traditions, some of which have evolved over almost two millennia. And for centuries, other communities have also participated in the celebration of this Indian festival—its cheer and spirit of love as resilient, even in times of division, as India itself. Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns (Speaking Tiger, 2022) captures the distinctive magic of Christmas in India. Edited and with introductions by two of India’s finest writers, Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, it is a splendid collection of essays, images, poems and hymns—both in English and translated from India’s other

The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (NYU Press, 2022) uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them. Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City. This intimate portrait follows the stories of individuals such as farmer Mary Juma, pacifist Kassem Rameden, poet Aliya Hassen, and bookmaker Kamel Osman from the early 1900s through World War I, the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and World War II. Its story-driven approach places Syrian Americans at t

How should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive relations is as palpable as ever. Thoroughly researched and artfully written, Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021) advances scholarship without leaving the lay reader behind. The comparative insights, theory-work, and appended transcriptions of this definitive study constitute a gift to past, present, and future travelers. This book is available open-access. Jessica Zu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at USC Dornsife. She specializes in modern Chinese Yogācāra and Buddhist social philosophy. You can find her on Twitter @ JessicaZu7 or email her at xzu@usc.edu. L

In Writing With Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark (T&T Clark, 2022), Nathanael Vette proposes that the Gospel of Mark, like other narrative works in the Second Temple period, uses the Jewish scriptures as a model to compose episodes and tell a new story. Vette compares Mark's use of scripture with roughly contemporary works like Pseudo-Philo, the Genesis Apocryphon, 1 Maccabees, Judith, and the Testament of Abraham; diverse texts which, combined, support the existence of shared compositional techniques. This volume identifies five scripturalized narratives in the Gospel: Jesus' forty-day sojourn in the wilderness and call of the disciples; the feeding of the multitudes; the execution of John the Baptist; and the Crucifixion of Jesus. This fresh understanding of how the Jewish scriptures were used to compose new narratives across diverse genres in the Second Temple period holds important lessons for how scholars read the Gospel of Mark. Instead of treating scriptural allusions and echo

Today I talked to Holly Walters about her new book Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam UP, 2020). For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple

Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. Richard B. Miller identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, and then offers an alternative framework for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Shadowing these various methodologies, he notes, is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that aspires to value-neutrality. This ideal fortifies a "regime of truth" that undercuts efforts to think normatively and teleologically about the field's purpose and value. Miller's alternative framework, Critical Humanism, theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship. Why Study Religion? (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an account of humanistic inquiry that is held together by four values: Post-critical Reasoning, Social Criticis

Ariana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Karma Ben-Johanan presents a revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue. A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never been rejected by God. In a few carefully phrased statements, two millennia of deep hostility were swept into the trash heap of history. But old animosities die hard. While Catholic and Jewish leaders publicly promoted interfaith dialogue, doubts remained behind closed doors. Catholic officials and theologians soon found that changing their attitude toward Jews could threaten the foundations of Christian tradition. For their part, many Jews perceived the new Catholic line as a Church effort to shore up support amid athei