Daniel Capper's book Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World (Cornell UP, 2022) delves into ecological experiences in seven Buddhist worlds, spanning ancient India to the modern West, offering a comprehensive analysis of Buddhist environmental ethics. Capper critically examines theories, practices, and real-world outcomes related to Buddhist perspectives on vegetarianism, meat consumption, nature mysticism, and spirituality in nonhuman animals. While Buddhist environmental ethics are often seen as tools against climate change, the book highlights two issues: uncritical acceptance of ideals without assessing practical impacts and a lack of communication among Buddhists, hindering coordinated responses to issues like climate change. The book, with an accessible style and a focus on personhood ethics, appeals to those concerned about human-nonhuman interactions. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Many books on happiness suggest that we have considerable control over our level of happiness by doing or not doing specific things, like mediation, exercise, and maintaining social ties.  Approaching happiness through the lens of economics, Vani Kant Borooah takes a different approach in his book Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth (Routledge, 2024). He argues that while it is true that we can take such actions to improve our relative level of day-to-day happiness, there are also significant influences which fall outside of our control and depend heavily upon the attitudes and actions of other people. The book identifies the internal factors of personal happiness and measures the relative strength of their contribution, then contrasts that with an analysis of the externalities that people impose upon the happiness of others.  These externalities are the direct result of intolerance and feelings of envy and superiority. Taking a cue from Jean-Paul Sartre's aphorism, "hell is other people", this book examines those often negative and even violent externalities, a theme explored in the areas of religion, money, and prejudice where our happiness is contingent upon the perspectives and actions of those around us.  Recommended read:  Slaughter Among Neighbors: The Political Origins of Communal Violence (Human Rights Watch, 1995) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Bones & Honey: A Heathen Prayer Book (New World Library, 2023)l is a collection of nature-inspired prayers, mythic incantations, stories, and pagan poetry that can be enjoyed slowly or all at once. It will resonate with anyone looking to soothe the wounds of modernity with eco-devotional language, spellwork, and daily spiritual nourishment. Danielle Dulsky speaks to the expanding movement of those returning to slow, simple living and cultivating an Earth-inspired, sustainable existence. Organized around thirteen archetypes and their themes, ranging from the Mountain Mage (solitude) and Bone-Witch (grievers) to the Heathen Queen (empowerment) and Shepherd (nurturing), Bones & Honey will carry you to the “third road,” the unforeseen way that arises from the tension of opposites. Danielle Dulsky is an Aquarian mischief maker, painter, and word-witch. Author of The Holy Wild Grimoire (New World Library, 2022), Sacred Hags Oracle (New World Library, 2021), Seasons of Moon and Flame (New World Library, 2020), The Holy Wild (New World Library, 2018), and Woman Most Wild (New World Library, 2017), Danielle is the founder of The Hag School and believes in the power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning Witches, and rebellious artists in tending to the world’s healing. Mother to two wildlings and partner to a potter, Danielle fills her world with nature, family, old stories, and intentional awe. Find her in the haunted wilds of central New York or the whiskey-soaked streets of a Pennsylvania steel town; she calls both places home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Wisdom From the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times (Cornell University Press, 2023) describes what anthropologists can do to contribute to the social and cultural changes that shape a social future of wellbeing and viability. Paul Stoller shows how anthropologists can develop sensuously described ethnographic narratives to communicate powerfully their insights to a wide range of audiences. These insights are filled with wisdom about how respect for nature is central to the future of humankind. Stoller demonstrates how the ethnographic evocation of space and place, the honing of dialogue, and the crafting of character depict the drama of social life, and borrows techniques from film, poetry, and fiction to expand the appeal of anthropological knowledge and heighten its ability to connect the public to the idiosyncrasies of people and locale. Ultimately, Wisdom from the Edge underscores the importance of recognizing and applying indigenous wisdom to the social problems that threaten the future. Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University and Permanent Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Friedrich Alexander University/Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is the author of fifteen books and, in 2013, was awarded the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology by the King of Sweden. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) is a popular spiritual icon. His legacy is sustained within the mystical and religious practice of Sufism, particularly through renditions of his poetry, music, and the meditation practice of whirling. In Canada, practices associated with Rumi have become ubiquitous in public spaces, such as museums, art galleries, and theatre halls, just as they continue to inform sacred ritual among Sufi communities.  The Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2023) explores what practices associated with Rumi in public and private spaces tell us about Sufism and spirituality, including sacred, cultural, and artistic expressions in the Canadian context. Using Rumi and contemporary expressions of poetry and whirling associated with him, the book captures the lived reality of Sufism through an ethnographic study of communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Drawing from conversations with Sufi leaders, whirling dervishes, and poets, Merin Shobhana Xavier, Associate Professor of Religion at Queen’s University, explores how Sufism is constructed in Canada, particularly at the nexus of Islamic mysticism, Muslim diaspora, spiritual commodity, popular culture, and universal spirituality.  In our conversation we discussed the history of the Sufi communities in Canada, Rumi’s rise in popularity in North America, the public performance versus the ritual practice of whirling, poetic remembrance ceremonies, the commemoration of the death anniversary of Rumi, gender dynamics in Sufi rituals, women’s positions of authority, the appropriation and commodification of Rumi, and future directions in the study of “Sufism in Canada.” The book is available an as open access title HERE. Kristian Petersen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The time has come for nondualism. As a fundamentally unifying concept, nondualism may seem out of place in an age of rising nationalism and bitter deglobalization, but our current debates over tribalism and universalism all grant nondualism an informative relevance. Nondualism rejects both separation and identity, thereby encouraging unity-in-difference. Yet “nondualism” as a word occupies a large semantic field. Nondual theists advocate the unity of humankind and God, while nondual atheists advocate the inseparability of all persons, without reference to a divinity. Ecological nondualism asserts that we are in nature and nature is in us, while monistic nondualists assert that only God exists and all difference is illusion. Edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony Watson, and guided by scholars from different religions and specializations, Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the semantic field that nondualism occupies. The collection elicits the expansive potential of the concept, clarifies agreement and disagreement, and considers current applications. In every case, nondualism is universal in its relevance yet always distinctive in its contribution. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke UP, 2023) examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle. Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally and include things lovely and dangerous still (2003), Best in the West (2006), las callecitas y la cañada (2009), and Signs of Remarkable History (2016); she is currently working on two film duets with composer/musician Wadada Leo Smith that examine the ongoing relationships between the struggles for Black freedom, creative music, and spirituality. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition. Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Angel Park is a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous community where plural marriages between one man and multiple women are common. Based on many years of in-depth ethnographic research, in Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (Columbia UP, 2023), William Jankowiak considers the plural family from the points of view of husbands, wives, and children, giving a balanced account of its complications and conflicts. Through an extensive case study, the book not only gives the readers a real feeling for the society, but also invites us to rethink something essential about being human. William R. Jankowiak is professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City: An Anthropological Account (1993) as well as the editor of Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (1995) and Intimacies: Love and Sex Across Cultures (2008), among other books. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests 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

In Amazonian Cosmopolitans: Navigating a Shamanic Cosmos, Shifting Indigenous Policies, and Other Modern Projects (U Nebraska Press, 2022), Suzanne Oakdale focuses on the autobiographical accounts of two Brazilian Indigenous leaders, Prepori and Sabino, Kawaiwete men whose lives spanned the twentieth century, when Amazonia increasingly became the context of large-scale state projects. Both give accounts of how they worked in a range of interethnic enterprises from the 1920s to the 1960s in central Brazil. Prepori, a shaman, also gives an account of his relations with spirit beings that populate the Kawaiwete cosmos as he participated in these projects. Like other Indigenous Amazonians, Kawaiwete value engagement with outsiders, particularly for leaders and shamanic healers. These social engagements encourage a careful watching and learning of others’ habits, customs, and sometimes languages, what could be called a kind of cosmopolitanism or an attitude of openness, leading to an expansion of the boundaries of community. The historical consciousness presented by these narrators centers on how transformations in social relations were experienced in bodily terms—how their bodies changed as new relationships formed. Amazonian Cosmopolitans offers Indigenous perspectives on twentieth-century Brazilian history as well as a way to reimagine lowland peoples as living within vast networks, bridging wide social and cosmological divides. Suzanne Oakdale is Professor of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. She specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts. She is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests 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

Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially the development of new technologies and state and colonial projects. Indian Muslim artisans, such as those who worked in electroplating, or as stonemasons, tailors, carpenters, or woodworkers, used their craft, labour, class, and religion to establish prophetic lineages to their crafts and imbue it with Islamic piety in response to struggles of class and caste hierarchies and broader disenfranchisement. Amanda Lanzillo masterfully draws out these stories from Urdu technical manuals and oral histories of artisans themselves and in the process challenges us to think more capaciously about Islamic piety through the economy of labour, class, and technology, and our approaches to the histories of Islam in South Asia and beyond. This book is available open access here. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Santideva's 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist classic, "The Guide to the Practices of Awakening" (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years.  In Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury, 2023), Stephen Harris guides us through a philosophical exploration of Santideva's masterpiece, introducing us to his understanding of the compassionate bodhisattva, who vows to liberate the entire universe from suffering. Individual chapters provide studies of the bodhisattva virtues of generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom, illustrating the role each plays in Santideva's account of well-being and moral development. Harris also provides an in-depth analysis of many of Santideva's most influential arguments, demonstrating how he employs reasoning as a method to cultivate moral character. As the first book-length English language philosophical study of Santideva's most influential text, this will be essential reading for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics, as well as for anyone interested in intercultural ethics and the philosophy of well-being. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Renowned historian of Mormonism Richard Lyman Bushman's latest book presents a vibrant history of a sacred object that gave birth to a new religion: the gold plates Joseph Smith said he discovered in upstate New York in the 1820s. Believers hailed Smith as a revered prophet and translator of lost languages while critics warned the public he was a dangerous charlatan. Two hundred years later the mystery of the gold plates remains.  In Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History (Oxford UP, 2023), Bushman offers a cultural history of the gold plates down through the years. How have they been imagined by believers, critics, and skeptics, by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others?  In this interview, Bushman talks about his personal relationship to the project and whether he thinks the plates can help re-enchant a largely disenchanted modern world.  Hosted by Blair Hodges, host of the new podcast Family Proclamations, Fireside with Blair Hodges, and formerly the Maxwell Institute Podcast at Brigham Young University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A proponent of the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Candrakīrti wrote several works, one of which, the Madhamakāvatāra, strongly influenced later Tibetan understandings of Madhyamaka.  This work is the subject of Jan Westerhoff’s Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2024), part of the Oxford Guides to Philosophy series. His book situates Candarkīrti and his text within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and helps philosophical readers appreciate the text’s main arguments and ideas. Chief among these is a commitment to the emptiness of all phenomena, especially but not only selves, which is the subject of the lengthy sixth chapter—analyzing what it means for things to lack any substantial existence and criticizing opposing positions. Candrakīrti also takes up topics in metaphilosophy (do critical arguments commit us to positive claims?), philosophy of mind (do enlightened beings have experience at all?), and semantics and logic (what is the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, and can we express the latter in language?). Westerhoff’s guide aims to help readers unfamiliar with Sanskrit or Tibetan navigate these ideas, pointing them to further scholarly and philosophical resources along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

With a charming, colorful presentation, multiple strands of commentary, and groundbreaking, interactive features, Torah, the Five Books of Moses (with Complete Haftarah Cycle) (Kol Menachem, 2011) transforms the text into an experience. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Chaim Miller about how his edition of Torah endeavors to uncover the spiritual potential and human relevance of its every line. Rabbi Chaim Miller was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in London, England and studied Medical Science at Leeds University. He published the best-selling Kol Menachem Chumash—Gutnick Edition, which made over a thousand complex discourses of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe easily accessible to the layman. His Lifestyle Books Torah, Five Books of Moses—Slager Edition was distributed to thousands of servicemen and women in the U.S. Army. In 2013, he was chosen by the Jewish Press as one of sixty “Movers and Shakers” in the Jewish world. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Chani and seven children. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022) in which he examines how the religious right became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation.  Until the 1990s, theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies of Christian environmental stewardship were uncontroversial. However, when some in the evangelical community began to lean towards environmental activism in response to human caused climate change, their effort was overwhelmed by some conservative leaders who stressed a position against environmentalism. They ridiculed conservation efforts, embraced conspiracy theories, and refuted the expanding scientific literature. Pogue explains how different ideas of nature helped to construct a conservative evangelical political movement that rejected long-standing beliefs regarding Christian environmental stewardship. Suggested readings:  The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change by Robin Globus Veldman (University of California Press, 2019) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press, 2016) Meghan Cochran studies belief and action as a technologist working in customer experience and as a student of religion, business, and literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Steinsaltz Humash is the long-awaited English version of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s pioneering translation and commentary on the Torah. Like his monumental translation and commentary of the entire Talmud, the new Steinsaltz Humash includes a treasure trove of information to make the text clear, fascinating, and relevant to users of all backgrounds. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Meni Even Israel about his father’s Torah insights. Rabbi Meni Even-Israel serves as the Executive Director of the Steinsaltz Center, which oversees the teachings and publications of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, and has recently put out the app, Steinsaltz Daily Study. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature (Oxford UP, 2019) offers an engaging philosophical overview of Tibetan Buddhist thought. Integrating competing and complementary perspectives on the nature of mind and reality, Douglas Duckworth reveals the way that Buddhist theory informs Buddhist practice in various Tibetan traditions. Duckworth draws upon a contrast between phenomenology and ontology to highlight distinct starting points of inquiries into mind and nature in Buddhism, and to illuminate central issues confronted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. This thematic study engages some of the most difficult and critical topics in Buddhist thought, such as the nature of mind and the meaning of emptiness, across a wide range of philosophical traditions, including the "Middle Way" of Madhyamaka, Yogacara (also known as "Mind-Only"), and tantra. Duckworth provides a richly textured overview that explores the intersecting nature of mind, language, and world depicted in Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Further, this book puts Tibetan philosophy into conversation with texts and traditions from India, Europe, and America, exemplifying the possibility and potential for a transformative conversation in global philosophy. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources – from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj – Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they did so by channeling inter-imperial crosscurrents to successive surges of imperial revolution and regional regime change. Rishad Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on X @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Darnise C. Martin's Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (NYU Press, 2005) draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances. This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad's Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment (Routledge, 2022) directs attention to frictions around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. While documenting a range of containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and scrutinising their functioning and outcomes, the book is a first attempt to bridge research on religious offence with critical understandings of peace and scholarship on the micro-mechanisms of coexistence. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tulasi Srinivas' edited volume Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023) brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning of wonder in such varied joyful, tense, and creative sites and moments as Sufi music performances in Gujarat, Tamil graveyard processions, trans women's charitable practices, Kipling's Orientalist tales, village Kuchipudi dance performances, and Rajasthani healing shrines. Offering a synthetic and scholarly reading of wonder that speaks to the political, aesthetic, and ethical worlds of South Asia, these essays redefine the nature and meaning of wonder and its worlds. Taken together, they provide an invaluable research tool for those in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions in particular. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism, shaping the worldview of Jewish people during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. In his book, Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism: From the Temple to the Mishnah (Indiana UP, 2023), Yair Furstenberg examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at the same time determined the degree of sectarian separation.  Yair Furstenberg is Associate Professor and Chair of the department of Talmud at Hebrew University, and has also published: Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity: From the Books of Maccabees to the Babylonian Talmud. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Amy Langenberg, a scholar of South Asian Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and the body. We focus on Amy’s work on misogyny in Buddhist texts, her book on Buddhist embryology, and her current project on sexual abuse in contemporary Buddhist communities. Along the way we discuss miscarriage, menstruation, and the importance of feminist scholarship . . . and also, what does the Buddha have in common with Michael Phelps? Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl! Resources mentioned in this episode: Amy Langenberg, Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (2017) Pierce Salguero, "'This Fathom-Long Body': Bodily Materiality and Ascetic Ideology in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Scriptures" (2018) Amy’s academic papers, free to download on Academia.edu Pierce Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources (2017) Amy Langenberg, "The Buddha Didn’t Teach Consent" (2021) The Buddhist Bodies Collective Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Survivor-Centered Solutions: #MeToo and Spiritual Abuse” (CBC Radio) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, "Abuse, Sex and the Sangha: A Series of Healing Conversations” (video playlist) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Sexual Ethics and Healthy Boundaries in the Wake of Teacher Abuse” (2023) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Supporting Survivors of Abuse” (video) Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig, "Sexual Misconduct And Buddhism - Centering Survivors" (2020) Amy Langenberg, “Late Night Phone Alerts And Other Intrusions: What To Expect When You Write About Sexual Violation In Religion” (2021) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael R. Sheehy and Klaus-Dieter Mathes's edited collection The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (SUNY Press, 2019) brings together perspectives of leading international Tibetan studies scholars on the subject of zhentong or “other-emptiness.” Defined as the emptiness of everything other than the continuous luminous awareness that is one’s own enlightened nature, this distinctive philosophical and contemplative presentation of emptiness is quite different from rangtong—emptiness that lacks independent existence, which has had a strong influence on the dissemination of Buddhist philosophy in the West. Important topics are addressed, including the history, literature, and philosophy of emptiness that have contributed to zhentong thinking in Tibet from the thirteenth century until today. The contributors examine a wide range of views on zhentong from each of the major orders of Tibetan Buddhism, highlighting the key Tibetan thinkers in the zhentong philosophical tradition. Also discussed are the early formulations of buddhanature, interpretations of cosmic time, polemical debates about emptiness in Tibet, the zhentong view of contemplation, and creative innovations of thought in Tibetan Buddhism. Highly accessible and informative, this book can be used as a scholarly resource as well as a textbook for teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on Buddhist philosophy. Sangseraima Ujeed, ACLS Robert H.N Ho Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara received her MSt and DPhil degrees in Oriental Studies from the Department of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Her main research focus is the trans-national aspect of Buddhism, lineage and identity in Tibet and Mongolia in the Early Modern period, with a particular emphasis on the contributions made by ethnically Mongolian monk scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration. Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin is our guide through the cathedrals of Chartres, Canterbury and Cologne, and takes us from Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle to Swiss guildhalls, Iran’s Pink Mosque, Tiffany’s chapel for the World Exposition, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and more. As she reveals, the art of stained glass relies on not only a single maker, but the relationship between the physical site, the patron’s aims, the work’s legibility for the spectator and the prevailing style of the era. This is a fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume for anyone interested in stained-glass works. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

She is benevolent and nurturing, yet fierce and terrible, a warrior and a lover. She creates and gives life, is death personified, and the one who grants eternal salvation. She is the ultimate form of reality, the cosmos. As the Saundaryalahiri says, "Only when Shiva joins with you, O Shakti, can he exert his powers as lord, on his own he has not even the power to stir. You are worshipped by Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, and other gods. How dare I, meritless mortal, offer you reverence and praise?" The Goddess inspires deep devotion and it is not surprising to see Her being worshipped and revered across homes in India. Nilima Chitgopekar's Shakti (DK Publishing, 2022) will delve into this rich tradition of the Divine Feminine as She is represented across India and the subcontinent. Shakti will be a one-of-a-kind linear exploration of Goddess worship, neither a basic guide nor a dense academic treatise. Instead, it will invite the reader to learn about the Shakta culture, while telling the story of its birth and evolution, the many manifestations of the Goddess and their worship, and the myths, legends, and rituals that make up the tradition. This title will position itself as the first point of entry for anyone interested in the world of the Devi and Her culture. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Although Katharine Drexel has been the subject of several biographies, they have tended to treat her as a perfect human being whom the Church later transformed into a saint. Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision (Paulist Press, 2023) moves beyond the story of the heiress’s individual life devoted to God and shines a light on the work she did, assisted by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Drexel could have lived comfortably, wealthy and privileged, as a Philadelphia philanthropist but chose to found a religious congregation of women dedicated to working within Black and Indigenous communities―without receiving the bulk of the money left by Drexel's father. Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision is a critical biography of this American saint written within the context of the religious order she founded. It ties her sainthood to the Sisters’ ministries to Black and Indigenous communities; Margaret McGuinness's careful examination of the work Katharine Drexel and her Sisters accomplished brings a critical perspective to this important ministry in the Church. It deepens our understanding of these communities and renews our commitment to the difficult, ongoing conversation about race in America. Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are the canonical Gospels historically reliable? The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources. Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical Gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2019), Keener explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the Gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the life and ministry of Jesus. Keener’s Christobiography has far-reaching implications for the study of the canonical Gospels and historical Jesus research. He concludes that the four canonical Gospels are historically reliable ancient biographies. Dr. Craig Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 30 books, 6 of which have won awards in Christianity Today. Keener is also the New Testament editor for the award-winning NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, and is serving as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. With more than a million copies of his books in circulation, Keener also serves the global church by teaching and lecturing all over the world. Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu-Christian Conversation (Fordham UP, 2022) is a book about how the God in whom Christians believe ought to be understood. The key conceptual argument that runs throughout is that the distinctive relation between the world and God in Christian theology is best understood as a non-dualistic one. The "two"-"God" and "World" cannot be added up as separate, enumerable realities or contrasted with each other against some common background because God does not belong in any category and creatures are ontologically constituted by their relation to the Creator. In exploring the unique character of this distinctive relation, Soars turns to Sara Grant's work on the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta and the metaphysics of creation found in Thomas Aquinas. He develops Grant's work and that of the earlier Calcutta School by drawing explicit attention to the Neoplatonic themes in Aquinas that provide some of the most fruitful areas for comparative engagement with Vedānta. To the Christian, the fact that the world exists only as dependent on God means that "world" and "God" must be ontologically distinct because God's existence does not depend on the world. To the Advaitin, this simultaneously means that "World" and "God" cannot be ontologically separate either. The language of non-duality allows us to see that both positions can be held coherently together without entailing any contradiction or disagreement at the level of fundamental ontology. What it means to be "world" does not and cannot exclude what it means to be "God." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

One of the earliest Christian confessions—that Jesus is Messiah and Lord—has long been recognized throughout the New Testament. Joshua Jipp shows that the New Testament is in fact built upon this foundational messianic claim, and each of its primary compositions is a unique creative expansion of this common thread. Having made the same argument about the Pauline epistles in his previous book Christ Is King: Paul’s Royal Ideology, Jipp works methodically through the New Testament to show how the authors proclaim Jesus as the incarnate, crucified, and enthroned messiah of God. In the second section of this book, Jipp moves beyond exegesis toward larger theological questions, such as those of Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology, revealing the practical value of reading the Bible with an eye to its messianic vision. The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 2020) functions as an excellent introductory text, honoring the vigorous pluralism of the New Testament books while still addressing the obvious question: what makes these twenty-seven different compositions one unified testament? Dr. Josh Jipp is associate professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. His previous books include Christ Is King: Paul's Royal Ideology and Saved by Faith and Hospitality, which won the Academy of Parish Clergy's Book of the Year award in 2018. Twitter: @TheRealJoshJipp Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr. Alice Collett’s monograph Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford University Press, 2016) delves into the lives of six of the best-known nuns from the period of early Buddhism: Dhammadinnā, Khemā, Kisāgotamī, Paṭācārā, Bhaddā Kuṇḍalakesā, and Uppalavaṇṇā, all of whom are said to have been direct disciples of the historical Buddha. Collett does the thankless task of sorting through the biographical information scattered throughout the canonical and commentarial literature to present a richly textured account of the these six extraordinary women’s lives. She further analyzes the differences between the various biographical accounts to glean historical information about the position of women and changing gender relations in the early centuries of Buddhism in India. One of the main contributions of her monograph is the finding that women were treated more favorably in the Pāli Canon than is commonly presented. She also gains insight into an impressive number of other themes ranging from notions of beauty and bodily adornment, to family, class, and marriage. This book is sure to be of value to a wide audience, especially those interested in women in Buddhism, early Buddhism and early Indian society. Alex Carroll studies Buddhist Studies at the University of South Wales and is primarily interested in Theravāda and early Buddhism. He lives in Oslo, Norway and can be reached via his website 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 astrology, palm-reading and fortune telling have to do with politics in Thailand, and how can we make sense of these divination practices and their use in Thai politics? Listen to Edoardo Siani and Petra Alderman in this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast to learn more about divination and the way it was used during the recent student-led protests in Thailand. Edoardo Siani is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Edoardo’s research concerns the relationship between Buddhist cosmology and politics in Thailand, focusing on divination, kingship, and spirit mediumship. To learn more about his research, read his article ‘Co-opting the stars: Divination and the politics of resistance in Buddhist Thailand.’ The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2024) analyses the concepts of God in Vaiṣṇavism, which is commonly referred to as one of the great Hindu monotheistic traditions. Addressing the question of what attributes God possesses according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaiṣṇavism, the book analyses Vaiṣṇava traditions and texts in order to locate them within a global philosophical framework. The book is divided into two sections. The first one, God in Vaiṣṇava Texts, deals with concepts of God found in the canonical Vaiṣṇava texts: the Bhavagad Gītā, the Bhagavata Purāṇa, the Pāñcarātras, and the Mahābhārata. The second section, God in Vaiṣṇava Traditions, addresses concepts of God found in several Vaiṣṇava traditions and their respective key theologians. As well as the Āḻvārs, five traditional Vaiṣṇava schools- the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, the Madhva tradition, the Nimbārka tradition, the Puṣṭimārga tradition, and the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition- and two contemporary ones Ramakrishna's and Swami Bhaktivedanta's are considered. The book combines normative, critical and descriptive elements. Some chapters are philosophical in nature, others are more descriptive, unpacking a specific Vaiṣṇava concept of God for future philosophical analysis and critique. Written by experts who break new ground in presenting and representing a diversity of Vaiṣṇava texts and tradition, the book presents approaches that reflect the amount of philosophical and historical deliberation on the specific issues and divine attributes considered. This book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of philosophy of religion and Indian philosophy, cross-cultural and comparative philosophy, analytic philosophy of religion, Hindu studies, theology and religious studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in an effort to define "us." Analyzing anti-Muslim sentiment in texts and images produced across Europe and the Middle East over a thousand years, the author shows how Christians intentionally distorted reality by alleging that Muslims are just like Jews. They did so not only to justify assaults against Muslims on theological grounds but also to motivate fellow believers to live as "good" Christians. The disdain premodern polemicists expressed for Islam and Judaism was never really about these religions. They sought to promote their own visions of Christianity―a dynamic that similarly animates portrayals of Muslims and Jews today. David M. Freidenreich is Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College and author of Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In addition to denying the existence of a substantial, enduring self, Buddhists are usually understood to deny the existence of a God or gods. However, in Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin argue that there is conceptual space to affirm both basic Buddhist metaphysical claims and Classical Theism without contradiction. Their book argues that three fundamental commitments are generally agreed upon by Buddhists: all things are interdependent, impermanent, and empty of "own-being" (svabhāva). However, since Classical Theists like Aquinas deny that God—who is eternal, immutable, impassible, and metaphysically simple—is a thing among other things, accepting the existence of such a God poses no problem for a Buddhist. The book unpacks this thesis, also taking up historical Buddhist and contemporary philosophical objections to a divine being, arguing for a synthesis of Buddhist and theistic ethics and soteriology, and closing with a discussion of the problem of religious pluralism for Christians and Buddhists. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Public bathhouses embodied the Roman way of life, from food and fashion to sculpture and sports. The most popular institution of the ancient Mediterranean world, the baths drew people of all backgrounds. They were places suffused with nudity, sex, and magic. A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how Jews navigated this space with ease and confidence, engaging with Roman bath culture rather than avoiding it. In this landmark interdisciplinary work of cultural history, Yaron Eliav uses the Roman bathhouse as a social laboratory to reexamine how Jews interacted with Graeco-Roman culture. He reconstructs their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the baths and the activities that took place there, documenting their pleasures as well as their anxieties and concerns. Archaeologists have excavated hundreds of bathhouse facilities across the Mediterranean. Graeco-Roman writers mention the bathhouse frequently, and rabbinic literature contains hundreds of references to the baths. Eliav draws on the archaeological and literary record to offer fresh perspectives on the Jews of antiquity, developing a new model for the ways smaller and often weaker groups interact with large, dominant cultures. A compelling and richly evocative work of scholarship, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse challenges us to rethink the relationship between Judaism and Graeco-Roman society, shedding new light on how cross-cultural engagement shaped Western civilization. Yaron Eliav is Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Jewish History of Late Antiquity at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Mario Baghos's book From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium: Kings, Symbols, and Cities (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities—commissioned by their monarchs expressing their relationship with their gods—show us that religiosity was inherent to such enterprises. It also demonstrates that what transpired from the first cities in history to Byzantine Christendom is the gradual replacement of the pagan ruler cult—which was inherent to city-building in antiquity—with the ruler becoming subordinate to Christ; exemplified by representations of the latter as the ‘Master of All’ (Pantokrator). Beginning in Mesopotamia, the book continues with an analysis of city-building by rulers in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, before addressing Judaism (specifically, the city of Jerusalem) and Christianity as shifting the emphasis away from pagan-gods and rulers to monotheistic perceptions of God as elevated above worldly kings. It concludes with an assessment of Christian Rome and Constantinople as typifying the evolution from the ancient and classical world to Christendom. Buy this book with a 25% discount with the code PROMO25 at the checkout here.  Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit. Although the Muslim inhabitants of these lands speak dozens of languages, represent numerous ethnic groups, and practice diverse forms of Islam, they are united by shared practices and worldviews shaped by religious identity. To highlight these commonalities, the co-editors invited a team of scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine Muslim societies in comparative and interconnected ways.  The result is a book that showcases ethics, education, architecture, the arts, modernization, political resistance, marriage, divorce, and death rituals. Using the insights and methods of historians, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, political scientists, and sociologists, Islamic Ecumene seeks to understand Islamic identity as a dynamic phenomenon that is reflected in the multivalent practices of the more than one billion people across the planet who identify as Muslims. Eric Taliacozzo: John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University.  David S. Powers: Professor of Islamic studies at Cornell University.  Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on X @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

One of the eight national dances of India, bharatanatyam, partly originates from the area around Tranquebar. During the time that Tranquebar was a Danish colony, devadasis, women who did service at temples through dance, were patronized by the Thanjavur royal court. In 1623, a Danish–Icelandic soldier routinely observed the devadasis dancing outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansborg, which he was guarding. His accounts of the dancers are interesting at two levels; first, they provide us with unique data on the role of the devadasis at the village level in seventeenth century Tamil Nadu. Secondly, they shed light on a certain imagination and perspective on Indian religion grounded in European Christian thought at the time. Since the seventeenth century the dance of the devadasis has undergone a dramatic transformation, as it has been taken from its original setting to a national middle class arena in which females of very different socio-cultural backgrounds learn the dance now called bharatanatyam. Stine elaborates on her fieldwork done in one of the bharatanatyam dance institutions situated in New Delhi, and deals with reflections on Hinduism as well as Christianity through dance practice. Parallel to that some methodological reflections on the study on cultural encounters through dance are presented. Though set in very different contexts, the two accounts shed light on Christian perspectives on Hinduism through their encounter with a dominant South Indian dance form. In this episode, Stine Simonsen Puri, explores history and practice of the Indian temple dance today called bharatanatyam through a focus on cultural encounters with the dance from both a Hindu and a Christian perspective. Being a board member of the Nordic Center India, part of the Faculty of Modern India and South Asian Studies as well as Teaching Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional studies, Stine shares her expertise on Indian’s socio-cultural issues. Her knowledge especially stems from her extensive fieldwork at a bharatanatyam Dance School in New Delhi as well as her research part of the Tranquebar Initiative. Marianne Tykesson is a student assistant as the Nordic Institute of Asia Studies and a Cross-Cultural Studies Student at the University of Copenhagen with a particular interest in the research of social injustice and cross-national encounters. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Pankaj Jain's book Modern Jainism: A Historical Approach (Springer, 2023) presents a substantive yet accessible introduction to the modern thought of Jainism. It examines the life and thought of some of the most influential 19th- and 20th-century Jain ascetic leaders that remain little known in the Western world. The book's first part provides a detailed philosophical overview of Jain thought based on the translation of a seminal Hindi text Jain Darshan. The second part introduces eight Jain saints from the major Jain sects, including their biographies, philosophical perspectives, and related contemporary movements flourishing in various places across India and beyond.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides.  In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of religion must be rethought as an ordinary aspect of social, historical existence, a stance that makes the scholar of religion a critic of cultural and historical practices rather than a caretaker of religious tradition or a font of timeless wisdom and deep meaning. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture. "What's wrong with you?" Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What's wrong isn't her wheelchair, though--it's exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God's call. Jacob's encounter with an angel leaves him changed not just spiritually but physically: he gains a limp. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold in ways that treat disability as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity or as a challenge to be overcome. Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023) instead paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God's beloved. Belser delves deep into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies. Loving Our Own Bones invites readers to claim the power and promise of spiritual dissent, and to nourish their own souls through the revolutionary art of radical self-love. Ilana Maymind is a lecturer at the Religious Studies Department at Chapman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff argues for cosmic purposivism, the idea that the universe does have a purpose – although this is not because there is an all-powerful God who provides it with one. Instead, Goff argues, fundamental physics provides us with reason to think it is probable there is a cosmic purpose – and, moreover, the best explanation of these reasons is to posit cosmopsychism: the idea that there are fundamental forms of consciousness such that the universe itself is a conscious mind. Goff, who is professor of philosophy at Durham University, argues that these claims are not as extravagant as they may initially seem, and that his view provides a way for understanding human purposes that lies between secular humanism and religious or spiritual perspectives. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Despite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to play a role in processes of identification in societies all around the globe ... and such processes seems likely to continue to structure the ways in which communities view themselves even in today’s globalized and seemingly secularized world. – Gregory Goalwin, Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey (Rutgers UP, 2022) Religion and nationalism are two of the most powerful forces in the world. And as powerful as they are separately, humans throughout history have fused religious beliefs and nationalist politics to develop religious nationalism, which uses religious identity to define membership in the national community. But why and how have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of national identity in what sociologists have predicted would be a more secular world? This book takes two cases - nationalism in both Ireland and Turkey in the 20th century - as a foundation to advance a new theory of religious nationalism. By comparing cases, Goalwin emphasizes how modern political actors deploy religious identity as a boundary that differentiates national groups. This theory argues that religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a powerful movement developed as a tool that forges new and independent national identities. "In an age where religious nationalisms and populisms are on the rise, Goalwin's comparative-historical work is a welcome contribution for comprehending how religious identities and politics interact. A valuable source for social scientists as well as non-specialists who are interested in this complex phenomenon." – Efe Peker, co-author, Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park: From Private Discontent to Collective Action Gregory Goalwin is an assistant professor of sociology at Aurora University in Illinois. His research has been published in journals including Social Science History, Patterns of Prejudice, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers, and the Journal of Historical Sociology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

If anything, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has been a rallying cry for the disruption of the myths that abound in the world of Buddhism and meditation. David L. McMahan professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, has been something of a crusader himself, writing a much needed correction to many of the myths in western adoption of Buddhism in his seminal text, The Makings of Buddhist Modernism. In our second interview with David, we discuss his newest book, Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practice in Ancient and Modern Worlds (Oxford UP, 2023) continues where Buddhist Modern left off. In this text David wakes readers up to context, and the role it has in the stories western Buddhists have constructed around meditation. As a religious studies professor and historian, David does this through reconstructing the history that has produced many of the ideas that are so prominent today regarding meditation and mindfulness. It’s a fascinating book and we go through key sections and concepts in our discussion. This book is well worth your time if you, like us, take a critical approach to practice, results, and claims. Apologies to listeners: I had a cold whilst recording this. Episode 48. IBP - David L. McMahan on Buddhism, Science, the Humanities, and Modernity Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023), political scientist Anna Grzymała-Busse corrects a long-standing distortion in the study of state formation in Europe, writing religion back into the story and examining, at once pithily and methodically, the multiple contributions of the Roman Church to the emergence of modern practices of secular statehood. Sacred Foundations expands the conventional geography of medieval European state practice and brings to bear a range of innovative data analysis, showing that not only the papacy, but also a host of individuals and institutions subsumed under the Church contributed to medieval Europe’s territorial fragmentation (especially in Germanic and Italian lands), to the genesis of state institutions and civil law, and to the emergence of a culture of taxation by consent. Sometimes through rivalry, sometimes through emulation, kings across medieval Europe acquired the necessary tools to multiply human capital, drive institutional innovation, and ultimately best the papacy at its own long-standing efforts at administration and secular rule. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Joshua Skarf's book ArchitecTorah: Architectural Ideas in Judaism and the Weekly Torah Portion (Urim, 2023) is a collection of 178 short essays that investigate the Torah through the lens of architecture. Each essay briefly introduces a piece of architectural theory, a building, or a section of building code and then reexamines a well-known topic in the Torah to uncover new and insightful interpretations. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press, 2023), J. Christopher Edwards explores the early Christian teachings regarding who actually killed Jesus. Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter play and remember Roman soldiers hammering the nails. However, for early Christians, the detail that Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers under the direction of a Roman governor threatened their desire for a stable existence in the Roman world. Beginning with the writings found in the New Testament, early Christians sought to rewrite their history and shift the blame for Jesus's crucifixion away from Pilate and his soldiers and onto Jews. During the second century, a narrative of the crucifixion with Jewish executioners predominated. During the fourth century, this narrative functioned to encourage anti-Judaism within the newly established Christian empire. Yet, in the modern world, there exists a significant degree of ignorance regarding the pervasiveness--or sometimes even the existence!--of the claim among ancient Christians that Jesus was executed by Jews. J. Christopher Edwards is professor of religious studies at St. Francis College, Brooklyn. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ritual deposition is not an activity that many people in the Western world would consider themselves participants of. The enigmatic beliefs and magical thinking that led to the deposition of swords in watery places and votive statuettes in temples, for example, may feel irrelevant to the modern day. However, Dr. Ceri Houlbrook shows in ‘Ritual Litter' Redressed (Cambridge University Press, 2023) that ritual deposition is a more widespread feature now than in the past, with folk assemblages – from roadside memorials and love-lock bridges, to wishing fountains and coin-trees – emerging prolifically worldwide. Despite these assemblages being as much the result of ritual activity as historically deposited objects, they are rarely given the same academic attention or heritage status. As well as exploring the nature of ritual deposition in the contemporary West, and the beliefs and symbolisms behind various assemblages, this Element explores the heritage of the modern-day deposit, promoting a renegotiation of the pejorative term 'ritual litter'. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. In Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Tabitha Stanmore brings this world to light. Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The mantra known as Gāyatrī or Sāvitrī (Ṛgveda III 62.10) is one of the most frequently recited texts of mankind. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the mother of the Vedas – the oldest religious literature of South Asia –, but has even come to be venerated as a goddess. Today many consider it the most important, most efficacious, or holiest mantra of all.  In Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023), Dominik A. Haas reconstructs the history of the Gāyatrī-Mantra for the first time, tracing it from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. He shows how an inconspicuous verse became an emblem of Brahminical Hinduism and presents the processes that led to its deification. To this end, he not only subjects passages from more than one hundred source texts in Vedic and Sanskrit to philological-historical analysis, but also draws upon perspectives and insights from religious studies. The Gāyatrī-Mantra plays an important role in contemporary Hinduism as well as in modern yoga and alternative spiritual currents around the globe. This book therefore not only contributes to South Asian studies and religious studies, but is also of interest to a wider readership. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For thousands of years, the Jewish people lacked a political state; yet, what can we say about the Jewish tradition of statesmanship? What makes it distinctive, and what can we learn from it? In Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship (Encounter Books, 2023) , Rabbi Meir Soloveichik investigates ten Jews, from King David all the way to the foundation of Israel, what we can learn from their examples, and how history can provide hope amidst recent events in Israel. Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He received his PhD in Religion at Princeton in 2010. Among the world's preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured across the United States and Europe on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. He has a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, and many other outlets. He is the host of the podcast Bible 365, and you can also listen to him via the Meir Soloveichik podcast. Sources and examples referenced in the interview: Rembrandt's David in Prayer, 1652. John Trumbull's George Washington Resigning His Commission and Declaration of Independence (1826). George Washington's Letter to the Jews of Savannah (1790). Dan Senor and Saul Singer's recent book The Genius of Israel. A secular Israeli broadcaster borrows a kippah and performs a blessing. Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat and other charitable funds, for purposes of poverty alleviation. Specifically, the book explores the social foundations of contemporary Islamic practices that strive to encompass the economic within an expanded domain of divine worship and elucidates the effects such encompassment has on time, its fissure and synthesis.  In order to elaborate on the question of time, the book looks beyond anthropology and Islamic studies, engaging attentively, critically and productively with the post-structuralist work of G. Deleuze, M. Foucault and J. Derrida, three of the most important figures of the temporal turn in contemporary continental philosophy. Through doing so, the book impressively untangles the complex relationship between Islamic economics, divine worship, and time. Konstantinos Retsikas is Reader in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London, UK. His work focuses on temporality and personhood, and he has written extensively on issues of embodiment, place making, violence, and religion. He is also the author of Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java (2012). Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests 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

Exegetes have long relied on the framework of the Acts of the Apostles to understand the behavior and organization of Paul’s various ekklēsiai (assemblies), or church communities, from which Christ-groups have often been conceptualized as extensions from practices of diasporic Jewish synagogues. However, Richard S. Ascough’s work has been at the forefront of a scholarly movement emphasizing the relevance of data from Greco-Roman associations—occupational, cultic, ethnic, and otherwise—not only as a preferable model for understanding the constitution of early Christ-following communities, but also as fruitful comparanda for interpreting Paul’s letters, such as 1 Thessalonians and Philippians.  On this episode, Dr. Ascough joined the New Books Network to discuss Early Christ Groups and Greco-Roman Associations: Organizational Models and Social Practices (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his articles and essays on associations from the last 25 years detailing the road to the acceptance of association data within scholarship as well as the recruitment, self-promotion, socializing, and memorializing practices that these recoveries from antiquity reveal. Ascough discusses how he carved his own niche within biblical studies, from starting as a master’s student with a small group to translate previously unpublished inscriptions and papyri to ultimately showcasing the applicability of association behavior to early Christ-groups, Pauline and otherwise. Richard S. Ascough (Ph.D., Toronto School of Theology, 1997) is a Professor at the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He has written extensively on the formation of early Christ groups and Greco-Roman religious culture, with particular attention to various types of associations. He has published widely in the field with more than fifty articles or essays and thirteen books, including Christ Groups & Associations: Foundational Essays(Baylor U. Press, 2022), Associations in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Baylor U. Press, 2012), and Paul’s Macedonian Associations (Mohr Siebeck, 2003). He has been recognized for his innovative and effective teaching in many ways, including the two top teaching awards at Queen’s University and a 3M National Teaching Fellowship (2018). Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Rabbinic Sages of the Tannaitic era were fixated on memory and terrified of forgetfulness. In promulgating their own interpretations of Jewish law, the Tannaim not only took seriously Moses’s admonitions to remember and not forget, they painstakingly constructed a system of laws thar recognized that helped create and enhance a powerful and dynamic memory form. The rabbis also knew, however, that people are fallible and they’re going to forget. To try to ensure communal coherence within the embrace of the covenant in the face of the loss of a cultic center, the rabbis built a system of legal promulgation and interpretation that anticipated forgetting and devised ways for confronting, correcting, and mitigating damage from it. In her latest work, Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture (U California Press, 2023), Professor Balberg explores and examines how the Tannaitic sages not only understood and approached the problem of forgetting, but how they in essence created that problem, and position themselves as the specialists who can solve it. Mira Balberg is Professor and David Goodblatt Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization at the University of California at San Diego. She joins me today to speak about her latest work.  David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Keith Cantú's Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami And Śivarājayoga (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the life of a nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Tamil yogin named Sri Sabhapati Swami (Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī or Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, ca. 1828-1923/4) and his unique English, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali literature on a Sanskrit-based system of yogic meditation known as the "Rājayoga for Śiva" (Tamil: civarājayōkam, Sanskrit: śivarājayoga), the full experience of which is compared to being like a "tree universally spread." Its practice was based on a unique synthesis of Tamil Vīraśaiva and Siddhar cosmologies in the colonial period, and the yogic literature in which it is found was designed to have universal appeal across boundaries of caste, gender, and sectarian affiliation. His works, all of which are here analyzed together for the first time, are an important record in the history of yoga, print culture, and art history due to his vividly-illustrated and numbered diagrams on the yogic body with its subtle physiology. This book opens with a biographical account of Sabhapati, his editor Shrish Chandra Basu, and his students as gleaned from textual sources and the author's ethnographic field work. Sabhapati's literature in various languages is then analyzed, followed by a comprehensive exposition of his Śaiva cosmology and religious theories. Sabhapati's system of Śivarājayoga and its subtle physiology is then treated in detail, followed by an analysis of Sabhapati's aesthetic integration of aural sound and visual diagrams and an evaluation of the role of "science" in the swami's literature. Sabhapati also appealed to global authors and occultists outside of South Asia, so special attention is additionally given to his encounter with the founders of the Theosophical Society and the integration of his techniques into the thelemic "Magick" of Aleister Crowley, the German translation of Bavarian theosophical novelist Franz Hartmann, and the American publication of New Thought entrepreneur William Estep. To these are appended a never-before-translated Tamil hagiography of Sabhapati's life, a lexicon in table-form that compiles some archaic variants and Roman transliterations of technical terms used in his work, and a critically-edited passage on an innovative technique of Śivarājayoga that included visualizing the yogic central channel as a lithic "pole." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their testimonials to the Christian faith helped them to make sense of and find purpose in their trauma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodian communities in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, and Phnom Penh, Wong examines questions of religious identity and the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism. While the community has grown in recent decades, Christians nevertheless make up a small minority of the predominantly Buddhist diaspora. Wong explores what it is about Christianity that makes these converts willing to risk their social standing, familial bonds, and, in certain cases, physical safety in order to identify with the faith. Contributing to ongoing dialogues on conversion, reverse mission, and multiple religious belonging, this book will appeal to students and scholars of world Christianity, missiology, and the history of Christianity, as well as Southeast Asian studies, secular sociologies, and anthropologists operating within the field of religious studies. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, with a concentration in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When one thinks of your typical horror movie and it’s usual imagery, a number of tropes may come forward. Graveyards behind old cathedrals, crucifixes and holy water, possessions and exorcisms. The uniting thread of all of these is that they are all tied to the religious. One might then wonder if there is some underlying thread of meaning beneath the facade. Addressing this topic directly is Jonathan Greenaway in his book Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2022). Surveying a number of well known works from this period, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bronte sisters all the way up to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Greenaway finds works filled with various references and discussions of religious scripture, imagery and themes. What’s more, he’s able to follow these various occasions down into deeper territory, finding a subterranean conversation in much of this literature on themes of embodiment, createdness, epistemology, political institutions and ethical transgression. What Greenaway comes away with is insight into a dialogue between these two fields that will be richly rewarding to believers of both of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport (Routledge, 2021) examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include: the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson; the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; religious expressions of athletes in the NFL; treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams; Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice. This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport. Jeffrey Scholes is associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred. In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Kin Cheung, a scholar of contemporary Buddhism at Moravian University. We talk about his research on a Chinese-American community healer who happens to be his father. We discuss how his father’s practice raises challenging questions for scholars, and reveals gaping holes in current academic approaches to Buddhism. Along the way, we talk about how code-switching between different ontologies is a feature of life for Asian Americans, and hear Kin’s father conduct a blessing ritual. Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl! Resources mentioned in this episode: First installment of Pierce's blog series on Meta Approaches to Asian Medicine Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (2021) Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (2019) Pierce Salguero, Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (2020) Jivaka Project Philadelphia (documentary films on Asian American Buddhism in Philadelphia, by Pierce and Lan) Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane, Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World (2024) Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber, Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan (2020) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The technological revolution we are facing today is artificial intelligence. At least this is what we are told. Those doing the telling include tech experts such as Elon Musk, linguist Noam Chomsky, as well as philosophers, politicians and intellectuals of all stripes. What are to make of all this and how are we to manage a world experiencing such rapid change as practitioners? We explore the role of A.I. and its place in a line of societal change that has serious consequences for all of us. We discuss practice, and thinkers including Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky and a bunch of contemporary commentators and their thoughts. We look at the big picture of society in turmoil and ask what practices might help us navigate this moment of intense change and disruption. We look at what it means to remain human despite the push to merge ourselves with the spectacle of social media and the calls to become more than human by tech dudes and the emergent forms of Capitalism and their need for us all to discard ever more of our humanity. My companion in this episode is the co-founder of the podcast, Stuart Baldwin, who came back for this one off episode. The topic of tech and A.I. is close to his heart and the conversation both captures past glories of earlier episodes and signals a new maturation in our relationship in what we hope will be a stimulating conversation for serious practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina. When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’s journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture. Paying special attention to the diverse metaphysical beliefs that shaped her spiritual life, Craig untangles Tina’s Soka Gakkai Buddhist foundation; her incorporation of New Age ideas popularized in ’60s counterculture; and her upbringing in a Black Baptist congregation, alongside the influences of her grandmothers’ disciplinary and mystical sensibilities. Through critical engagement with Tina’s personal life and public brand, Craig sheds light on how popular culture has been used as a vehicle for authentic religious teaching. Scholars and fans alike will find Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans, 2023) as enlightening as the iconic singer herself. For those of you interested in the stories and poems of the first Buddhist nuns mentioned in the interview yet not included in the book's footnotes (hey, it's a trade book, so space for footnotes is limited), collected in Therīgāthā, you can find the stories here: Kisāgotamī; Ambapālī; Isidāsī. You can also find a modern recreation of Ambapālī's song here. For a trustworthy, philologically solid, yet still readable translation of Therīgāthā, see here. I also find this translation most useful because of its high-quality but manageable footnotes. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2023), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Drawing on history, literary studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit philology, narrative studies, and philosophy, Lindquist traces Yājñavalkya’s literary life—from his earliest mentions in ritual texts, through his developing biography in the Upaniṣads, and finally to his role as a hoary sage in narrative literature—offering the first detailed monograph on this central figure in early Indian religious and literary history. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression.  Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies. Naomi Goldenberg is professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include Resurrecting the Body (Crossroad Publishing, 1993), The End of God (University of Ottawa Press, 1981), and Changing the Gods (Beacon Press, 1979). This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Vanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition.  The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts women into the Order, but specific and controversial conditions are attached. Sasson invites us to think about who these first Buddhist women might have been, what they might have hoped to achieve, and what these conditions might have meant to them thereafter. By shaping her research into a story, Sasson invites readers to imagine a world that continues to inspire and complicate Buddhist narrative to this day. Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead (Duke UP, 2023), Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleash the spiritual and transformative potential of their music. Michael Kaler is Associate Professor, teaching stream, at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The obvious riddles and difficulties in Exodus 3:13-15 and 6:2-8 have attracted an overwhelming amount of attention and comment. These texts make important theological statements about the divine name and the contours of the divine character. In his book Making Sense of the Divine Name in the Book of Exodus: From Etymology to Literary Onomastics (Eisenbrauns, 2017), Austin Surls attempts to move beyond atomistic readings of individual texts and etymological studies of the divine name toward a holistic reading of the book of Exodus. Join us as we speak with Austin Surls about the progressive revelation of the divine name in the book of Exodus. Dr. Austin Surls is Assistant Professor of Old Testament Studies at Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ineffable, invisible, inscrutable--angels are enduring creatures across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine as mediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religious tradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy, sentimental, and saccharine of images: fat babies with wings and guardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripture whenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet or patriarch, they first declare "Fear not!" for terror would be the most appropriate initial reaction to these otherworldly beings. Angels are often not what we'd expect, but it's precisely in that transcendent encounter that something of the strangeness of existence can be conveyed.  Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology (Cernunnos, 2023) is a follow-up volume to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, and like the earlier title, this book offers an account of the angelic hierarchies as they've been understood across centuries and cultures and of the individual personages, such as the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel, who have marked the mythology of the West. Ed Simon is the Executive Director of Belt Media Collaborative and the Editor-in-Chief for Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site.” Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions. Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop (Norton, 2023) argues that mediators, translators and transmitters are not just essential supplements, they are the whole kit and kaboodle—it is borrowing and appropriation all the way down. Mentioned in the episode: Cave art: Chauvet cave "Meaning rather than utility" (cf Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams) Recovery of Gilgamesh retold in David Damrosch's The Buried Book) David Ferry translation of Gilgamesh John Guillory's version of multiple forms of cultural transmission: "Monuments and Documents" William Blake, "Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead" Alex Ross writes eloquently in his book The Rest Is Noise about music's "pulverized modernity"; the revival of ancient culture in a reformulated, fragmented and reassembled from. Creolization as distinctively Caribbean (cf Glissant's notion of creolite ) Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death (cf also Vincent Brown on the syncretism and continuity in Carribean deathways, Reaper's Garden) "Revenants of the past" as a way of understanding what scholars do: a phrase from Lorraine Daston's Rules--and was extensively discussed in the RTB conversation with Daston. Peter Brown Through the Eye of the Needle on monastic wealth and the rise of "mangerial bishops"--a topic that came up in his conversation with RTB. John presses the non-cenobitic tradition of the hermit monk, but Martin insists that most Church tradition shares his preference for the cenobitic or communal monastic tradition --even on Mt Athos. Recallable Books:  Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture Richard Price, First Time (the dad of Leah Price?) Aphra Behn Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688) Roberto Calasso (an Umberto Eco sidekick?) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony  Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Christopher Jain Miller's book Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge, 2023) is a refreshingly original, multi-sited ethnography of transnational yoga that obliges us to look beyond postural practice (as̄ana) in modern yoga research. The book introduces readers to three alternative, understudied categories of transnational yoga practice which include food, music, and breathing. Studying these categories of embodied practice using interdisciplinary methods reveals transformative "engaged alchemies" that have been extensively deployed by contemporary disseminators of yoga. Readers will encounter how South Asian dietary regimens, musical practices, and breathing techniques have been adapted into contemporaneous worlds of yoga practice both within, but also beyond, the Indian Ocean rim. The book brings the field of Modern Yoga Studies into productive dialogue with the fields of Indian Ocean Studies, Embodiment Studies, Food Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Pollution Studies. It will also be a valuable resource for both scholarly work and for teaching in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and South Asian Religions. Arihanta Institute Engaged Jain Studies: South Asian and Global Perspectives (MA program) Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followed—would be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen. Toby, in his most recent book The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford University Press, 2023), tries to chart the history of the Sunni-Shia split: its origins at the very start of Islam’s founding, and how different Muslim polities—including those outside of the Arabian core—flitted between tolerance and conflict. In this interview, Toby and I talk about the origins of the division between the Sunni and the Shia, how different regimes throughout history molded and were molded by the split, and what that means for the present day. Toby Matthiesen is Senior Lecturer in Global Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of several award-winning books and has previously held fellowships at the Universities of Oxford, Ca' Foscari of Venice, Stanford, Cambridge, and the LSE. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Caliph and the Imam. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions. It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises. Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them. Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When King Arthur was conveyed to Avalon they were there. When Odin summoned warriors to Valhalla they were there. When Apollo was worshipped on Greek mountains they were there. When Brendan came to the Island of Women they were there. They are the Nine Maidens – from the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, to the nine sisters at the heart of the found myth of the Gikuyu of Kenya or witches battling with the Irish St Patrick, these women stand out in history and mythology. Triggered by a local story still told in his native Dundee, Stuart McHardy has traced what seems to be memories of groups of nine women across much of Europe and as far as Siberia, Korea, India and Africa. As explored in his book The Nine Maidens: Priestesses of the Ancient World (Luath Press, 2023), McHardy shows that whether as Pictish saints, muses, valkyries, druidesses or witches, the tales of these groups of nine women transcend a vast range of cultural and linguistic boundaries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Yanki Tauber's The Book of Genesis with Commentary and Insights from 500 Sages and Mystics (Open Book Press, 2022) features a new foundational English translation of the first book of the Bible, an anthology of commentaries representing the full spectrum of Jewish learning spanning 33 centuries, and an abundance of illustrations, maps, and infographics. Never before has the English reader been given direct, unmediated access to this wealth of moral, legal, philosophical, mystical, and psychological wisdom and guidance. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society. Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors' zealous movement involved other acts that closely foreshadowed the Reformation movement that would sweep Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Like that later Reformation, iconoclasm marked an authentic revolution in religious sensibility, with all that implied for theology, culture, and visual perceptions of holiness. This was a pivotal moment in the definition of Christianity and its relationship to the material creation. It was also a time of critical encounters with the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam. With A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (Baylor UP, 2023), Philip Jenkins offers a compelling retelling of the saga of how the iconoclastic movement detonated ferocious controversy within the church and secular society as icon supporters challenged the image breakers. Decades of internal struggle followed, marked by rebellions and civil wars, purges and persecutions, plotting and coups d'état. After their cause triumphed, image supporters made the cult of icons ever more central to the faith of Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm marked a watershed in the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and it contributed to Western attempts to establish new empires. The questions raised during these struggles are all the more relevant at a time when such controversy rages over public depictions of history and the removal of statues, monuments, and names associated with hated figures. As in those earlier times, debates over images serve as vehicles for authentic cultural revolutions. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic. In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Histories of political religion since the 1960s often center on the rise of the powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc since the 1970s. One of the beliefs that has united these citizens is the idea that they are treated unfairly or are marginalized, despite their significant influence on public life. From the ascent of Reagan to the "Contract with America," from 9/11 to Obama to Trump--these claims have moved steadily to the center of conservative activism. Scholars of religion have approached these phenomena with great caution, generally focusing on institutional history, or relying on journalistic conveniences like "populism," or embracing the self-understandings of evangelicals themselves. None of these approaches is sufficiently calibrated to decoding the fierce convergence of online conspiracy theory, public violence, white supremacy, and religious authoritarianism. Accepting the narrative of Embattlement on its own terms, or examining it as mere turbulence on the path of American pluralism, overlooks how such deeper structural or atmospheric conditions work through this discourse to undermine the actual practice of democratic politics.  Exploring the impact of these claims through case studies ranging from the Tea Party to Birthers to anti-sharia laws, Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion (Oxford UP, 2022) digs deeper into the debates between Martyrs (those who profess persecution) and Whistleblowers (those who sanctimoniously refute such claims). Hidden beneath each of these episodes is a series of ambivalences about democracy that require attention. Jason Bivins argues that the claims of Martyrs and Whistleblowers are symptoms of America's larger failings to strengthen the conditions for democratic life, and thus that rather than engaging their claims on the merits, concerned citizens should reassess fundamental democratic norms as part of a broader challenge to embolden American citizenship and institutions. Jason C. Bivins is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He is the author of three previous books including, most recently, Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion. He has written widely for popular and academic media, has taught for The Great Courses, and has recorded multiple albums of improvised music on guitar. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves? Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place. He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity. The book fills important gaps in Durkheim’s social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A candid conversation with Corinne Dempsey on her wide-ranging, fascinating research in religion, from the Indian Goddess in New York and Icelandic Spirit Work. Books The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York: Breaking Convention and Making Home at a North American Hindu Temple Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion Bridges Between Worlds: Spirits and Spirit Work in Northern Iceland  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy. Cultural historian Dr. Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shape American Democracy (Viking, 2023), Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Gina A. Zurlo's book Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their key role in Christianity becoming a world religion, including how they sustain the faith in the present and their expanding role in the future.  Women in World Christianity features findings from the Women in World Christianity Project, a groundbreaking study that produced the first quantitative dataset on gender in every Christian denomination in every country of the world. Throughout the text, special emphasis is placed on women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the period of Christianity’s shift from the global North to the global South. Easily accessible chapters – organized by continent, tradition, and select topics – introduce students to the wide variety of Christian belief and practice around the world. The book also discusses issues specifically relevant to women in the church: gender-based violence, ecology, theological education, peacebuilding and more. This textbook: Provides a balanced view of women’s involvement in Christianity as a world religion and how they sustain the faith today Introduces students to female theologians around the world whose scholarship is generally overlooked in Western theological education Discusses women’s essential contributions to Christian mission, leadership, education, relief work, healthcare, and other social services of the church Complements the growing body of literature about Christian women from different continental, regional, national, and ecclesiastical perspectives Explores the contributions of contemporary Christian women of all major denominations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania Helps students become more aware of the unique challenges women face worldwide, and what they are doing to overcome them Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement is an excellent primary textbook for introductory courses on World Christianity, History of Christianity, World Religions, Gender in Religion, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses specifically focused on women in World Christianity. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and the history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia and Protestant missions. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion, church-state relations, and politics of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans has been foundational for Christianity, and well-studied throughout the history of the Church. Ben Witherington, however, gleans fresh insights by reading Paul's epistle in light of early Jewish theology, the historical situation of Rome in the middle of the first century, and Paul's own rhetorical concerns. Join us as we speak with Ben Witherington III about his now classic commentary on Romans: Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2004) Dr. Ben Witherington III is the Jean R. Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. A prolific author, Ben has written over 60 books, and has led numerous study tours through the lands of the Bible. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Greco-Egyptian syncretistic god Serapis was used by the 3rd century BCE Ptolemaic pharaohs to impose Greek cultural hegemony and consolidate political power. The Alexandrian Serapeum, sometimes referred to as The Great Library of Alexandria’s “daughter library,” may be seen as an archetype for institutions where religion and secular knowledge come together for the reproduction of ideologies. The Serapeum, however, is by no means unique in this regard; libraries have always incorporated religious symbols and rituals into their material structures. Very little research has been conducted concerning the sociocultural and historical impact of this union of temple and information institution or how this dynamic interrelationship (even if it may now be implicit or partially concealed) stretches from the earliest Mesopotamian proto-libraries to our present academic ones. Serapis explores the role of the historical and legacy religious symbols and rituals of the academic library (referred to as the “Serapian Library”) as a powerful ideological state institution and investigates how these symbols and rituals support hegemonic structures in society. Specifically, the book examines the role of the modern secular “Serapian” academic library in its historical context as a “sacred space,” and applies the theories of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Ivan Illich, and other thinkers to explain the ramifications of the library as crypto-temple. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879- 1950) is perhaps the most widely known Indian spiritual figure of the last century, second only to Gandhi. Patrick Laude's book Surrendering to the Self: Ramana Maharshi's Message for the Present (Hurst, 2021) offers a fresh introduction to the Maharshi's life and teachings, intending to situate him within the non-dualistic traditions of Hinduism. It also delves into themes and questions particularly relevant to the spiritual crisis and search for meaning that have characterised, in various ways, both the modern and postmodern outlooks. The book comprises seven chapters that touch upon such central issues as the role of religion in Self-inquiry; the relationship between devotion and knowledge; the role and limitations of traditional forms; and the implications in our postmodern era of both the Maharshi's emphasis on surrender, and his basic question: 'Who am I?' Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This cultural history of humility reveals this lost virtue as a secret defense against arrogance and incivility. History demonstrates that when the virtue of humility is cast aside, excessive individualism follows. A person who lacks humility is at risk of developing a deceptive sense of certitude and at worst denies basic human rights, respect, and dignity to anyone they identify as the enemy. Christopher M. Bellitto's Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue (Georgetown UP, 2023), a cultural history and biography of the idea of humility, argues that the frightening alternative to humility has been the death of civility. In this book, Bellitto explores humility in Greco-Roman history, philosophy, and literature; in the ancient and medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures and sermons; in the Enlightenment; and in contemporary discussions of education in virtue and citizenship. The author encourages readers to recover and reclaim this lost virtue by developing a new perspective on humility as an alternative to the diseases of hubris, arrogance, and narcissism in society. This book offers a fresh perspective on this lost virtue for readers interested in finding a path to renewed civility. Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr Pierce Salguero talks with Rev. Nathan Jishin Michon, a postdoctoral fellow at Ryukoku University and an ordained priest in the Shingon Buddhist tradition. Our conversation touches on diverse Buddhist healing rituals and the role of light in Shingon practice and cosmology. We discuss the playfulness and innovation in modern Japanese Buddhism, and the rise of chaplaincy after the 3.11 tsunami and nuclear disaster. We also talk about Nathan’s ethnographic work in Japan, as well as their experiences volunteering in a “listening cafe.” Resources mentioned in the episode: Pierce Salguero, Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (2019) Jivaka Project Nathan’s dissertation: “Awakening to Care: Formation of Japanese Buddhist Chaplaincy” (2020) Nathan Michon, A Thousand Hands: A Guidebook to Caring for Your Buddhist Community (2016) Nathan Michon, Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (2023) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Julian Goodare and Martha McGill's edited volume The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester UP, 2023) is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural. To find the card game Martha and Jana talked click here for Martha's website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (NYU Press, 2023), the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Dr. Monteith argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed—and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the “civilising mission,” a wide-ranging project that sought to protect “child races” from harmful influences while remodelling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress. This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention. These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minorities: the Karen, the Kachin, and others. Alexandra Kaloyonides covers these missions in Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press: 2023), her latest book. Alexandra Kaloyonides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where her teaching focuses on Buddhism. Dr. Kaloyanides serves as Associate Editor of Material Religion, served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and served as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel. Today, Alex and I talk about the missions to Burma, their success among the country’s minority groups, and how Christian faith became wrapped in the country’s identity formation. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Baptizing Burma. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tom Boomershine, one of the pioneers of performance criticism for biblical texts, joined the New Books Network to discuss the publication of First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his essays dating back to 1981. On this episode, we discuss his life and career in scholarship, his conviction that the New Testament be studied as an oral/aural (spoken/heard) experience, and his compelling argument that the Gospel of Mark was not first written and not merely experienced as a performance but also composed in a performance setting concurrent with the major events of the Jewish-Roman War (ca. 66–73 CE). Among other findings, Boomershine’s work provides insight into the narratively dissatisfying ending of the Gospel of Mark, which he performs on this episode, and although the extension of performance theory to other books of the New Testament is only presently in its infancy, he makes a case for its broad applicability beyond just the Gospel of Mark—even if, as can be argued, the composition of other gospels, letters, and books betrays their production within a more explicitly textual culture. Thomas E. Boomershine (Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary, 1974) is the Founder of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media group (1982) at the Society of Biblical Literature and the Network of Biblical Storytellers International (1977). He has taught both in the academy and the church since his graduate studies, including serving as the G. Ernest Thomas Distinguished Professor of Christianity and Communication at United Theological Seminary (Dayton, Ohio) from 2004–2006 and as Professor of New Testament for over 20 years before that. His passions and research interests include telling the stories of Jesus by heart, the pedagogy of performing the gospels, and situating the gospels—especially the Gospel of Mark—in the context of ancient media culture as performance literature. His prior publications include Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling (Abingdon, 1988), The Messiah of Peace: A Performance-Criticism Commentary on Mark’s Passion-Resurrection Narrative (Cascade, 2015), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Life without God: An Outsider's Look at Atheism (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rik Peels explores atheism from a new perspective that aims to go beyond the highly polarized debate about arguments for and against God's existence. Since our beliefs about the most important things in life are not usually based on arguments, we should look beyond atheistic arguments and explore what truly motivates the atheist. Are there certain ideals or experiences that explain the turn to atheism? Could atheism be the default position for us, not requiring any arguments whatsoever? And what about the often-discussed arguments against belief in God-is there something that religious and nonreligious people alike can learn from them? This book explores how a novel understanding of atheism is possible - and how it effectively moves the God debate further. Believers and nonbelievers can learn much from Peels's assessment of arguments for and against atheism. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Independent food historian and author Christina Ward joins New Books Network to discuss her highly anticipated book Holy Food: How Cults, Communes and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat (Process, 2023) – exploring the influence of mainstream to fringe religious beliefs on modern American food culture. In the book and over the course of the interview, Ward unravels the numerous ways religious beliefs intersect with politics and economics and, of course, food to tell a different story of America. She tells the story of true believers and charlatans, of idealists and visionaries, and of the everyday people who followed them—often at their peril. Holy Food explains how faith pioneers used societal woes and cultural trends to create new pathways of belief and reveals the interconnectivity between sects and their leaders. Religious beliefs have been the source of food "rules" since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (they contain souls), Kosher and Halal rules forbade the shrimp cocktail (shellfish are scavengers, or maybe G-d just said "no"). A long-ago Pope forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins). Rules about eating are present in nearly every American belief, from high-control groups that ban everything except air to the infamous strawberry shortcake that sated visitors to the Oneida Community in the late 1800s. Only in the United States—where the freedom to worship the God of your choice and sometimes of your own making—could people embrace new ideas about religion. It is in this over-stirred pot of liberation, revolution, and mysticism that we discover God cares about what you put in your mouth. Holy Food looks at how the explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings (the nationwide religious revivals in the 1730s-40s and 1795-1835) birthed a cottage industry of food fads that gained mainstream acceptance. And at the obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality that used food to both entice and control followers. Ward skillfully navigates between academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts to make sharp observations with new insights into American history in this highly readable journey through the American kitchen. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was not afraid to express his opinions. Living amid what he perceived to be a culturally lukewarm Christianity, he was often critical of his contemporary church. But that does not mean Kierkegaard rejected traditional Christian theology. Indeed, at a time when many of his contemporaries were questioning the classical doctrine of God, Kierkegaard swam against the stream by maintaining orthodox Christian beliefs. In Kierkegaard and the Changelessness of God: A Modern Defense of Classical Immutability (InterVarsity Press, 2023), Craig A. Hefner explores Kierkegaard's reading of Scripture and his theology to argue not only that the great Dane was a modern defender of the doctrine of divine immutability (or God's changelessness) in response to the disintegration of the self, but that his theology can be a surprising resource today. Even as the church continues to be beset by "shifting shadows" (James 1:17), Kierkegaard can remind us of the good and perfect gifts that come from an unchanging God. Craig A. Hefner is the Head of School at Covenant School in Huntington, WV. His work has appeared in publications such as the International Journal of Systematic Theology and the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Rachel Elior's book The Unknown History of Jewish Women: On Learning and Illiteracy, On Slavery and Liberty (de Gruyter, 2023) is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy.  The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any communal Jewish education for girls until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the implications of this fact for twentieth-century immigration to Israel (1949-1959). The following chapters discuss the social, cultural and legal contexts of this reality of female illiteracy in the Jewish community-a community that placed a supreme value on male education. The discussion focuses on the patriarchal order and the postulations, rules, norms, sanctions and mythologies that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, laid the religious foundations of this discriminatory reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau's ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispecies community. The book makes an important contribution to scholarship in religious studies, political theory, English, environmental studies, and critical theory by offering the first sustained reading of Thoreau's religiously motivated politics. In Balthrop-Lewis's vision, practices of renunciation like Thoreau's can contribute to reforming social and political life. This book transforms Thoreau's image, making him a vital source for a world beset by inequality and climate change. Balthrop-Lewis argues for an environmental politics in which ecological flourishing is impossible without economic and social justice. Alda Balthrop-Lewis is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University and has taught Religious Studies at Brown University. Her research, which focuses on religious ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms, has appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Religious Ethics. Ilana Maymind is a lecturer at the Religious Studies Department at Chapman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

While early Buddhists hailed their religion's founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha's body boasts thirty-two physical features, including lionlike jaws, thighs like a royal stag, broad shoulders, and a deep, resonant voice, that distinguish him from ordinary men. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia and around the world, the Buddha remained an exemplary man, but Buddhists in other times and places developed their own understandings of what it meant to be masculine. This transdisciplinary book brings together essays that explore the variety and diversity of Buddhist masculinities, from early India to the contemporary United States, and from bodhisattva-kings to martial monks. Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia UP, 2023) adopts the methods of religious studies, anthropology, art history, textual-historical studies, and cultural studies to explore texts, images, films, media, and embodiments of masculinity across the Buddhist world, past and present. It turns scholarly attention to normative forms of masculinity that usually go unmarked and unstudied precisely because they are "normal," illuminating the religious and cultural processes that construct Buddhist masculinities. Engaging with contemporary issues of gender identity, intersectionality, and sexual ethics, Buddhist Masculinities ushers in a new era for the study of Buddhism and gender. MEGAN BRYSON is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and chair of the Asian Studies program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her B.A. in Religious Studies and Chinese from University of Oregon, and her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. Her research focuses primarily on themes of gender and ethnicity in Chinese religions, especially in the Dali region of Yunnan Province. The geographical specificity of her work is balanced by its temporal breadth, which ranges from the Nanzhao (649-903) and Dali (937-1253) kingdoms to the present, as reflected in her monograph, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016, an interview with her about this book is also on the New Books Network), which traces the worship of a local deity in Dali from the 12th to 21st centuries. KEVIN BUCKELEW is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He received his B.A. in the liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on Buddhism in premodern China, with special attention to the rise of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition and to interactions between Chinese Buddhists and Daoists. Thematically, his work explores how religious identities take shape and assume social authority; how materiality, embodiment, and gender figure into Buddhist soteriology; and how Buddhists have grappled with the problem of human agency. Jue Liang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University. She is currently completing her first book, entitled Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshé Tsogyel. She is also working on a second project, tentatively titled i. As a scholar of Buddhist literature, history, and culture in South and East Asia, she reflects in her research and teaching continuities as well as innovations in the gender discourses of Buddhist communities. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation in general, and translating Tibetan literature in particular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Middle-Class Dharma: Gender, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2023) is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one. Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate--that is, what is dharmic--as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new dharmic boundaries and religious selfhoods in the middle classes. Such transitions can be as joyful as they are difficult and disorienting. Middle-Class Dharma explores how contemporary Hindu women's everyday practices reimagine and reshape Hindu traditions. By developing dharma as an analytical category and class as a dharmic category, Ortegren pushes for expanding definitions of religion in academia, both within and beyond the study of Hinduism in South Asia. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation. Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion, An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior (Routledge, 2020) proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more than false belief or the product of scholarly invention. The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and anthropology of art, particularly the identification of "the special" by Ellen Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from, among others, Ann Taves, who similarly identified "specialness" as characteristic of religion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the development and maintenance of religions. The innovative combination of art, science, and religion in this book makes it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology. Bryan Rennie is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Philosophy in the Religion Faculty at Westminster College, USA. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Book of Esther, one of the historical books in the Torah and the Old Testament, is known as a story of community, discrimination, and human ingenuity. It’s core to the Jewish holiday of Purim, with singing, feasting, and other merriment. And it’s unique as one of the few books in the Bible that doesn’t mention God. At all. But it’s also useful as a historical document, as Lloyd Llewellyn Jones writes in his most recent book, Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: Achaemenid Court Culture in the Hebrew Bible (I. B. Tauris, 2023). While not perhaps entirely accurate, the book refers to political divisions, court customs, and gender politics that align with what we know about Ancient Persia. In this interview, Lloyd and I talk about the Book of Esther, what it tells us about Persian history, and whether other parts of the Bible might act as good historical sources. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones holds the chair in ancient history at Cardiff University and is the director of the Ancient Iran Program for the British Institute of Persian Studies. He has published widely on ancient history. His other books include Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (Basic Books: 2022), Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World (Edinburgh University Press: 2018), and Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Classical Press of Wales: 2004). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sister Mary Josefa of the Eucharist is a Benedictine nun in Missouri; she and the sisters of her community recently wrote a charming children’s book, Brides of Christ (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), which invites the reader into the rhythms of their contemplative life through the course of the day and cycle of the year. She talks about this life with me and also the discernment that drew her into it. We also discuss the late Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster who founded their community who drew the attention of the world earlier this year when her exhumed body was miraculously not corrupted four years after death, nor her garments (though the fabric of her coffin was completely rotted away). Finally, we discuss the special charism and Marian consecration of this Benedictine community who emulate the quiet, loving role of the Mother of God in the years between the Ascension of Jesus and her own Assumption, supporting the Early Church. The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles website The new book, Brides of Christ, from Sophia Institute Press Articles about Sr Wilhelmina Lancaster’s uncorrupted remains: in the New York Times, in the Catholic News Agency, and in the Catholic Review.  Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Matisyahu Shulman's Reimagining Repentance: Experiencing the High Holidays Through the Lens of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Kodesh, 2023) is unique in its attempt to bridge Torah content on the High Holidays with modern psychological theory about change. The book reviews the major themes of each part of the High Holidays and explores psychological principles related to each theme. The text contains clinical anecdotes weaved with Torah ideas and will be both a meaningful and enjoyable read for anyone wishing for a psychological perspective on the High Holidays. Excerpts from theoretical sessions with patients seeking help with drug or alcohol use disorders make the book more relatable and highlight the intersection between addiction treatment and Jewish philosophy. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings delighted so many of us as children, yet it and its vast body of accompanying work, such as the Silmarillion, contain a rich depth not well understood by most adults. Tolkien's work reflects his academic interests in the history of language and the Medieval world, as well as his Catholic faith. What purpose and religious message does his writing contain? Does his work carry a political meaning? Here to discuss is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. In addition to her work on the history of Christianity, medieval liturgy, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, she teaches a popular course "Tolkien: Medieval and Modern," and has a series of lectures and writings mining the depths of Tolkien's thought and writing. More on Rachel Fulton Brown here. The syllabus to her course is here. Her lecture series, "The Forge of Tolkien" is here.  Her blog, "Fencing Bear at Prayer" is here.  Dragon Common Room, which contains more lectures and information about creative writing, is here.  Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The statement ‘we live in a secular age’ is open to the obvious challenge that in some parts of the word, religion is a growing force in society. And even in places such as the US, religious activists seem to have growing influence – as the recent US Supreme Court decision about abortion suggests. So, is this actually a secular age? Ryan Cragun is a co-author (with Isabella Kasselstrand and Phil Zuckerman) of Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (NYU Press, 2023) – listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Daoist Cultivation of Qi and Virtue for Life, Wisdom, and Learning (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores Daoist philosophies of qi and virtue through inquiry into their potential as technologies for cultivating good among individuals and society within educational settings, as well as in the modern world. The first part of the book, authored by Jing Lin, examines Daoist cosmology, axiology, and epistemology. She illuminates qi cultivation’s reliance on the accumulation of virtues, leading to transformation of the body and even―extraordinarily―the abilities of Daoist masters to transcend physical limitations to achieve health, longevity, and immortality. The second part of the book, authored by Tom Culham, establishes an understanding of qi and virtue as a technology within the Daoist paradigm, outlining the benefits of its cultivation while illuminating how contemporary Western philosophy and science support this paradigm. Both authors explore new forms of education to incorporate Daoist wisdom in schooling. Bingwan Tian is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo interested in the study of special education and citizenship education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. Divya Cherian: An assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prof. Cherian is a historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. She is the author of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023) (Indian edition: Navayana, 2023), winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I sit down for an in-depth conversation with my good friend, Michael Stanley-Baker, a scholar of Chinese religion and medicine. We talk about Mike’s international childhood and how his family history influenced his intellectual life, his training as a Chinese medical practitioner, and his book co-edited with Vivienne Lo, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2022), which is groundbreaking... and open access! We also talk about Mike’s new book with Manchester University Press, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, which opens up a critical conversation about how we understand Asian medicine. Then, we look ahead to Mike’s digital humanities project, called Polyglot Asian Medicines. Along the way we talk rabbit-ducks and how fish know that they're underwater. I hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Resources mentioned in the episode: Michael Stanley-Baker and Vivienne Lo (eds), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2022). Available open access here.  Michael Stanley-Baker, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations (2023). The Rabbit-Duck (image) Polyglot Asian Medicines project website Polyglot Asian Medicines intro video Mike's publications Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and sing; they offer testimonials of healing, and receive the blessings of encounter from an unlikely deity. Facing this ocean of humanity is a 12-foot billboard Christ, arms outstretched, urging in Hindi: "Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest." At the lectern stands a saffron-clad priest offering teachings punctuated by hallelujahs, met with boisterous echoes. Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on a novel movement of low and no-caste devotees worshipping Jesus in the purported heart of Hindu civilization. Through thick description and analysis, and by attending to devotees and clergy in their own voices, Kerry P. C. San Chirico examines the worldview and ways of life of these Khrist Bhaktas, or devotees of Jesus, along with the Catholic priests and nuns who mediate Jesus, Mary, and other members of the Catholic pantheon in a place hardly associated with Jesus or Christianity. San Chirico places this movement within the context of the devotional history of the Banaras region, the history of Indian Christianity, the rise of low caste and Dalit emancipatory strategies, and the ascendance of Hindu nationalism. Attending to convergences and disparities between devotional Hinduism and charismatic Catholicism, Between Hindu and Christian demonstrates that religious categories are not nearly as distinct as they often seem. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Ravi Gupta and Kenneth Valpey about The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Text and Living Tradition (Columbia UP, 2013) A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora. Introducing the Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts the first multidimensional reading of the entire text. Each essay focuses on a key theme of the Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu theology, performing arts, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns. Also see: The Bhāgavata Purāna: Selected Readings The BhP Research Project The Bhagavata documentary Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For Augustine, the world is replete with meaning; it represents not merely a collection of facts to be catalogued but a repository of truths to be discovered and discerned, a view which contrasts with the one we have inherited as a result of the thought of figures such as Descartes, Newton, and Kant. What difference would it make to see the world as created? In On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2019), Matthew W. Knotts explores this question in close conversation with Augustine, according to whom our nature as God's creatures determines fundamental aspects of our identity and our knowledge. In a postmodern context informed by a renewed appreciation of the limitations of human nature and reason, Augustine once again emerges as an insightful and compelling source for further reflection. Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Creatures like Lilith, the seductive first wife of Adam, and mermaids, who lured sailors to their death, are familiar figures in the genre of monstrous temptresses who use their charms to entice men to their doom. But if we go back 4,000 years, the roots of these demons lie in horrific creatures like Lamashtu, a lion-headed Mesopotamian demon who strangled infants and murdered pregnant women, and Gello, a virgin ghost of ancient Greece who killed expectant mothers and babies out of jealousy. Far from enticing men into danger and destruction, these monsters were part of women's ritual practices surrounding childbirth and pregnancy. So how did their mythology evolve into one focused on the seduction of men? In Women's Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents, and Succubi (Apollo, 2023) Dr. Sarah Clegg takes us on an absorbing and witty journey from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day, encountering a multitude of serpentine succubi, a child-eating wolf-monster of ancient Greece, the Queen of Sheba and a host of vampires. Dr. Clegg shows how these demons were appropriated by male-centred societies, before they were eventually recast as symbols of women's liberation, offering new insights into attitudes towards womanhood, sexuality and women's rights. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hans Van Eyghen's book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge, 2023) assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two arguments in support of the existence of spirits and arguments that experiences of various sorts (perceptions, mediumship, possession, and animistic experiences) can lend justification to spirit-beliefs. Most work in philosophy of religion exclusively deals with the existence of God or the epistemic status of belief in God. Spirit beliefs are often regarded as aberrations, and the falsity of such beliefs is often assumed. This book argues that various beliefs concerning spirits can be regarded as justified when they are rooted in experiences that are not defeated. It argues that spirit-beliefs are not defeated by recent theories put forth by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists or evolutionary biologists. Additional arguments are made that traditional theistic belief is epistemically linked to spirit beliefs and that unusual events can be explained in terms of spirit-activity. The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, ethnography and cognitive neuroscience. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His Ph.D. work is on Indigenous Religion and Christianity among the Nagas of Nagaland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Annie Rachel Royson's book Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness: Cultural Translation in Kristapurana (Routledge, 2023) presents a critical reading of Kristapurāṇa, the first South Asian retelling of the Bible. In 1579, Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), a young Jesuit priest, arrived in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity to the local subjects of the Portuguese colony. Kristapurāṇa (1616), a sweeping narrative with 10,962 verses, is his epic poetic retelling of the Christian Bible in the Marathi language. This fascinating text, which first appeared in Roman script, is also one of the earliest printed works in the subcontinent. Kristapurāṇa translated the entire biblical narrative into Marathi a century before Bible translation into South Asian languages began in earnest in Protestant missions. This book contributes to an understanding of translation as it was practiced in South Asia through its study of genre, landscapes, and cultural translation in Kristapurāṇa, while also retelling a history of sacred texts and biblical narratives in the region. It examines this understudied masterpiece of Christian writing from Goa in the early era of Catholic missions and examines themes such as the complexities of the colonial machinery, religious encounters, textual traditions, and multilingualism, providing insight into Portuguese Goa of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first of its kind, the book makes significant interventions into the current discourse on cultural translation and brings to the fore a hitherto understudied text. It will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation studies, comparative literature, religious studies, biblical studies, English literature, cultural studies, literary history, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience and grace (which includes really listening) to people we disagree with and regard as eccentric. So why not talk it over on Almost Good Catholics? Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio. Kevin Vallier’s personal website. Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled. Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna. “What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar.  Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of "reading" inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman's Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens (Academic Studies Press, 2017) is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In World of Worldly Gods: The Persistence and Transformation of Shamanic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan (Oxford UP, 2023), Kelzang T. Tashi offers the first comprehensive examination of the tenacity of Shamanic Bon practices, as they are lived and contested in the presence of an invalidating force: Buddhism. Through a rich ethnography of Goleng and nearby villages in central Bhutan, Tashi investigates why people, despite shifting contexts, continue to practice and engage with Bon, a religious practice that has survived over a millennium of impatience from a dominant Buddhist ecclesiastical structure. Against the backdrop of long-standing debates around practices unsystematically identified as 'bon', this book reframes the often stale and scholastic debates by providing a clear and succinct statement on how these practices should be conceived in the region. Tashi argues that the reasons for the tenacity of Bon practices and beliefs amid censures by the Buddhist priests are manifold and complex. While a significant reason for the persistence of Bon is the recency of formal Buddhist institutions in Goleng, he demonstrates that Bon beliefs are so deeply embedded in village social life that some Buddhists paradoxically feel it necessary to reach some kind of accommodation with Bon priests. Through an analysis of the relationship between Shamanic Bon and Buddhism, and the contemporary dynamics of Bhutanese society, this book tackles the longstanding concern of anthropology: cultural persistence and change. It discusses the mutual accommodation and attempted amalgamation of Buddhism and Bon, and offers fresh perspectives on the central distinguishing features of Great and Little Traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Father Chris Pietraszko has been thinking about sin and redemption for the last year and a half as he has been writing a series of articles that will become a book. Relying on the Gospel, Catholic Doctrine, Thomas Aquinas, and his experience in the confessional, Father Chris explains the mechanism of sin, how it works in our lives, and how it is to be defeated. He reflects on his experience as a confessor and explains the relationship between the deadly and venial sins. Articles by Father Chris Pietraszko from Missio Dei (including all of the ones about the Seven Deadly Sins) Father Chris at the Kent Lambton Roman Catholic Family of Parishes Many videos with Father Chris for listeners who would like to hear more Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atlantic. In the years prior to the massacre, Americans dubbed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the "Mormon problem" as it garnered national attention for its "unusual" theocracy and practice of polygamy. In the aftermath of the massacre, many Americans viewed Mormonism as a real religious and physical threat to white civilization. Putting the Mormon Church on trial for its crimes against American purity became more important than prosecuting those responsible for the slaughter. In Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture (UNC Press, 2023), religious historian Janiece Johnson analyzes how sensational media attention used the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre to enflame public sentiment and provoke legal action against Latter-day Saints. Ministers, novelists, entertainers, cartoonists, and federal officials followed suit, spreading anti-Mormon sentiment to collectively convict the Mormon religion itself. This troubling episode in American religious history sheds important light on the role of media and popular culture in provoking religious intolerance that continues to resonate in the present. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism―not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship―is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America.  In From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership (Baylor UP, 2022), Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short. Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God. Bingwan Tian is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo interested in the study of special education and citizenship education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jamila Rodrigues's new book Sufi Women, Embodiment and the “Self”: Gender in Islamic Ritual (Routledge 2023) uses her dance and performance studies background to study women’s hadra or zikr experiences of a Naqshbandi Sufi community in Cape Town, South Africa. This ritual includes engagement with sacred texts, music, and bodily movement with the aim of reaching union with Allah. This focused study on women’s bodily movement during zikr and women’s understanding of the mind and soul provides fascinating insights of what constitutes the “self” via ritual and performance studies. Rodrigues also uses auto-ethnography to situate some of this discussion on embodiment. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, Sufi studies scholars, and performance studies scholars. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sharada Sugirtharajah's edited volume Religious and Non-Religious Perspectives on Happiness and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2022) explores the theme of happiness and well-being from religious, spiritual, philosophical, psychological, humanistic, and health perspectives. Taking a non-binary approach, it considers how happiness in particular has been understood and appropriated in religious and non-religious strands of thought. The chapters offer incisive insight from a variety of perspectives, including humanism, atheism and major religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. Together they demonstrate that although worldviews might vary substantially, there are concurrences across religious and non-religious perspectives on happiness that provide a common ground for further cross-cultural and interreligious exploration. What the book makes clear is that happiness is not a static or monolithic category. It is an ongoing process of being and becoming, striving and seeking, living ethically and meaningfully, as well as arriving at a tranquil state of being. This multifaceted volume makes a fresh contribution to the contemporary study of happiness and is valuable reading for scholars and students from religious studies and theology, including those interested in interreligious dialogue and the psychology of religion, as well as positive psychology. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea. The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social ‘backwardness’; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam’s territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam’s resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea. The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries – e.g. secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, etc. – and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and -women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts. Edyta Roszko's Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press, 2021) is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. Jason Weiner's book Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility (Georgetown UP, 2023) is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics.  But this book is not only about applying classical Jewish values to bioethical dilemmas. It seeks to develop an approach that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations and social responsibilities. Jewish values focus on requirements, obligations, and commandments, and has thus sometimes been called an "Ethics of Responsibility," by advancing new relevant approaches that can encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing compassionate care to all, based on these inspiring and timeless values.  Each chapter of this book explores questions such as: "Are we expected to risk our lives on behalf of others?" "When we can only help a limited number of people, how do we prioritize?" "What are the obligations and expectations of a society or government?" "Are issues of cultural sensitivity relevant in how we discharge our obligations to others?" "What should we do when obligations for others violate our own moral principles or commitments?" "Are there limits to how far one can be expected to go for others?" These and other issues are addressed in this book, as it attempts to describe a meaningful and compassionate Jewish bioethic of responsibility for our times. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Pentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He began by spending two weeks living in a Brazilian prison as if he were an inmate: sleeping in the same cells as the inmates, eating the same food, and participating in the men's daily routines as if he were incarcerated. And he returned many times afterward to observe prison churches' worship services, which were led by inmates who had been voted into positions of leadership by their fellow prisoners. He accompanied Pentecostal volunteers when they visited cells that were controlled by Rio's most dominant criminal gang to lead worship services, provide health care, and deliver other social services to the inmates.  Why does this faith resonate so profoundly with the incarcerated? Pentecostalism, argues Johnson, is the "faith of the killable people" and offers ex-criminals and gang members the opportunity to positively reinvent their public personas. If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford UP, 2017) provides a deeply personal look at the relationship between the margins of Brazilian society and the Pentecostal faith, both behind bars and in the favelas, Rio de Janeiro's peripheral neighborhoods. Based on his intimate relationships with the figures in this book, Johnson makes a passionate case that Pentecostal practice behind bars is an act of political radicalism as much as a spiritual experience. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen. Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG)) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). Her work has appeared recently in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feminist Anthropology, and Transforming Anthropology. She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religious Dispatches, and the Conversation among others. She is a senior fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and a fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and a board member for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Joseph Gaines can be reached at jgaines1091@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2022) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists' religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of 'conflict' and 'complementarity'. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificial intelligence when computers are doing more and more work for us, and we humans—like miniature Gods—can make up new simulated realities and even identities for ourselves. There’s a word for when people worship the things they create: idolatry. Looking to the Bible (from the Garden of Eden, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and the Golden Calf) and literature (from Homer, Plato, and Hesiod, all the way to Milton), Professor Howland and I talk about where we are, and where we might be headed. Jacob Howland’s website and his faculty pages at the University of Tulsa and the University of Austin Jacob Howland’s article, “AI is a False Prophet: Our enslavement to idolatry will end in disaster.” (Unherd, April 2023) Jacob Howland’s article, “AI has always plagued mankind: Technological arrogance brought about our Fall.” (Unherd, July 2023) Jacob Howland’s article, “Henry Adams and the Crisis of Education: How the famed historian foresaw our civilizational predicament” (City Journal, July 2023) Jacob Howland and Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast (June 2023) Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism (Pickwick, 2023)., a wide range of scholars write on the question of the promises of God to Israel. These essays put forward the position that unconditional promises were given to Israel, which have not been fulfilled in the church or any other entity. At the consummation, there will be a continuing role for the Jewish people, realized through their national and territorial hope of a restored-redeemed Israel.  Join us as we speak with one of the contributors, Michael Brown, about The Future Restoration of Israel. Michael L. Brown holds a PhD in Near Eastern studies from New York University. He's written a variety of books, including Our Hands Are Stained With Blood, Job: The Faith To Challenge God, and Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus. He has a nationally syndicated radio show, The Line of Fire, and hosts the YouTube channel AskDrBrown. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The persistence of religion in modern Europe and the challenges of transitioning from a religious to a secular state has all too often been overlooked in the history of the Balkans. Indeed, the link between religion and nationalism in this region has long been considered natural, even historically inevitable. Religion and Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia: Serbian Nationalism and East Orthodox Christianity (Bloombury, 2023) challenges this assumption and shows that, in actuality, the region's political and spiritual identities clashed in a fashion that was just as important to the first South Slav state as the much vaunted 'national question' itself.  Focusing on the interwar era, Religion and Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia explores the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Yugoslavia. It examines the church's political vision and reveals how the Serbian Orthodox Church emerged both in reaction to and in interaction with the challenges posed by political modernity such as the establishment of the multinational Yugoslav state, the fear of secularization, and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe. Synthesizing analyses of ideologies and public discourses with stories of personal histories and individual agendas, Maria Falina's insightful study is therefore a significant contribution to the history of religion and nationalism in the Balkans. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (William B. Eerdmans, 2023), Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe end-times theory, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination. Hummel locates dispensationalism’s origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the movement, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal—visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories. Measured and irenic, Hummel objectively evaluates evangelicalism’s most resilient and contentious popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion. Daniel G. Hummel is a historian of US religion and the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. He is Director of University Enagagement at Upper House, a Christian study center serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil. Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agents were women. In Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France (Baylor UP, 2022), Michèle Sigg sheds light on the seminal role French Protestant women played in launching and sustaining this movement of revival and mission. Out of the concerted efforts of these women arose a holistic mission strategy encompassing the home front and the foreign field. Parisian women, led by Émilie Mallet, established schools to provide infants with food, safety, and religious education. Mallet and her friend Albertine de Broglie led the women’s auxiliary of the Paris Bible Society to design and carry out a strategy for large-scale Bible distribution and fundraising. In 1825 de Broglie pioneered the women’s committee of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, which used the Bible Society model to promote international missions across their many networks. In meetings, publications, and reports to the annual General Assembly, the women reflected on their calling in the work of mission and fully embraced their identity as "true missionaries." The success of women teachers and their presence as wives and mothers in the Lesotho Mission—exemplified by pioneering missionary wife Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland—proved that married couples serving together as models of Christian living were essential in opening the doors to missionary work in Africa. The story, and these women’s legacies, does not end in the field, however. Sigg demonstrates how the educational work of the missionary wives and their publications that shared good news of growing faith in Lesotho sparked local revivals in France. When the enthusiasm of the Réveil waned in the metropole and divisions mounted among Protestants, a movement of deaconesses emerged to renew the faith of French Protestants. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and the history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia and Protestant missions. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion, church-state relations, and politics of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When meeting an expatriate friend on my first trip to Dubai, the host at the restaurant where we were meeting quickly ushered me up to the second floor. For foreigners, he said—before handing me a wine list. Dubai’s tolerance of alcohol is a more formalized version of Muslim tolerance—and clandestine drinking—of alcohol that dates back to its very inception, despite religious commands to the contrary. Professor Rudi Matthee tells that story in Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press / Hurst, 2023). In this interview, Rudi and I chat about alcohol in the Islamic world: who drank it—and how they excused their behavior—and how non-Muslims ended up being a part of the Muslim drinking world. Rudi Matthee is the John A. Munroe and Dorothy L. Munroe Chair of History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of four prize-winning monographs on Iranian history, and the editor or co-editor of another six books. He is currently President of the Persian Heritage Foundation. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael Baltutis' book The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance (SUNY Press, 2023) details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources--especially the epic Mahābhārata--the book highlights the innovative ways that this annual public festival has supported the stable royal power responsible for the sponsorship of these texts. More than just a textual project, however, the book devotes significant ethnographic attention to the only contemporary performance of this festival that adheres to the classical Sanskrit record: the Indrajatra of Kathmandu, Nepal. Here, Indra's tall pole remains the festival's focal point, though its addition of the royal blessing by Kumari, the "living goddess" of Nepal, and the regular presence of the fierce god Bhairav show several significant ways that ritual agents have re-constructed this festival over the past two thousand years. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Can we know what there is not?  Zhihua Yao's Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy: On Knowing What There is Not (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the historical development of the concept of the cognition of nonexistent objects in several major Buddhist philosophical schools. Beginning with a study of the historical development of the concept in Mahasamghika, Darstantika, Yogacara and Sautrantika, it evaluates how successfully they have argued against the extreme view of their main opponent the Sarvastivadins and established their view that one can know what there is not. It also includes thematic studies on the epistemological issues of nonexistence, discussing making sense of empty terms, controversies over negative judgments, and a proper classification of the conceptions of nothing or nonexistence. Taking a comparative approach to these topics, this book considers contemporary Western philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Meinong and Russell alongside representative figures of the Buddhist Pramana School. Based on first-hand study of primary sources in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan, Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy makes available the rich discussions and debates on the epistemological issues of nonexistence in Buddhist philosophy to students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy. Check out Prof. Yao Zhihua's recent publications here! Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale University Press, 2022), Yonatan Adler pursues the societal adoption of recognizable Jewish practices by Judeans in antiquity with the ultimate aim of establishing a particular terminus ante quem (temporal limit before which) these practices must have become widespread. Sifting through both textual and archaeological evidence for the aversion to graven images/figural artwork, dietary restrictions, synagogue worship, circumcision, the Sabbath as a day of rest, Judean festivals, and more, Adler’s “social history” demonstrates that such observances can be conclusively dated at various points within the second century BCE—but not on any meaningful scale before this crucial time of the Maccabean revolt and Israel’s brief period of Hasmonean self-rule. Adler joined the New Books Network to discuss his potentially paradigm-shifting findings, which contrast strongly with claims from the Hebrew Bible and much of biblical scholarship that, on the basis of “intellectual history,” prefer to locate Jewish origins in the postexilic Persian Achaemenid period (ca. 539–332 BCE) if not significantly earlier than this. Yonatan Adler (Ph.D., Bar-Ilan University, 2011) is Associate Professor in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel, where he also heads its Institute of Archaeology. Adler specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. Previously, his research has focused on ritual purity observance evidenced in the archaeological remains of chalk vessels and immersion pools, and he has also published extensively on ancient tefillin (phylacteries) from Qumran and elsewhere in the Judean Desert. Dr. Adler has directed excavations at several sites throughout Israel, and from 2019 to 2020 he held the appointment of Horace W. Goldsmith Visiting Associate Professor in Judaic Studies at Yale University. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Joseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the LDS Church, including the post of president from 1901 until his death in 1918. Joseph F. Smith laid the theological groundwork for modern Mormonism, especially the emphasis on temple work. This contribution was capped off by his "revelation on the redemption of the dead," a prophetic glimpse into the afterlife. Taysom's book traces the roots of this vision, which reach far more deeply into Joseph F. Smith's life than other scholars have previously identified. In Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith (U of Utah Press, 2023), Stephen C. Taysom uses previously unavailable primary source materials to craft a deeply detailed, insightful story of a prominent member of a governing and influential Mormon family. Importantly, Taysom situates Smith within the historical currents of American westward expansion, rapid industrialization, settler colonialism, regional and national politics, changing ideas about family and masculinity, and more. Though some writers tend to view the LDS Church and its leaders through a lens of political and religious separatism, Taysom does the opposite, pushing Joseph F. Smith and the LDS Church closer to the centers of power in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (New York University Press, 2023), Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel's steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state. Lea Taragin-Zeller is Assistant Professor in the Federmann School of Public Policy and Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge UP, 2022), Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'ḥjāb - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously. Erin Pettigrew is an associate professor of History and Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of Africa specializing in West African colonial and postcolonial history with a focus on Muslim societies. Her research has focused on the cultural history of Islam, slavery, race, gender, and nation in what she calls "the Saharan West," or what is today primarily the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Yamin Levy's The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition (MHC Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking book that delves into the mystical tradition of Andalusia and specifically of Maimonides. Unlike Kabalah and the European mystical traditions, Andalusian mysticism is rooted in clear Halakhic and philosophical principles devoid of superstition and magic. This book examines Maimonides works which serve as a guide for those interested in pursuing mystical union with G-d. Topics such as prophecy, love and awe of G-d, silent meditation, the role of prophets, and the spiritual aspects of Jewish rituals are all explored in this book. The Mysticism of Andalusia offers a refreshing perspective and path forward for all who desire deep spiritual fulfillment without the rejection of the mind and self. Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a psychology research and clinical assistant. He is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, and is involved in a wide array of initiatives and studies from legal philosophy, Jewish programming, and psychology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ecclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." As part of a search for enduring meaning, it questions the nature of work, mortality, happiness, justice, goodness, and life itself. Abounding with careful observations, disappointments, and insights, Ecclesiastes is one of the richest and most complex books in all of Tanakh.  Join us as we speak with Erica Brown, whose commentary offers a fresh and hopeful look at this ancient book, as she synthesizes rabbinic commentary with modern scholarship, fine art, and poetry.  Dr. Erica Brown is the Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and the founding director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks–Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ruth, a princess of Moab, leaves her homeland after suffering terrible losses to become the mother of the royal house of Israel. Now, in a revolutionary reading of this immortal tale, Moshe Miller provides an entirely new perspective on this beloved story. Beneath the simple surface of this story, the Sages trace a web of primal issues, including the Serpent in the Garden of Eden; the jealousy of Cain; the painful break between Abraham and Lot; and the mystery that is the mitzvah of yibum. The fiber that binds together all these issues is love. Love is the key to this story, which culminates in the unique love of Ruth and Boaz, and the ancestors of the once and future king, David, whose very name means love!  Join us as we speak with Moshe Miller about his book, Rising Moon: Unraveling the Book of Ruth (Kodesh Press, 2022). Moshe Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Ner Yisrael and holds a master's degree in philosophy from Brown University. He has been an educator for nearly fifty years and immigrated to Israel in 2010. He lives in Jerusalem, where he continues to teach and write. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape? The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2023) offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as “Nisei,” Japanese for “second-generation”-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace. The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible. Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Similar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku.  Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he is also the Chair of Taiwan studies. Truly Human is the result of nearly two decades of field research and interactions among the Sediq and Truku; the book provides a deep yet accessible dive into matters such as hunting practices, belief systems, electoral politics, historical narratives, and how Taiwan's geopolitical status may affect the island's indigenous communities.  As Taiwan becomes ever-more-prominent in international headlines, Truly Human helps readers draw parallels with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, and learn about a dimension of Taiwanese and Austronesian society that often gets lost in discussions centered on conflict. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity. Drawing on Deleuzian, Foucauldian, and new materialist theories, Miranda Corcoran charts a new feminist history from 1940s bobbysoxer to today, untangling strands of embodiments, agency, and violence. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ankur Barua's book Exploring Hindu Philosophy (Equinox Publishing, 2023) points to some of the diverse tapestries of Hindu worldviews where scriptural revelation, logical argumentation, embodied affectivity, moral reasoning, and aesthetic cultivation constitute densely interwoven conceptual threads. It begins with an exploration of some classical iterations of the quest for a fundamental ontology amidst the diversities of the everyday world. This quest is often embedded in both a diagnosis of the human condition as structured by suffering and a therapy for recovery from worldly fragmentation.  A crucial aspect of this therapeutic structure is the analysis of the means of knowledge and the categories of reality, since in order to know the nature of the world one must proceed along truth-tracking routes. Such dynamic mind-world encounters are mediated through language, and Hindu philosophical texts extensively discuss the motif of whether or not deep reality can be comprehended through linguistic structures. These philosophical exercises also shape reflections on themes such as aesthetics, social organization, the meaning of life, and so on. As Hinduism increasingly migrates to western locations through practices of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness, and along with sensibilities relating to vegetarianism, ecology, and pacifism, we encounter multiple translations of these classical motifs relating to the self, language, and consciousness. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text.  But in The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge. Dr. Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life. The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Daniel Boyarin's new book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023) is a provocative anti-Zionist manifesto pleading for a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood and sketching an alternative vision for a Jewish future beyond the nation-state: the Diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the "nation" and the "state," only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.  Professor emeritus of Talmudic culture at the University of California, Berkeley, Daniel Boyarin has been one of the most influential and paradigm-shifting scholars in Jewish Studies generally and of rabbinic culture and the study of Judaism and Christianity specifically. His publications include Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity (1999), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003), A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (2015) and Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (2018). Miriam Chorley-Schulz (neé Schulz) holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon. Miriam is the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present and the author of the award-winning monograph Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Daniel J. Soars and Nadya Pohran's book Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) focuses on dual belonging within Hindu-Christian contexts. Written by experts in a variety of fields, the chapters explore the theological, philosophical, and cultural anthropological debates relating to religious pluralism, religious language, and social identity while addressing the fact that both Hindu and Christian forms of self-understandings have been significantly moulded through their interactions in South Asia and across certain Euro-American horizons. The limits of the definition of dual belonging are tested via case studies, and contributors address the question of whether there is anything distinctive about dual belonging across Christianity and Hinduism specifically. A timely contribution to the emerging subject of dual religious belonging, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Hindu studies and Christian theology, Hindu-Christian comparative theology, religious pluralism, interreligious relations, the sociology and anthropology of religion, and comparative theology and philosophy. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Professor David Tavárez, historian and linguistic anthropologist, is Professor of Anthropology and at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. This Dr. Tavárez’s third time on the New Books Network. He spoken twice in 2020 about his earlier work: his 2011 book The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (from Stanford University Press), and his 2017 edited volume Words & Worlds Turned Around (from UP of Colorado). His new book, published last year (2022, University of Texas Press), is Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico builds on his earlier work and is a magisterial and profound discussion of Zapotec ideas of cosmology and time, and how indigenous communities maintained and integrated their pre-Columbian beliefs, the quela li, or true custom, into the Colonial Spanish World and the Catholic Christian Faith. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. His dissertation on diplomacy and travel in the early sixteenth century is a forthcoming book from Brepols Press. He is also the host of the Almost Good Catholics podcast, part of New Books Network Academic Partners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate (Fortress Press, 2022) is Eric Vanden Eykel’s second monograph overall and his first geared at a popular, non-scholarly audience. However, even scholars will find much to appreciate and more than a few narrative surprises from this thorough account of the Magi (often translated in English Bibles as “wise men” or “astrologers”), for it succeeds as an excellent recent example of uncompromising, but accessible, public-facing biblical scholarship. The author plumbs beyond basic exegesis of Matthew 2:1–12 to examine apocryphal texts, patristic treatises, and more recent tendential literature demonstrating how, despite palpable political undertones in the evangelist’s intentions to signify Jesus as the rightfully born “King of the Judeans,” the journey of the Magi has served as fertile storytelling fodder for Christians down the centuries, earning them names, royal backstories, sainthood, and perennial reverence for their recognition of Jesus’s nativity. Vanden Eykel joined the New Books Network to discuss all these topics and more from his attempt to unravel the mysteries of the Magi. Eric Vanden Eykel (Ph.D., Marquette University, 2014) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Forrest S. Williams Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Ferrum College in Virginia. Dr. Vanden Eykel’s primary area of research is early Christian apocryphal literature, with a special focus on texts and traditions about the infancies and childhoods of Jesus and his mother, Mary. He has previously authored “But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James (T&T Clark, 2016) and co-edited Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lexington Books, 2022). In his free time, he enjoys making beer, running, and woodworking. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The church has too often lost its way in reading the Old Testament for lack of sound principles of interpretation. When careless habits get us off track, we can lose sight of what the Bible is really saying, derailing our own spiritual growth and even risking discredit to God’s word. We need a consistent approach to give us confidence as faithful interpreters. In Wisdom for Faithful Reading: Principles and Practices for Old Testament Interpretation (InterVarsity Press, 2023), the trusted Old Testament scholar John Walton lays out his tried-and-true best practices developed over four decades in the classroom. His principles are memorable, practical, and enlightening, including: The Bible is written for us, but not to us. Reading the Bible instinctively is not reliable and risks imposing a foreign perspective on the text. More important than what the characters do is what the narrator does with the characters and what God is doing through the characters. Not everything has a "biblical view." Along with identifying common missteps, Walton's insights point the way to stay focused on what the Old Testament text communicated to its original audience—and what it has to say for us today. When we submit ourselves to be accountable to the authors' intentions we experience the true authority of Scripture, and faithful reading fuels a faithful life. Using numerous examples across the breadth of the Old Testament and its genres, Walton equips thoughtful Christians to read more knowledgeably, to pay attention to God’s plans and purposes, to recognize good interpretations, and to truly live in light of Scripture. You may never read the Old Testament the same way again. John H. Walton is professor of Old Testament, emeritus, at Wheaton College and Graduate School. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Building on the success of Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés, this follow up volume dismantles a further 10 widespread stereotypes and clichés about religion, focusing on clichés that a new generation of students are most familiar with. Each chapter includes: A description of a particular cliché; Discussion of where it appears in popular culture or popular media; Discussion of where it appears in scholarly literature; A historical contextualization of its use in the past; An analysis of the social or rhetorical work the cliché accomplishes in the present. Clichés addressed include: "Religion and science naturally conflict", "All religions are against LGBTQ rights", "Eastern religions are more spiritual than Western religions", "Religion is personal and not subject to government regulation", "Religious pluralism gives everyone a voice", etc. Written in an easy and accessible style, Stereotyping Religion II: Critiquing Clichés is suitable for all readers looking to clear away unsophisticated assumptions in preparation for more critical studies. Brad Stoddard is Associate Professor in the History and Art History Department at McDaniel College, Westminster, MD. He researches religion in the United States. He is the author of Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida's Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State (2021) and has edited or coedited several books. He is currently researching the topic of entheogens.  Craig Martin is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY. His research interests include method and theory in the study of religion, discourse analysis and ideology critique, and poststructuralism. His books include A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (2017) and Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture (2022). He edits a book series with Bloomsbury titled Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

We close Pride Month of 2023 with Jamie Staples talking about queer mysticism. This includes instances in medieval Christianity where an embodied and erotic experience of life, within and between persons, became the basis for an apprehension of divinity. The conversation particularly focuses on the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross and the work of 14th-15th century English mystic Margery Kempe. Jamie shares his own story to show how queer mysticism can offer resources from within Christianity to build a personal and communitarian politics against fundamentalist discrimination and hatred. Starting this fall, Jamie Staples will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval English literature at Trinity College in Hartford. His research takes seriously the productive intersection of mystical theology and poetry in the development of alternative modes of critical thinking in the late Middle Ages. He's recently written two articles focused more specifically on the queer mysticism that he will be discussing today, one on the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, published in Romanic Review, and the other on the fourteenth-century poem Cleanness, published in Exemplaria. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,” Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity “secretes” atheism “more than any other religion,” however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze’s atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam’s historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze’s model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable “lines of flight.” A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal “Islamic theology” that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of “orthodoxy.” The discussions in Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism (Fordham UP, 2023) thus highlight Islam’s extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur’an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular “mainstream” interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze’s vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What do we do when God is silent? This question was asked by the ancient Jewish people during their darkest era, the seventh century BCE. Assyrian armies had ransacked, looted, and burned their once-beautiful land--destroying or exiling much of the populace, leaving behind scarred and traumatized inhabitants under a tyrant's rule. In this environment, violence and idolatry flourished. The prophets were silenced and the Torah nearly forgotten, threatening the survival of God's people. Into this spiritual vacuum, three new voices arose: Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, who are some of the most unfamiliar prophets within the Book of the Twelve. What were their historical contexts, and what is the main divine message communicated by each?  Drawing from the best of traditional and contemporary scholarship, master teacher Rabbi Yaakov Beasley shows us why these prophets are as relevant today as they were to the Jews of Judah so many centuries ago. Join us as we speak with Yaakov Beasley about his recent commentary on these prophets, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: Lights in the Valley (Maggid, 2020). Rabbi Yaakov Beasley is a popular and passionate educator, lecturer, and writer on the Bible in North America and Israel. He studied at Yeshiva University and Herzog College, and holds an MA with, and is a doctoral candidate at, Bar Ilan University. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Into the Mirror: A Buddhist Journey through Mind, Matter, and the Nature of Reality (Shambhala, 2023) examines the materialism of the modern world through the profound teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and offers an accessible and powerful method for investigating the way our minds construct our worlds. Into the Mirror combines contemporary Western inquiries into the nature of consciousness, with classical Buddhist investigations into the nature of mind, to offer deep insights into the nature of reality. Andy Karr invites the reader to make this a personal, experiential journey through study, contemplation, and meditation.  The first part of the book presents the Mahayana Buddhist approach to the path of freedom from suffering. It explores foundational teachings, such as the four truths, the notion of enlightenment, and the practice of meditation, from a fresh perspective. The second part deconstructs assumptions about mind and the material world using easily understood tools from contemporary Western philosophy. Part three presents a series of contemplative practices, ethics, and insights, starting with the Middle Way teachings on emptiness and interdependence, through Yogachara’s subtle understanding of non-duality, to the view that buddha nature is already within us to be revealed rather than something external to be acquired. Into the Mirror concludes with a call to cultivate compassion for beings and the environment right within this world of illusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfound openness regarding the topic among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Both the theological trajectory and the historical circumstances of the Orthodox Church differ radically from those of other Christian denominations that have already developed robust and creative reflections on sexuality and sexual diversity. Within its unique history, theology, and tradition, Orthodox Christianity holds rich resources for engaging challenging questions of sexuality in new and responsive ways. What is at stake in questions of sexuality in the Orthodox tradition? What sources and theological convictions can uniquely shape Orthodox understandings of sexuality? Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Fordham UP, 2022) aims to create an agora for discussing sex, and not least the sexualities that are often thought of as untraditional in Orthodox contexts. Through fifteen distinct chapters, written by leading scholars and theologians, this book offers a developed treatment of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world by approaching the subject from scriptural, patristic, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives. Chapters devoted to practical and pastoral insights, as well as reflections on specific cultural contexts, engage the human realities of sexual diversity and Christian life. From re-thinking scripture to developing theologies of sex, from eschatological views of eros to re-evaluations of the Orthodox responses to science, this book offers new thinking on pressing, present-day issues and initiates conversations about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity. Dr. Thomas Arentzen is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at the University of Uppsala. Dr. Ashley Purpura is director of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program and Associate Professor of Religious Studies Purdue University. Dr. Aristotle Papanikolau is Professor of Theology and Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture and Co-Director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ever since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine—nearly always men—have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence—civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions—they have much to teach us. In Accidental Gods: On Race, Empire, and Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (Metropolitan Books, 2021), Anna Della Subin presents a revelatory history spanning five centuries of a cast of surprising deities that help to shed light on the thorny questions of how our modern concept of "religion" was invented, why religion and politics are perpetually entangled in our supposedly secular age, and how the power to call someone divine has been used and abused by both oppressors and the oppressed. From nationalist uprisings in India to Nigerian spirit possession cults, Subin explores how deification has been a means of defiance for colonized peoples. Conversely, we see how Columbus, Cortés, and other white explorers amplified stories of their godhood to justify their dominion over native peoples, setting into motion the currents of racism and exclusion that have plagued the New World ever since they touched its shores. Anna Della Subin is a writer, critic, senior editor at Bidoun, the award-winning publishing and curatorial initiative focused on the Middle East and its diasporas, and a contributing editor at The Public Domain Review. Her work has appeared in many prestigious publications such as the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and more. Anna Della was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2022 by Prospect Magazine. She studied philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago and the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Absorbing the full reality of climate change will require more than a scientific approach. Some American Jews are showing how religious ritual can help us metabolize catastrophic grief while also pointing towards a future rebirth. Guests: -Jennie Rosenn, Founder & CEO of Dayenu -Andrue Kahn, Central Synagogue -Malkah Binah Klein, Community leader This episode was produced by Liya Rechtman. Zachary Davis is the host of Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large and the Editor-in-Chief of Radiant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to modern audiences. Based on extensive fieldwork, Lars de Wildt's book The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion (Amsterdam UP, 2023) argues that developers of videogames and their players engage in a ‘Pop Theology’ through which laymen reconsider traditional questions of religion by playing with them. Games allow us to play with religious questions and identities in the same way that children play at being a soldier, or choose to ‘play house.’ This requires a radical rethinking of religious questions as no longer just questions of belief or disbelief; but as truths to be tried on, compared, and discarded at will. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. Although Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism, members of minority religious communities embraced Baptist teachings and practices, reimagining both Buddhism and Christianity in the process. In her new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia UP, 2023), religious studies scholar Alex Kaloyanides explores this history of power and conversion through the lens of sacred objects. Previously Tricycle’s managing editor, Kaloyanides now serves as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Kaloyanides to discuss the religious material culture of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religions solely through their texts, and how her research has shaped how she thinks about religious conflict today. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new contribution to the Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair introduces readers to a tradition often ignored by contemporary philosophers. While simultaneously arguing for the fecundity of Sikh categories and concepts from a philosophical vantage point, Mandair scrutinizes the characterization of Sikh ideas as unified -ism, also problematizing the philosophy/religion divide. And, at the same time as he tracks the historical and intellectual development of Sikh philosophy, examining the reasons for its marginalization, he introduces readers to the main contours of its epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind, and ethics, in particular bioethics. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known by his Hebrew acronym, Shadal, was the leading Italian Jewish scholar of the 19th century. Now, for the first time, an all-English version of Shadal's text translation and unabridged commentary of the book of Numbers, Bemidbar, is available through Kodesh Press. Luzzatto's work was translated and edited by Daniel A. Klein, who also offers copious explanatory notes as well as two appendices, offering translations of Shadal's poetry and letters. Tune in as we speak with Daniel Klein about his recent publication, Shadal on Numbers: Samuel David Luzzatto's Interpretation of the Book of Bemidbar (2023). Daniel A. Klein is an attorney and legal writer, and a graduate of Yeshiva University and New York University School of Law. His study of Italian as a youthful hobby led to a fascination with Italian Jewish culture and, in particular, the works of Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto).He and his wife live in Rochester, New York, where he has taught Judaic studies at elementary, high school, and adult levels. Through Kodesh Press, Daniel has also translated Shadal's commentaries on Genesis (2019), Exodus (2015), and Leviticus (2020). Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023) challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith. Orit Avishai is an ethnographer at Fordham University, where she teaches in the Sociology Department and in the Program on Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work considers how ideology and culture, broadly defined, shape social institutions, identities, political dialogue, and cultural practices. Her recent public-facing writing has appeared in The Conversation, The Katz Center Blog, and Religion Dispatches. Dr. Avishai has degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, the Yale Law School, and Tel Aviv University Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Lloyd Daniel Barba's book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford UP, 2022) traces the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. At the time, Pentecostalism was often seen as a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought of Mexicans as no more than a mere workforce not fit for citizenship; and industrial agriculture was celebrated for feeding American families while its exploitation of workers went largely ignored. Farmworkers were made out to be culturally vacuous and lacking creative genius, simple laborers caught in a vertiginous cycle of migrant work. This book argues that farmworkers from La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús carved out a robust socio-religious existence despite these conditions, and in doing so produced a vast record of cultural vibrancy. Examining racialized portrayals of Mexican workers and their religious lives through images created by farmworkers themselves, Sowing the Sacred draws on oral histories, photographs, and materials from new archival collections to tell an intimate story of sacred-space making. In showing how these workers mapped out churches, performed outdoor baptisms in grower-controlled waterways, and built and maintained houses of worship in the fields, this book considers the role that historical memory plays in telling these stories. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten until British colonial scholars re-discovered it in the early 1800s. Its full-fledged revival, so the story goes, only occurred in 1956, when the Indian civil rights pioneer Dr. B. R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his Dalit (formerly "untouchable") followers.  This, however, is only part of the story. Dust on the Throne reframes discussions about the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent from the early nineteenth century onwards, uncovering the integral, yet unacknowledged, role that Indians played in the making of modern global Buddhism in the century prior to Ambedkar's conversion, and the numerous ways that Buddhism gave powerful shape to modern Indian history. Through an extensive examination of disparate materials held at archives and temples across South Asia, Douglas Ober explores Buddhist religious dynamics in an age of expanding colonial empires, intra-Asian connectivity, and the histories of Buddhism produced by nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian thinkers. While Buddhism in contemporary India is often disparaged as being little more than tattered manuscripts and crumbling ruins, this book opens new avenues for understanding its substantial socio-political impact and intellectual legacy. You can find the Navayana Publishing edition with its amazing cover art here. You can find readable articles and references on more recent research on Bengli-speaking Buddhists and their contribution to modern Indian Buddhism by Sanjoy Chawdhury here. Douglas Ober is Visiting Assistant Professor, History Department, Fort Lewis College, and Honorary Research Associate, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2022) lays bare the causal mechanisms that lead state and non-state actors to identify particular ethnoreligious groups as threats to security, power, and status. It focuses on the cases of Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines to demonstrate how ethnoreligious others are transformed from strangers to enemies through passions, nationalism, and securitization. Advancing a novel ethnoreligious othering framework, the book offers a distinctive approach to understanding protracted conflict beyond dominant paradigms in international relations and conflict studies. In this interview, author Michael Magcamit shares the book’s back story, his ethical principles when doing field research in emotionally-charged and securitised sites, and the policy implications of his research. Michael Magcamit is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Politics at the University of Manchester. Before joining Manchester in August 2023, Michael was a Lecturer in Security Studies at the University of Leicester (2021-2023), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (2019-2021), and an assistant professor of Political Science at Musashi University (2016-2019). His research has been published in the International Studies Quarterly, International Politics, Political Science, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, among others. He is the author of Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Small Powers and Trading Security (Palgrave/Springer, 2016). To read the book, click the open access version here. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan, Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945 (Routledge 2021) Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii, Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford University Press 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new book, Down Deep in My Soul: An African American Catholic Theology of Preaching (Orbis Books, 2023), Father Maurice Nutt, a doctor of preaching from the Aquinas Institute of Theology and a Redemptorist priest, teaches us about African American oratorical and homiletic tradition and shows how it can enrich preaching in every church. This is a discussion about history, cultural anthropology, and the Roman Catholic Church. As always, we ask how we got here and where do we go next. I also ask Father Maurice to respond to Pope Francis’s recommendation that homilies should be kept under ten minutes. Finally, Father Maurice gives guidance that will benefit all preachers—and, in fact, all public speakers. Father Maurice’s webpage Father Maurice’s book, Deep Down in My Soul (Orbis, 2023) Father Maurice’s spiritual direction ministry Father Maurice on Almost Good Catholics, episode 21: We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred (Lever Press, 2023) by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge.  To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement. Democratic Criticism encourages Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging the Muslim readers to read representations of the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding. It will be a helpful tool in creating reading practices that allow both teachers and students of literature to transcend their mode of reading as universal and to read from the perspective of the Other, and allow readers to engage meaningfully with these texts. Students and scholars of world literature, history, and religious studies will find this book insightful and valuable. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, Anglophone literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow them on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Two new books on secularism and atheism in German and Soviet socialist cultures are reshaping scholarly understandings of the relationship between socialism and religion. Todd Weir and Victoria Smolkin show that socialist secularism and atheism were not concerned solely with destroying a tool of class oppression, as Marx had envisioned, but with creating a positive faith in science and materialism. Todd Weir is Professor on the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen and the author of the forthcoming Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany, 1800-1933. Victoria Smolkin is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wesleyan University and the author of A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018). Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tim Staples is Director of Apologetics and Evangelization at Catholic Answers. His piece, “What Happens in Purgatory?” is the most read article on the entire website. I ask him to explain what the Catholic Church says (and doesn’t say) about purgatory. How does purgatory work? ...and how about heaven and hell? How should we think about these ‘places’ and about eternity? Tim Staple’s profile in Catholic Answers Tim Staples’s article, “What Happens in Purgatory?,” in Catholic Answers, July 8, 2021. What the Catechism teaches on the subject of purgatory (CCC #1030 – 1032) 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent--as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants--from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice--with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm -- when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century terms, how does mind connect to body? These questions drive Loriliai Biernacki's The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism (Oxford UP, 2023), Biernacki draws on Abhinavagupta's thought--and particularly his yet-untranslated, philosophical magnum opus, the Isvara Pratyabhijña Vivrti Vimarsini--to think through contemporary issues such as the looming prospect of machine AI, ideas about information, and our ecological crises. She argues that Abhinavagupta's panentheism can help us understand our current world and can contribute to a New Materialist re-envisioning of the relationship that humans have with matter. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The third quest for the historical Jesus has reached an impasse. But a fourth quest is underway--one that draws from a heretofore largely neglected source: John's Gospel. In Jesus the Purifier: John's Gospel and the Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus (Baker Academic, 2023), renowned New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg advances the idea that John is a viable and valuable source for studying the historical Jesus. The data from John should be integrated with that of the Synoptics, which will yield additional insights into Jesus's emphases and ministry. Blomberg begins by reviewing the first three quests, reassessing both their contributions and their shortcomings. He then discusses the emerging consensus regarding demonstrably historical portions of John, which are more numerous than usually assumed. Peeling back the layers, we discover in Jesus's ministry an emphasis on purity and purification. The Synoptics corroborate this discovery, specifically in Jesus's meals with sinners. Blomberg then explores the practical and contemporary applications of Jesus the purifier, including the "contagious holiness" that Jesus's followers can spread to others. Craig Blomberg is distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Denver Seminary in Littleton, Colorado, where he has taught for more than thirty years. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hindus and Christians have a long history of interaction on the Indian subcontinent. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, with the increased possibilities for immigration, Hindus and Christians live side by side in many parts of the Western world and there are growing numbers of Hindu-Christian marriages and families. In North America, for example, the population of Hindus is approaching three million. Hindu students are attending many colleges with a Christian history and ideals. To avoid the dangers of these communities sharing geographical space but not understanding each other, Pathways to Hindu-Christian Dialogue (Augsburg Fortress, 2022) offers dialogue that fosters mutual understanding, respect, and learning in both communities. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies is holding a Day School on "How Do We Know What We Know?" Today I talked to Gavin Flood bout the day school, discusses how he began his scholarly journey, and what he's working on now. Gavin Flood is a Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Acclaimed cultural critic Curtis White examines current fissures in Western Buddhism and argues against the growth of scientific and corporate dharma, particularly in the Secular Buddhist movement. Most of his career has been spent writing experimental fiction, but he turned to writing books of social criticism, the latest of which is Transcendent, Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse (Melville House, 2023) Dogen: “Enlightenment is the intimacy of all things.” In this conversation we look at; Delusion and going beyond money, tech and the database Buddhisms that are in bed with Amazon and Google. What it means to live in a world that no longer exists. We get advice from James Joyce Joyce: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church”. How Curtis sees art and dharma possibly helping the new generations to discover intimacy. Zen, Vajrayana, and their forms of transcendent art Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What do financial bubbles and religious millenarianism have in common? They both involve collective delusion. When Charles Mackey wrote a book on the Madness of Crowds in the 19th century, he could not have imagined that religious and financial bubbles will continue to reappear, but as Willam Bernstein points out, the world has not gotten any saner. William Bernstein is an investment manager and the author of a number of books including, The Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups and The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created. And before his work in finance, he spent more than 30 years practicing medicine. William and Greg discuss the difference between intelligence and rationality, how human nature is rooted in imitation and mimicry, and the end of the world. Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. In The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam (NYU Press, 2022), Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas the established model of Islamic authority is rooted in formal religious training and Arabic language expertise, the WMA is predicated on women’s embodied experiences, commitments to social and racial justice, English interpretations of the Qur’an, and community building across Islamic sects and in an interfaith context. Situating the US at the center rather than at the margins of debates over Islamic authority and showing how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US and beyond, Ali’s work offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters. You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, interpret it as a metaphorical expression of hope for those suffering now, or only recognize its highlights from pop culture, what you think Revelation reveals…is almost certainly wrong. In Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (Simon and Schuster, 2023), acclaimed New Testament authority Bart D. Ehrman delves into the most misunderstood—and possibly the most dangerous—book of the Bible, exploring the horrifying social and political consequences of expecting an imminent apocalypse and offering a fascinating tour through three millennia of Judeo-Christian thinking about how our world will end. By turns hilarious, moving, troubling, and provocative, Armageddon presents inspiring insights into how to live our lives in the face of an uncertain future and reveals what the Bible really says about the end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Durmaz uses stories of saints to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Religious commitments can be a powerful engine for progressive social change. In A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford UP, 2023), Raúl E. Zegarra examines the process of articulation of religious beliefs and political concerns that takes place in religious organizing and activism. Focusing on the example of Latin American liberation theology and the work of Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, Zegarra shows how liberation theology advocates have been able to produce a new balance between faith and politics that advances an agenda of progressive social change without reducing politics to faith or faith to politics. Drawing from theologian David Tracy's method of critical correlation, the book focuses on key historical, philosophical, and theological shifts that have allowed liberation theologians to produce a new interpretation of the relationship between faith and politics in the Christian tradition, especially when issues of social justice are at stake. The book further approaches liberation theology's contributions to theorizing social justice through an unconventional path: a critical dialogue with the work of philosopher John Rawls. This dialogue, as Zegarra contends, allows us to see more clearly the contributions of liberation theology to the cause of progressive social change. Ultimately the book stands between "public religion" and "public reason," offering something of a blueprint for theological innovation and for how to remain committed to one's faith while respecting and defending the core values of democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (NYU Press, 2022), Evelyn Alsultany, Professor at the University of Southern California, argues that, even amid challenges to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments.  Muslims get included through “crisis diversity,” where high-profile Islamophobic incidents are urgently responded to and then ignored until the next crisis. In the popular cultural arena of television, this means interrogating even those representations of Muslims that others have celebrated as refreshingly positive. In the realm of corporations, she critically examines the firing of high-profile individuals for anti-Muslim speech—a remedy that rebrands corporations as anti-racist while institutional racism remains intact. At universities, Muslim students get included in diversity, equity, and inclusion plans but that gets disrupted if they are involved in Palestinian rights activism. And in law enforcement, hate crime laws revolving around violence against Muslims fail to address root causes.  In our conversation we discuss anti-Muslim racism and the racialization of Muslims, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, corporate motivations to value diversity, recent Hollywood representations of Muslims, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, racial gaslighting in law enforcement, the 2015 Chapel Hill shooting, anti-Muslim speech at NPR and ESPN, Palestinian activism on campus, and strategies to move beyond “crisis diversity.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. Patrick Corbeil is the first extensive historical analysis of the relationship between empire and the Victorian secularist movement. Historians have paid little attention to the role of empire in the development of organized free thought. Secularism as it developed in Britain and its settler colonies was an overtly outward-looking, global ideology in a period marked by the rise of scientific rationalism and belief in the logic of a European civilizing mission. Recent scholarship has focused on how the empire influenced British and American atheists on the question of race. What is missing is an in-depth examination of the formation of secularist ideas about universal progress, ethics, and secular morality. Through an examination of the secularist periodical and pamphlet press, this book argues that the religious diversity of the British Empire helped to shape the ethical worldview of the secularists, providing ammunition for their critiques of Christian morality and the church and justification for their policy reform proposals both in Britain and the colonies. Patrick Corbeil is an independent scholar living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is also the Associate Director with the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (ISHASH). Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2021), focuses on concepts of domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. Examining subsistence methods and lifestyle practices like hunting rituals and herding techniques in detail, Selcen Küçüküstel’s ethnographic account of contemporary lifeways and belief systems among the Dukha illuminates the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. Her research centers the role of the landscape in mediating and shaping human-animal interactions and encounters, capturing how the Dukha experience the landscape of the taiga as both their ancestral home and as a place with its own more-than-human agency. In this episode, we discuss the history of the Dukha, practices of pastoralism and hunting in northern Mongolia, the effects of contemporary political and environmental change on the Dukha, and Selcen’s methodological approach to her research as both a journalist and anthropologist. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a much-needed analysis of wellness, new age, and yoga influencers who’ve gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about personal and public health. Authors Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker offer a sophisticated analysis of the emotional concerns that fuel conspiracy thinking, whether among right-wing QANON alarmists or progressive back-to-earth yoga practitioners. Religious studies scholars especially will benefit from their careful and rigorous analysis, but more broadly, Conspirituality will help readers recognize wellness grifts, engage with loved ones who've fallen under the influence, and counter lies and distortions with insight, empathy, and wit. Matthew Remski joins us to talk about the book. He is a freelance journalist and podcaster with bylines in The Walrus and GEN by Medium. He’s published eight books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His book Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond earned international praise as a groundbreaking resource for critical thinking and community health. Hear more interviews by our host on Fireside with Blair Hodges.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate the political and social structures that incarcerate and degrade?  In Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Farah Godrej explores the tension between narratives of quiet contemplation and social or political liberation in meditative and yogic practice that the carceral condition exacerbates or exposes. Godrej resists the impulse to treat personal wellbeing and systemic critique as if they are in a binary relationship. By leveraging her own knowledge of yogic philosophy and practice of yoga, and drawing on Gandhian political theory, she offers an account of how incarcerated people in the United States can and do sometimes practice meditation or yoga subversively by going beyond the palliative logics of prison officials and the organisations that train and bring volunteers to teach them. The meaningful question, she shows, is not whether meditation and yoga should be taught inside, but how they are taught. By describing how, her book reveals the contingent possibilities that meditation and yoga provide incarcerated people to cope with degrading coercive conditions and also sometimes hinder mass incarceration, while deferring or foreclosing other possible freedoms. Farah Godrej joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss access, ethics and risk in prisons research; ethnographic observation and scholarly activism inside; the character of resistance to physical and structural violence in the carceral state; the nexus between activism and academic work; joys of co-authorship with research participants; the delicacy of checking research participants’ meanings; and the importance of self-care in research on violent and opaque institutions. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He is also a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Garrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity’s outsized influence in modernizing Japan from almost the moment the centuries-long ban was lifted in the 1870s. Washington roots his research in the physical space of Protestant houses of worship in Tokyo, exploring the ways that the churches became distinctively Japanese spaces and institutions that nurtured discourses and practices that affected the social, intellectual, and political development of Japan during the four decades of 1880-1920 that are the focus of the book.  Church Space begins with the creation of churches in the treaty ports and their migration into the centers of the new imperial capital, and examines the ways in which Western-style buildings commissioned by Japanese pastors came to house congregations with many elite and influential members who together wrestled with the role of Protestant Christianity in the development of modern Japan. Washington shows that both pastoral and lay discourses―especially in the spaces of women’s and youth groups―were linked robustly to the public lives of the congregants and the ways in which urban Japanese Protestantism impacted the course of Japan for decades. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. Indigeneity structures the political and cultural motifs in the making of the Christian musical traditions. Located at the intersection of Sociology, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology, the choral voices emplace 'affect' and the visual-aural dispatch. Thus, sonic spectrum holds space for indigenous and global musicality. This ethnographic work will be useful for scholars researching music and sound studies, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology of India. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Religious Literacy has become a popular concept for navigating religious diversity in public life. In The Politics of Religious Literacy: Education and Emotion in a Secular Age (Brill, 2022), Justine Ellis challenges commonly held understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for engaging with religion in modern, multifaith democracies. As the first book to rethink religious literacy from the perspective of affect theory and secularism studies, this new approach calls for a constructive reconsideration focused on the often-overlooked feelings and practices that inform our questionably secular age. This study offers fresh insights into the changing dynamics of religion and secularism in the public sphere. Justine Esta Ellis received a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is the Associate Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A candid conversation with Ramdas Lamb about his experiences as a sadhu, his journey to academia and his professorial pedagogy. Ramdas Lamb received a Bachelor of Arts degree with high honors in 1980 and a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Religion in 1986 from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He also studied at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1991. Ramdas Lamb began his academic career at the University of Hawaii as an Associate Professor of Religion from 1989 to 1991. Presently, he is a Professor of Religion there. Ramdas teaches introductory religion courses as well as courses dealing with contemporary religion and society, fieldwork, and mysticism. The focus of his current research is on monastic traditions and religion among the low castes in central and northern India. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Psychologist Paul Bloom and I talk about the human brain, morality, empathy, perversity, all the things—including Professor Bloom’s new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (Ecco Press, 2023). Culturally Jewish but in practice an atheist, Paul Bloom comes at the recurring theological questions familiar to the Almost Good Catholics audience from the materialistic perspective of psychology. Paul Bloom’s Yale faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Toronto faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Wikipedia page Paul Bloom’s book, Psych Paul Bloom and Dave Pizarro’s Psych podcast Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology on Yale Open Courses Paul Bloom’s TED Talk about St. Augustine of Hippo and perversity. Paul Bloom talks with Russ Roberts on EconTalk about Psych, The Sweet Spot, Cruelty, and Empathy. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects. Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic―a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following―including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions―Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice. Andrew R. Casper's book An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin. Andrew Casper is a professor of art history in the Department of Arts at Miami University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo, and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view "from below" of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived. Examining the interactions between gender and law in medieval Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Oded Zinger considers how women experienced Jewish courts and the pressure they faced to relinquish their monetary rights. The tactics with which women countered this pressure--ranging from exploiting family ties to appealing to Muslim courts--expose the complex relationship between individual agency, gendered expectations, and communal authority. Zinger concludes that, more than money, education, or lineage, it was the maintenance of a supportive network of social relations with men that protected women at different stages of their lives. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Magic was a fundamental part of the Greco-Roman world. Curses, erotic spells, healing charms, divination, and other supernatural methods of trying to change the universe were everyday methods of coping with the difficulties of life in antiquity. While ancient magic is most often studied through texts like surviving Greco-Egyptian spellbooks and artifacts like lead curse tablets, for a Greek or Roman magician a ritual was a rich sensual experience full of unusual tastes, smells, textures, and sounds, bright colors, and sensations like fasting and sleeplessness. Greco-Roman magical rituals were particularly dominated by the sense of smell, both fragrant smells and foul odors. Ritual practitioners surrounded themselves with clouds of fragrant incense and perfume to create a sweet and inviting atmosphere for contact with the divine and to alter their own perceptions; they also used odors as an instrumental weapon to attack enemies and command the gods. Elsewhere, odiferous herbs were used equally as medical cures and magical ingredients. In literature, scent and magic became intertwined as metaphors, with fragrant spells representing the dangers of sensual perfumes and conversely, smells acting as a visceral way of envisioning the mysterious action of magic. The Scent of Ancient Magic (University of Michigan Press, 2022) by Dr. Britta Ager explores the complex interconnection of scent and magic in the Greco-Roman world between 800 BCE and CE 600, drawing on ancient literature and the modern study of the senses to examine the sensory depth and richness of ancient magic. Dr. Ager looks at how ancient magicians used scents as part of their spells, to put themselves in the right mindset for an encounter with a god or to attack their enemies through scent. She also examines the magicians who appear in ancient fiction, like Medea and Circe, and the more metaphorical ways in which their spells are confused with perfumes and herbs. This book brings together recent scholarship on ancient magic from classical studies and on scent from the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies in order to examine how practicing ancient magicians used scents for ritual purposes, how scent and magic were conceptually related in ancient literature and culture, and how the assumption that strong scents convey powerful effects of various sorts was also found in related areas like ancient medical practices and normative religious ritual. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism.  Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham UP, 2022) highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends. Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy. Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation. 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 new history of the Reformation in the Netherlands, Christine Kooi synthesizes fifty years of scholarship provide a broad general history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. Kooi's writing focuses on the political context of the era and explores how religious change took place against the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Special attention is given to the Reformation's role in both fomenting and fueling the Revolt in the Netherlands against the Habsburg regime of Phillip II and demonstrating how it contributed to the formation of the region's two successor states, the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands. Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620 (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a broad understanding of the religions and political debates of the era in the Low Countries by synthesizing years of scholarship and knowledge into one accessible volume.  Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday life connected with practices ranging from cooking, socio-religious counseling, and story telling. Moving nimbly between different locations including East Africa, South Asia, and North America, as well as varied theoretical registers dealing with categories of sacred space, the sensorium, and embodied sociality, Rebuilding Community is a delightful text that will interest scholars in multiple fields across the Humanities. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

I talk with a Muslim friend about the places that Islam and Christianity overlap, and also the places where they diverge. Of these subjects, none is more interesting than the role of Jesus Christ whom Muslims call the Prophet Issa (peace be upon him). Muslims hold him in high esteem but do not believe in his divinity or in the Trinity itself. Muslims believe in the Resurrection and Second Coming but interestingly not in the death of Jesus. They also revere Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. Munir Sheikh is a Sunni Muslim from Bangladesh. He’s a management consultant on Wall Street in New York. He joined a Catholic Dads’ group (how I met him) to talk about important issues of faith and family life with some of his oldest American friends (who are Catholic). Munir Sheikh on LinkedIn Derya Little, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 27: Faithful Frontiers: A Turkish Scholar Describes How She Became a Catholic Apologist Mufti Menk, “The Story of Jesus” Omar Suleiman, “The Life and Mission of Jesus” Omar Suleiman, “Islam,” on the Lex Fridman Podcast Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the race to discover real solutions for the conflicts that plague contemporary society, it is essential that we look to precedent. Many of today's conflicts involve ethno-religious tensions that modern wisdom alone is ill-equipped to resolve. In Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (Oxford UP, 2021), Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth asks us to consider ancient religious and traditional cultural solutions to such present-day issues. Roth presents thirty-six case studies featuring third-party peacemakers drawn from Jewish classical, medieval, and early-modern rabbinic literature. Each case is explored through three layers of analysis - text, theory, and practice. The first layer offers historical and literary analysis of textual case studies, many of which are critically analyzed here for the first time. The second layer examines the theoretical model of third-party peacemaking imbedded within the selected cases and comparing them to other cultural and religious models of third-party peacemaking and conflict resolution. The final layer of analysis, based upon the author's personal experience of religious conflict resolution and peacemaking, looks at the practical implications of these case studies as models for modern peacemaking. Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism serves as an inspiration for fostering indigenous practices of third-party peacemaking and mediation in the modern era. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Why is Jordan Peterson so popular? In what ways is Jordan Peterson's approach to Scripture unique? What can Christians learn from Peterson about the Bible? Christopher Kaczor, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life. Jordan Peterson's Biblical Studies series is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians’ location between Hindus and Muslims. South Asia's Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2023) begins with a discussion of south India’s ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia’s Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. He then underscores the efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavors, but rarely succeeded in yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of postcolonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (Bloomsbury, 2022), the authors and the three editors (Eric Hones del Pinal, Marc Rosco Loustau and Kristin Norget) explore how Catholicism is produced, maintained and challenged through processes of communication. This book focuses on the ethnographic study of Catholicism and media. Chapters demonstrate how people engage with the Catholic media-scape, and analyze the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie Catholic media and mediatization. Case studies examine Catholic practices in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa, providing a truly comparative, de-centered representation of global Catholicism. Illustrating the vibrancy and heterogeneity of Catholicism world-wide, the book also examines how media work to sustain larger global Catholic imaginaries. Eric Hoenes Del Pinal’s chapter in particular examines “how Guatemalan Catholics have variously used FM radio and internet streaming video to manage the uncertainties of producing spectacular public rituals during Holy Week. Focusing on the devotional labor that Catholic lay leaders do to mount these events and the fact that efficacy of that work is not always easy to asses, he asks how their various media practices, which are meant to counterbalance unprecedented social changes, have contributed to the mediatization of parish life” (9). Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. She researches religion, media, and technology with a focus on Catholic communities around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How did liberationist Christianity develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War? How did liberation theology develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War?  Understanding the movement to be dynamic and highly diverse, Pablo Bradbury's book Liberationist Christianity in Argentina (1930-1983): Faith and Revolution (Tamesis Books, 2023) reveals that ecclesial and political conflicts, especially over Peronism and celibacy, were at the heart of the construction of a liberationist Christian identity, which simultaneously internalised deep tensions over its relationship to the Catholic Church. It first situates the rise of a revolutionary Christian impulse in Argentina within changes in society, in Catholicism and Protestantism and in Marxism in the 1930s, before analysing how the phenomenon coalesced in the late sixties into a coherent social movement. Finally, the book examines the responses of liberationist Christians to the intense period of repression under the presidency of Isabel Perón and the rule of the military junta between 1974 and 1983. By exploring these distinct responses and uncovering the heterogeneity of liberationist Christianity, the book offers a fresh analysis of a movement that occupies a major role in the popular memory of the period of state terror, and provides a corrective to narratives that depict the movement as monolithic or as a passive victim of the dictatorship. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“A moving description of a life in practice which goes far beyond text-based ideas of prayer, devotion, guru-connection, or meditation, and most especially of tantric practice." Anne Klein, former Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University. A ground-breaking book, The Magic of Vajrayana (Unfettered Mind Media, 2023) opens new doors to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Vajrayana, one of the most vibrant traditions of mystical practice in the world today. Ken McLeod deploys his considerable skills in translation, teaching, and writing to weave a rich tapestry of the core practices of this tradition and his experience with them. In simple clear English he immerses the reader in the practice of Vajrayana, bridging the gap between classical instruction and idealized descriptions of insights and understandings. Along with two of his previous books, Reflections on Silver River and A Trackless Path, The Magic of Vajrayana completes a trilogy of experiential instruction and guidance in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism. As one of the first generation western practitioners and then teacher, Ken is a contemporary of famous teachers across the American, Canadian and British dharma figures. He both shares concerns with them and has made his own way. He is one of those who have sought to innovate, westernise and explore what happens to Buddhism when it is taken out of a traditional setting. Whether through his Pragmatic Dharma website, or his insistence on finding language that works for those he taught and now writes for, Ken has gone deep into Tibetan Buddhism whilst committing to finding ways to have it speak to westerners: he has in many ways been a key early figure in adapting and westernising Buddhism, specifically Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism from Tibet. Ken’s latest book, The Magic of Vajrayana, is the topic of our conversation. In discussing it, we look at a variety of topics that relate to the practising life. What are magic and faith and what role do they have in the Tantric path. Opening to experience and how the path can enable this process. The role of power, and the guru. How mantras and deities can assist practitioners to wake up. The nature and role of reactive patterns and how to counter them. The role of language in opening up practices. Samsara. The future of Vajrayana in the West. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Teena Purohit’s new book Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2023) maps how various Muslim modernists from the 19th to the 20th centuries used their Sunni normativity to construct social and political boundaries around conceptions of tawhid or Islamic unity. The book distinctively focuses on how Muslim modernists such as canonical figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and many others, focused on communities such as Shi‘as, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai’s in their activist and intellectual projects that aspired for a singular unified Islam against encroaching western modernity.  For Muslim modernists who were anxious to reclaim a “lost unity” of Islam that existed in the past and believed could be achieved again in the future (though lacking in their time), non-Sunni groups, like Ahmadis for Muhammad Iqbal or esoteric groups for Rashid Rida, became communities that received disparaging attention and intolerant attitudes that led to a particular Sunni chauvinism, Purohit argues. And as such, this obsession with unity (tawhid) and the privileging of Sunnism that went with it was found in all forms of Muslim modernism. This book then invites a rethinking of our conceptualization of Muslim modernism in light of these thinkers approaches to esoteric (i.e., Sufi) and Shi‘a groups who were viewed as problematic for the social and political goal of tawhid. This accessible book will be of interest to those who think and write on Muslim modernism and non-Sunni movements in Islam. It will also be a great teaching resource for undergraduate and graduate classes. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked with Senator Joe Lieberman—who ran for Vice President in 2000 with Al Gore, and for President in 2004 in the Democratic primary—about his book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011). Senator Lieberman is a devout Jew and talks with me about the Sabbath tradition, a custom rooted in God’s day of rest at the end of creation (Genesis 2) and the Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). It is the shared practice of all Abrahamic monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Senator Lieberman’s book, The Gift of Rest Senator Lieberman’s Wikipedia page Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the importance of science in society. They have also advanced a derisive view of religion and forcefully argued that science and religion are intrinsically in conflict. Many in the public think that all scientists are atheists and all atheist scientists are New Atheists, militantly against religion and religious people. But what do everyday atheist scientists actually think about religion? Drawing on a survey of 1,293 atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K., and 81 follow-up in-depth interviews, Varieties of Atheism in Science (Oxford Academic Press, 2021) by Professors Elaine Howard Ecklund and David R. Johnson, explains the pathways that led to atheism among scientists, the diverse views of religion they hold, their perspectives on the limits of what science can explain, and their views of meaning and morality. The findings reveal a vast gulf between the rhetoric of New Atheism in the public sphere and the reality of atheism in science. The story of the varieties of atheism in science is consequential for scientific and religious communities and points to tools for dialogue between these seemingly disparate groups. Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Boniuk Institute at Rice University, Houston TX. Her research examines social and institutional change, especially when individuals leverage aspects of their religious, racial, and gender identities to change institutions. Elaine is the author of seven books, over 100 research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received grants and awards from multiple organizations. David R. Johnson is an associate professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research agenda examines how universities are shaped by changes in their institutional environments, especially as it relates to capitalism, religion, and politics. He has previously published in numerous academic journals, a book with Johns Hopkins University Press, A Fractured Profession: Commercialism and Conflict in Academic Science (2017), and co-authored another book with Elaine Ecklund, Secularity and Science: What Scientists around the World Actually Think, from Oxford University Press (2019). In fact, they joined Carrie Lynn on New Books in Secularism in September 2019 to discuss that book; listen here. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Timothy R. Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (Oxford UP, 2023) is a sweeping account of what happened when Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change. Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE)—which resulted in the warmest temperatures in the northern hemisphere since the "Roman Warm Period," a half millennium earlier. Reconstructing these climatic events and the cultural transformations they wrought, Pauketat guides readers down ancient American paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book follows the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands. Along the way, readers discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change—or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs. Spanning from North to Central America, Gods of Thunder focuses on remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, leading us down an evidentiary trail toward the book's conclusion that a great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago. The author also includes a guide to visiting the archaeological sites discussed in each chapter of the book. Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question... Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences? According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems? In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (Pantheon, 2023), Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”—the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution. What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Pastors, thoughtful Christians, and students of Scripture must learn how to carefully read and understand the Bible, but it can be difficult to know where to start. In this clear, logical guide, Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell explain how to interpret Scripture from three effective viewpoints: canonical, thematic, and ethical. Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach (Crossway, 2023) is arranged book by book from the Old Testament (using the Hebrew order) through the New Testament. For each text, Kostenberger and Goswell analyze key biblical-theological themes, discussing the book’s place in the overall storyline of Scripture. Next, they focus on the ethical component, showing how God seeks to transform the lives of his people through the inspired text. Following this technique, readers will better understand the theology of each book and its author. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod (Brill, 2017), Barak S. Cohen reevaluates the evidence in Tannaitic and Amoraic literature of an independent "Babylonian Mishnah" which originated in the proto-Talmudic period. The book focuses on an analysis of the most notable Halakhic corpora that have been identified by scholars as originating in the Tannaitic period or at the outset of the Amoraic. If indeed such an early corpus did exist, what are its characteristics and what, if any, connection does it have with the parallel Palestinian collections? Was this Babylonian Mishnah created in order to harmonize the Palestinian Mishnah with a corpus of rabbinic teachings already existent in Babylonia? Was this corpus one of the main contributors to the forced interpretations and resolutions found so frequently in the Bavli? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence (Columbia UP, 2022) recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective. Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a theoretical framework for understanding sacred kingship, which leading scholars reflect on and respond to in a series of essays. They distinguish between two separate but complementary religious tendencies, immanentism and transcendentalism, which mold kings into divinized or righteous rulers, respectively. Whereas immanence demands priestly and cosmic rites from kings to sustain the flourishing of life, transcendence turns the focus to salvation and subordinates rulers to higher ethical objectives. Secular modernity does not end the struggle between immanence and transcendence—flourishing and righteousness—but only displaces it from kings onto nations and individuals. After an essay by Marshall Sahlins that ranges from the Pacific to the Arctic, the book contains chapters on religion and kingship in settings as far-flung as ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval Islam, Mughal India, modern European drama, and ISIS. Sacred Kingship in World History sheds new light on how religion has constructed rulership, with implications spanning global history, religious studies, political theory, and anthropology. Alan Strathern teaches European and Global History as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at Oxford and as a Fellow at Brasenose College; he also lectures at St. John's College. He works on the global history of religious encounter and conversion, particularly in the early modern period (1500-1800), while additionally writing on the nature of religious change and its relationship with politics across world history. A. Azfar Moin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the early modern Islamic world from comparative perspectives with a focus on concepts and practices of sovereignty. Justin N. Smolin is a PhD candidate in the History of Religions specializing in at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the question of the translatability of religious difference, with a particular view to the early modern Islamicate world: his broader interests include literary history, translation, and political theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Saadia Sumbal's book Islam and Religious Change in Pakistan: Sufis and Ulema in 20th-Century South Asia (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival. This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries. Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow them on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How do objects become contested in settings characterized by (violent) conflict? Why are some things contested by religious actors? How do religious actors mobilize things in conflict situations, and how are conflict and violence experienced by religious groups? Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema's book Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict, and Violence: Things of Conflict (Brill, 2022) explores relations between materiality, religion, and violence by drawing upon two fields of scholarship that have rarely engaged with one another: research on religion and (violent) conflict and the material turn within religious studies. This way, this volume sets the stage for the development of new conceptual and methodological directions in the study of religion-related violent conflict that takes materiality seriously. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. Student working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations. Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity. Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Hebrew Bible is filled with narrative doubling, which can be a challenge to interpret. Through an interdisciplinary model, Joshua Berman offers new insights into how battle reports may serve as oblique commentary and metaphors for the non-battle accounts that immediately precede them. Battle scenes are revealed to stand in metaphoric analogy with accounts of a trial, a rape, a drinking feast, and a court deliberation, among others. Join us as we speak with Joshua Berman about his book Narrative Analogy in the Hebrew Bible: Battle Stories and Their Equivalent Non-battle Narratives (Brill, 2004). Joshua A. Berman is a Lecturer in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His other books include The Temple: Its Symbolism and Meaning Then and Now, also Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, and Ani Maamin, a book on biblical criticism. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Deidre Nicole Green about her book Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). Drawing on the thought of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in order to illuminate and interrogate feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, Green relies on Kierkegaard's view of Christian love to offer a constructive theological framework for limiting self-sacrifice that resists an overly simplistic identification of self-sacrifice with love. Although Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, his view of love also circumscribes the role of self-sacrifice within human life. Particularly, it offers the potential for a rigorous and empowering model of forgiveness that challenges traditional ideals of the submissive, permissive woman while keeping love central to the dialogue. Rather than passively accept unjust relationships, works of love must seek to ameliorate a world of violence. Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, treated as fringe cultists at best or marginalized as polygamists unworthy of serious examination at worst. In Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020), the historian Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mormons are, in fact, essential to understanding American history writ large. Drawing on newly available sources from the LDS Church--sources that had been kept unseen in Church archives for 150 years--Park recreates one of the most dramatic episodes of the 19th century frontier. Founded in Western Illinois in 1839 by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his followers, Nauvoo initially served as a haven from mob attacks the Mormons had endured in neighboring Missouri, where, in one incident, seventeen men, women, and children were massacred, and where the governor declared that all Mormons should be exterminated. In the relative safety of Nauvoo, situated on a hill and protected on three sides by the Mississippi River, the industrious Mormons quickly built a religious empire; at its peak, the city surpassed Chicago in population, with more than 12,000 inhabitants. The Mormons founded their own army, with Smith as its general; established their own courts; and went so far as to write their own constitution, in which they declared that there could be no separation of church and state, and that the world was to be ruled by Mormon priests. This experiment in religious utopia, however, began to unravel when gentiles in the countryside around Nauvoo heard rumors of a new Mormon marital practice. More than any previous work, Kingdom of Nauvoo pieces together the haphazard and surprising emergence of Mormon polygamy, and reveals that most Mormons were not participants themselves, though they too heard the rumors, which said that Joseph Smith and other married Church officials had been "sealed" to multiple women. Evidence of polygamy soon became undeniable, and non-Mormons reacted with horror, as did many Mormons--including Joseph Smith's first wife, Emma Smith, a strong-willed woman who resisted the strictures of her deeply patriarchal community and attempted to save her Church, and family, even when it meant opposing her husband and prophet. A raucous, violent, character-driven story, Kingdom of Nauvoo raises many of the central questions of American history, and even serves as a parable for the American present. How far does religious freedom extend? Can religious and other minority groups survive in a democracy where the majority dictates the law of the land? The Mormons of Nauvoo, who initially believed in the promise of American democracy, would become its strongest critics. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows the many ways in which the Mormons were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates nineteenth century Mormon history into the American mainstream. Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

"What could I have done more for my vineyard?" In one of the Book of Mormons most magisterial passages, the lord of a vineyard looks over his beloved olive trees with great sorrow and strives to redeem them. This allegory represents Jesus Christ s labor to save not only individual souls but an entire world. Perhaps more than any other Book of Mormon prophet, Jacob manifests the same divine anxiety, having been born in a wild wilderness and inheriting the task of uniting a divided people.  In Jacob: A Brief Theological Introduction (Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2020), Deidre Nicole Green presents Jacob as a vulnerable and empathic religious leader deeply concerned about social justice. As a teacher consecrated by his brother Nephi, Jacob insists on continuity between religious and social life. His personal experiences of suffering, his compassion for those in society s margins, and his concern for equality are inseparable from his testimony of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, Jacob lovingly and mournfully seeks to nurture a faithful and just community, even against all odds of success. Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism, and later, a core text of America's white Christian nationalism. In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible (Oxford UP. 2023), Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals. Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“It is not events that disturb us, but what we believe about them.” Is this true? Well, apparently Pyrrho, a rather obscure Greek philosopher claimed it to be the case and he may have been influenced by Buddhism in his creation of what today is called “Pyrrhonism”. Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha that delusion was the cause of suffering, but instead of using meditation to end delusion, Pyrrho applied Greek philosophical rationalism. Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism (Sumeru Press, 2020) lays out the Pyrrhonist path for modern readers on how to apply Pyrrhonist practice to everyday life. Its author is Douglas C. Bates, founder of the Modern Pyrrhonism Movement. He has been a Zen practitioner for over 25 years, was a founding member of Boundless Way Zen, and is a student of Zeno Myoun, Roshi. “…succeeds in making a difficult and obscure philosophy not only intelligible but, more to the point, something to be practiced in a way that can make a difference to your life here and now.” — STEPHEN BATCHELOR, author of The Art of Solitude “…an intelligent, readable book that succeeds in its goal of introducing Pyrrhonism as practice.” — CHRISTOPHER BECKWITH, author of Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Few people would describe themselves as antisemites. And yet many Jews living in Europe and the US believe that they encounter anti-semitism quite frequently – so what accounts for these different perceptions? Owen Bennett Jones discusses antisemitism with Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World and How You Can Change It (Backbite, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For three weeks in February of 2023, a spontaneous ‘Outpouring’ at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, set the hearts of American Christians aflame, reviving their faith and our spiritual conversation. Fr Norman Fischer, pastor of nearby St. Peter Claver Catholic Church and the chaplain at Lexington Catholic High School, in Lexington Kentucky, went over to Asbury to check it out. He tells us about the glorious events he witnessed there, in Wilmore. He also explains how, for Catholics, to feel the intercession of God is not unusual. God is in the Eucharist, in every miracle, in every saintly martyrdom, in every Marian apparition, and so our world is triumphantly enchanted with His Presence at every turn. Father Norman talks about his own numinous experiences and about his life as a priest. Short Interview with Fr. Norman, National Black Catholic Congress Fr. Norman on Facebook St. Peter Claver Parish on Facebook and on the diocesan webpage. Gina Christian’s article in Detroit Catholic (which talks about Fr Norman at Asbury) Asbury University webpage about the Outpouring “A Gen Z Religious Revival” on the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss. The Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano, on the Real Presence website and Wikipedia Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities. At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia UP, 2021) bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries. They bring into sharp focus the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies. Contributors break down the categories of domestic and foreign and inquire into how these taxonomies are related to other axes of discrimination, asking questions such as: What and who counts as “home” or “abroad,” how and by whom are these determinations made, and with what consequences? Offering a new approach to theorizing the politics of religion in the context of the American nation-state, At Home and Abroad also interrogates American religious exceptionalism and illuminates imperial dynamics beyond the United States. Find the sister-project, Theologies of American Exceptionalism, here. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015). Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, director of the Center for Religion and the Human, and affiliated professor of law at Indiana University Bloomington. Her books include The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in U.S. Law (2020). This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Paula Arai, a scholar of Japanese Zen, gender, and healing ritual. Paula is an inspiration in the way she blends critical analysis and compassion in her work. In this episode, we talk about how her journey into Zen began with her relationship with her Japanese mother, as well as her work on everyday Japanese healing rituals. Our discussion focuses on the ethics of empathetic scholarship and how Paula’s care for relationships has shaped her five books. Along the way, we touch on the centrality of women in Buddhism and the challenges of facing misogyny and sexism in academia. Enjoy the conversation! And, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes here. Resources: Article about Paula by Karma Lekse Tsomo in Challenging Bias Against Women Academics in Religion (2021) Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns (1999) Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals (2011) Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra (2019) The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice (2022) The Little Book of Zen Healing: Japanese Rituals for Beauty, Harmony, and Love (2023) Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Brahma-sutra, attributed to Badaraya (ca. 400 CE), is the canonical book of Vedanta, the philosophical tradition which became the doctrinal backbone of modern Hinduism. As an explanation of the Upanishads, it is principally concerned with the ideas of Brahman, the great ground of Being, and of the highest good. The Philosophy of the Brahma-sutra: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first introduction to concentrate on the text and its ideas, rather than its reception and interpretation in the different schools of Vedanta. Covering the epistemology, ontology, theory of causality and psychology of the Brahma-sutra, and its characteristic theodicy, it also: - Provides a comprehensive account of its doctrine of meditation - Elaborates on its nature and attainment, while carefully considering the wider religious context of Ancient India in which the work is situated - Draws the contours of Brahma-sutra's intellectual biography and reception history. By contextualizing the Brahma-sutra's teachings against the background of its main collocutors, it elucidates how the work gave rise to widely divergent ontologies and notions of practice. For both the undergraduate student and the specialist this is an illuminating and necessary introduction to one of Indian philosophy's most important works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2022) reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is “ground zero” in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be weaponized and securitized to advance political agendas in Ukraine and beyond. These practices, Catherine Wanner argues, enable religiosity to be increasingly present in public spaces, public institutions, and wartime politics in a pluralist society that claims to be secular. Based on ethnographic data and interviews conducted since before the Revolution of Dignity and the outbreak of armed combat in 2014, Wanner investigates the conditions that catapulted religiosity, religious institutions, and religious leaders to the forefront of politics and geopolitics. John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation that examines the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ritual is one of the oldest, and certainly most enigmatic, threads in the history of human culture. It presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now. In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behavior. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a wide range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In birthday parties and coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Carla Cevasco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, discusses her recent article, "This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France." Her article was published in the December 2016 issue of The New England Quarterly. Abstract: Analyzing the material culture of English, French, and Native communion ceremonies, and debates over communion and cannibalism, this article argues that peoples in the borderlands between colonial New England and New France refused to recognize their cultural similarities, a cross-cultural failure of communication with violent consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Nishant Kumar's Religious Offense and Censorship of Publications: An Enquiry Through the Prism of Indian Laws and the Judiciary (Routledge, 2022) analyzes the role of laws and the judiciary in the process of censorship in India. It examines the rationales and observations produced by the judiciary when demands for censorship are directed against publications that allegedly offend religious sentiments. Focusing on a micro-level analysis of censorship of publications, it presents a hard case to understand the limitations of freedom of expression and the role played by the judiciary in defining its boundaries. The volume traces the evolution of laws governing freedom of expression since the colonial period and the context in which these laws were amended after Independence. It also explicates how the legal process – the structural and functional aspects of working of judiciary – affects the fate of freedom of expression in India. Employing comparative legal analysis, it tries to understand and situate the Indian case within the larger discourse of censorship and freedom of expression around the world, thereby marking its similarities and differences. In unravelling the politics of censorship, the author also examines the interaction among different stakeholders like government, non-state actors and the judiciary. A tract for our times, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, especially constitutional law and fundamental rights, politics, especially political theory and Indian politics, modern India and South Asian studies. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that the question of whether Islam is antiblack is immensely complicated and knotty. Unafraid to pose and address difficult and provocative questions on issues of race, class, and difference in Islamic thought, this book not only represents a profound meditation on Islam and Blackness, but is also a painstakingly researched presentation of the depth and complexity of Muslim scholarly traditions and debates more broadly. The ethical perceptiveness of this book competes fiercely with the clarity of its prose and propose, and the intellectual cum political significance of its argument. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World. In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II (NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect. Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished. Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity (NYU Press, 2022) reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the present day, Price explains how Jamaicans’ obsession with the Rastafari wavered from campaigns of violence to appeasement and cooptation. Indeed, he argues that the Rastafari as a political, religious, and cultural movement survived the biases and violence they faced through their race consciousness and uncanny ability to ride the waves of anti-colonialism and Black Power. This social movement traveled throughout the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, and the United States, capturing the heart and imagination of much of the African diaspora. Rastafari spans the movement’s struggle for autonomy, its multiple campaigns for repatriation to Africa, and its leading role in the Black consciousness movements of the twentieth century. Not satisfied with simply narrating the past, Rastafari also takes on the challenges of gender equality and the commodification of Rastafari culture in the twenty-first century without abandoning its message of equality and empowering the downpressed. Rastafari shows how this cultural and political context helped to shape the development of a Black collective identity, demonstrating how Rastafarians confronted society-wide ridicule and oppression and emerged prouder and more united, steadfast in their conviction that they were a chosen people. Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Developing emuna, or faith in God, is extraordinarily challenging in our day. Emuna may have sat comfortably with us as we dwelt among the worshiping cultures of the ancient Near East. But several thousand years of exposure to rationally based Western cultures has transformed our consciousness, personalities, and outlook to the point that God often seems like an idea pasted incongruously onto our vision of reality. How can we achieve an emuna that is integrated, consistent with our rational context, yet still retains its Near Eastern soul?  In The Intellect and the Exodus (Maggid, 2018) award-winning author Rabbi Jeremy Kagan traces the history of our experience of emuna, building on the perspective it provides to gain powerful insights into the nature of emuna in the modern world. He then shows how the story of the Exodus is structured to foster a perception of reality in us, out of which an awareness of God emerges naturally. That perceptual component, however, must be complimented with an inner sense of God that has a genuine basis. That basis is to be sought in the depths of the self. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jews and Christians alike have made Psalm 91 one of the most commonly used and cited parts of the Bible. For over two thousand years, the psalm has played a pivotal role in discussions of theology and politics, of medicine and mysticism. In He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford UP, 2022), acclaimed religion scholar Philip Jenkins illustrates how the evolving uses of Psalm 91 map developing ideas about religion and the supernatural. Depending on the era, Psalm 91 is protective; it is triumphalist; it is messianic; it is millenarian and apocalyptic; it is therapeutic. It has shaped theories of politics and government. In different ages, it has borne many different names: the Song of Evil Spirits, the Soldier's Psalm, and most broadly, the Protection Psalm. As the Song of Plagues, it has gained a whole new relevance in an age of global pandemic. In the New Testament, Satan himself quotes the psalm, and ever since, that text has both reflected and shaped changing concepts of evil and the demonic. It can be read as a lesson in exalted monotheistic theology, but it was and is used for magical purposes, including for exorcism and demon-fighting. As threats have evolved in various societies, so interpretations of Psalm 91 have developed to accommodate each new reality. The psalm's language about demons and evil forces has repeatedly come into play when Christianity encounters other religious traditions. At every stage, interpretations have to be understood in the larger context of social, spiritual, and practical concerns--indeed, a biography of Psalm 91 is also a history of critical themes in Western religion. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ioannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternativity as a framework to understand how it has been framed in relation to something else. This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine. Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception.  Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkers--most of them women --but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing traditions around the world, now also have contemporary analogues in virtual worlds found on the internet. In this innovative book, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass argues that avatars allow for the ecstatic projection of consciousness into alternate realities, potentially providing both the spiritually possessed and gamers access to superior secondary identities with elevated social standing. Even if only temporary, self-transformations of these kinds can help reduce psychosocial stress and positively improve health and well-being. Jeffrey G. Snodgrass is Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Regular guest to the podcast Glenn Wallis wrote  A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real (Bloomsbury) back in 2018. Time has flown since and in honour of the non-Buddhism project, and some interesting news coming up, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast presents this audio review of the text that will serve as a useful introduction to the topic itself for those new to the world of this controversial set of theories and practices.  “The single most important book of contemporary Buddhist philosophic reflection. Wallis' critique masterfully addresses the twinned questions central to contemporary Buddhism: 'What use is being made of Buddhism today?' and 'What use is Buddhism today?'” ―Richard K. Payne, Yehan Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhist Studies, Institute of Buddhist Studies, USA “Wallis' Critique is a bold commentary and analysis of Western Buddhism that runs against the mainstream. His central arguments are convincing and should certainly enter into discussions of "mindfulness" practices and adaptions of Buddhism in Western societies. This book will challenge the thinking and practice of many readers, make some uncomfortable, but will be a life preserver for others.” ―Stuart W Smithers, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Puget Sound, USA “It is a very rare and precious thing to find a book such as this, which engages as deeply with religious materials as it does with the philosophical. Glenn Wallis brings together resources from Continental philosophy, namely François Laruelle's non-philosophy, and concepts and ideas from Buddhism to carry out a A fecund project that grows in the ruins of our philosophical and religious pretensions and arrogance.”” ―Anthony Paul Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology, La Salle University, USA Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The seventeenth century Reformed Orthodox discussions of the work of Christ and its various doctrinal constitutive elements were rich and multifaceted, ranging across biblical and exegetical, historical, philosophical, and theological fields of inquiry. Among the most contested questions in these discussions was the question of the necessity of Christ's satisfaction. Joshua D. Schendel's The Necessity of Christ's Satisfaction (Brill, 2022) sets that "great controverted point," as Richard Baxter called it, in its historical and traditionary contexts and provides a philosophical and theological analysis of the arguments offered by two representative Reformed scholastic theologians, William Twisse and John Owen. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022). Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, and introducing Tathagatagarbha notions into his translations of Yogacara texts. Engaging with the digitalized Chinese Buddhist canon, Ching Keng draws on clues from a long-lost Dunhuang fragment and considers its striking similarities with Paramartha's corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrines. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the concept of jiexing, Keng demystifies the image of Paramartha and makes the case that the fragment holds the key to recovering his original teachings.  Further readings mentioned in our interview: Funayama, Toru 船山徹. The Work of Paramārtha an Example of Sino-Indian Cross-cultural Exchange. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies; 2009; 31, pp. 141-83. Radich, Michael. The Doctrine of *Amalavijñāna in Paramārtha (499–569), and Later Authors to Approximately 800C.E. Zinbun; 2008; 41, pp. 45-174. Listeners and readers interested in further discussions, please feel free to contact Prof. Ching Keng, ckeng@ntu.edu.tw Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Stanford University Press, 2020), David J. Halperin explores the phenomena of UFO's through a psychological lense. UFOs became part of our cultural landscape in 1947, and they've been with us ever since. Debunked innumerable times, they refuse to go away. Made the subject of great expectations by their believers, they invariably disappoint. They've been called a myth, both in disparagement and, more properly, in appreciation of their power and significance.  This book argues that they are actually a mythology, as gripping and profound as the great mythologies of antiquity to which they're linked. The question it asks about them is not, "What are they?" nor "Where do they come from?" but "What do they mean?" Halperin begins his exploration with his own longish teenage foray into the UFOs that he began to believe in as his mother lay dying of cancer. Despite the fact that he was only a high school student, Halperin joined and then became the director of "New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena" (NJAAP), an organization of amateur observers with members across the States. He goes on to revisit a range of famous cases of UFO sightings and abductions while introducing his own approach, which is informed by the study of religion, folklore, and Jungian psychology. Ultimately arguing for UFOs as evidence of the inner trauma of individuals as well as entire societies, he posits that the rise of the UFO in post-World War II America coincides with that moment in the nuclear age when we first became capable of imagining our death as a species, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins (Routledge, 2022) explores the cross- and trans-cultural dialectic between Tantra and intersecting 'magical' and 'shamanic' practices associated with vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia. With a chronological frame going from the mediaeval Indic period up to the present, a wide geographical framework, and through the dialogue between various disciplines, it presents a coherent enquiry shedding light on practices and practitioners that have been frequently alienated in the elitist discourse of mainstream Indic religions and equally overlooked by modern scholarship. The book addresses three desiderata in the field of Tantric Studies: it fills a gap in the historical modelling of Tantra; it extends the geographical parameters of Tantra to the vast, yet culturally interlinked, socio-geographical construct of Monsoon Asia; it explores Tantra as an interface between the Sanskritic elite and the folk, the vernacular, the magical, and the shamanic, thereby revisiting the intellectual and historically fallacious divide between cosmopolitan Sanskritic and vernacular local. The book offers a highly innovative contribution to the field of Tantric Studies and, more generally, South and Southeast Asian religions, by breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries. Its variety of disciplinary approaches makes it attractive to both the textual/diachronic and ethnographic/synchronic dimensions. It will be of interest to specialist and non-specialist academic readers, including scholars and students of South Asian religions, mainly Hinduism and Buddhism, Tantric traditions, and Southeast Asian religions, as well as Asian and global folk religion, shamanism, and magic. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A unique Buddhist tradition, accessible in English for the first time—translations of forty-five Cambodian Dharma songs, with contextualizing essays and a link to audio of stunning vocal performances.  Trent Walker's Until Nirvana's Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Shambhala, 2022) is the first collection of traditional Cambodian Buddhist literature available in English, presenting original translations of forty-five poems. Introduced, translated, and contextualized by scholar and vocalist Trent Walker, the Dharma songs in this book reveal a distinctive Southeast Asian genre of devotion, mourning, and contemplation. Their soaring melodies have inspired Cambodians for generations, whether in daily prayers or all-night rituals.  Trained in oral and written lineages in Cambodia, Walker presents a carefully curated range of poems from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries that capture the transformative wisdom of the Khmer Buddhist tradition. Many of the poems, having been transcribed from old cassette tapes or fragile bark-paper manuscripts, are printed here for the first time. A link to recordings of selected songs in English and Khmer accompanies the book. These frank and compelling poems offer mirrors to our own lives—even as they challenge Buddhist conventions of how to die, how to grieve, and how to repay the ones we love. Selected recordings of Dharma songs can be accessed here: Trent Walker--Dharma Songs. You can download Trent Walker's 1631-page-long dissertation here: Unfolding Buddhism. Here's the link to register for his course at Barre Center: Story and Song. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Appropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of 'embodied cognition', Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition (Oxford UP, 2023) explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. The principle of divine accommodation provides a theological framework for considering the human cognitive capacities that are accommodated by theological concepts and ecclesial practices. A rich portrait of the nature of human cognitive capacities is drawn from an emerging paradigm in cognitive science, embodied cognition, which proposes that cognition depends upon bodily sensorimotor systems to ground concepts and to draw upon environmental resources. Embodied cognition's hypothesis that human concepts are grounded in sensorimotor states poses a theological quandary for God-concepts, since identifying God with sensorimotor content risks idolatry. The incarnation resolves this problem in theological epistemology by grounding God-concepts in bodily understanding, while avoiding idolatry. Thus, the incarnation represents an accommodation to human conceptual capacities. Embodied cognition further hypothesises that cognition relies on sensorimotor engagement with the world rather than internal mental representations. Subsequently, in addition to the brain, bodily states and environmental artefacts 'scaffold' cognitive processes. A scaffolded view of cognition highlights the cognitive import of embodied religious practices, which choregraph the body and curate material culture. Tanton applies dozens of studies identifying mechanisms by which bodily or environmental factors influence cognition to the embodied and material dimensions Christian practices. On account of their inherent cognitive effects, practices are theorised to have intrinsic 'embodied' meanings alongside 'symbolic' ones established by conventions. Consequently, liturgy is seen as a bearer of theological content rather than merely an expression of it; a locus of religious experience; and a crucial determinate of religious and ethical formation. Again, the embodied nature of Christian liturgy is understood in terms of accommodation. Embodied cognition research helpfully illuminates the details of human embodiment to which theological understanding must be accommodated. Frazer MacDiarmid holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford, and currently works on Māori-Crown relations in New Zealand. He talks about books on Instagram @turnsof_fraze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the fourth century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows in this illuminating new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise and eventual dominance. From Constantine the Great's pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire--which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction--to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (Knopf, 2023) is an unparalleled history of early Christianity. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Revered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality (Catholic U of America Press, 2022) takes a fresh look at this classic Christian thinker, exploring the gamut of Bede's literary corpus. The book investigates key themes, including Bede's understanding of the theological significance of time, his conception of the relationship between the temporal and eternal orders within history, his theological use of rhetoric, his foray into narrative theology, and his spirituality. The purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to principal theological themes in Bede's thought. Bequette's thesis is that Bede was a theologian writing in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet making creative, original contributions to that tradition for the sake of his contemporaries, both in the monastery and in the culture at large. The method involves a close reading and analysis of key texts within Bede's corpus of writings. These texts include the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Life of St Cuthbert, and several of Bede's biblical commentaries (On the Tabernacle, On the Temple) his homilies, and didactic treatises (On the Reckoning of Time, Concerning Figures and Tropes in Sacred Scripture). Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality constitutes a scholarly study of Bede's thought as an integral whole, identifying key themes and ideas that pervade his writings. Thus, it can serve as an introduction to Bede's thought for non-specialists in the areas of theology, religious studies, and other areas of the humanities. John Bequette is professor of philosophy and theology at the University of St. Francis (Ind.) Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces reiterations and reinterpretations of the deity Susanoo regarding his relationship with Korea vis-a-vis Japan. Through careful examination of mythological texts and other primary sources, David Weiss examines Susanoo’s role in the construction of Korea’s image as Japan’s periphery. This book discusses how ancient Japanese mythology was utilized during the colonial period to justify the annexation of Korea to Japan, with special focus on the god Susanoo. Described as an ambivalent figure and wanderer between the worlds, Susanoo served as a foil to set off the sun goddess, who played an important role in the modern construction of a Japanese national identity. Susanoo inhabited a sinister otherworld, which came to be associated with colonial Korea. Imperialist ideologues were able to build on these interpretations of the Susanoo myth to depict Korea as a dreary realm at the margin of the Japanese empire that made the imperial metropole shine all the more brightly. At the same time, Susanoo was identified as the ancestor of the Korean people. Thus, the colonial subjects were ideologically incorporated into the homogeneous Japanese “family state.” The book situates Susanoo in Japan's cultural memory and shows how the deity, while being repeatedly transformed in order to meet the religious and ideological needs of the day, continued to symbolize the margin of Japan. Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Who are the Salafis, and what are the roots of Salafism? What does it even mean to be Salafi? Why is Salafism concerned with ethics of visibility and bodily regulation? Why, when, and how did Salafism become significant?  In his latest book, In the Shade of the Sunnah: Salafi Piety in the 20th Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022), Aaron Rock-Singer explores these questions and many more about Salafism. Rock-Singer situates Salafism as a movement whose core logic is shaped by questions that emerge distinctly during modernity even though the movement derives its claims to legitimacy from claims to continuity with early Islamic history. In other words, Salafism is a distinctly modern project that is not rooted in the Islamic legal, textual, or ethical tradition, given that many Salafi practices aren’t rooted in Islamic texts. As a result, Salafis finds themselves in a challenging textual position when seeking religious, textual justification for some practices, such as gender segregation or not praying in shoes. How, then, does Salafism legitimate and ground itself? How is their claim to authenticity premised on continuity with the Islamic seventh century? To answer these questions, Rock-Singer takes a few specific issues, such as gender segregation, beards, the length of the robe or pants, as potent ideological sites that are connected in significant ways to Salafism’s project to regulate social space. These issues were not applied in the early 20th century or prior but became significant in the mid to late 20th century in a specific social and political context. So, for instance, the beard matters not just because it’s an attempt to emulate the Prophet Muhammad but because it’s a visual way of identifying the commitment to emulating Muhammad, to make clear who a Salafi is. In our discussion today, Aaron talks about the origins of this book, its major contributions and findings, the roots of Salafism, its ideas of worship and tawhid (i.e., oneness of God), Salafism’s textual and political challenges, the significance of the regulation of social space, questions of authenticity and continuity, and the issues of beards, praying in shoes, gender segregation, and the length of one’s robe according to Salafi practice. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Gripping tales that abound with fantastic characters and astonishing twists and turns, Greek myths confront what it means to be mortal in a world of powerful forces beyond human control. Little wonder that they continue to fascinate readers thousands of years after they were first told. Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (Princeton UP, 2023) is a major new telling of ancient Greek myths by one of the world's preeminent experts. In a fresh, vibrant, and compelling style that draws readers into the lives of the characters, Sarah Iles Johnston offers new narrations of all the best-known tales as well as others that are seldom told, taking readers on an enthralling journey from the origin of the cosmos to the aftermath of the Trojan War. Some of the mortals in these stories are cursed by the gods, while luckier ones are blessed with resourcefulness and resilience. Gods transform themselves into animals, humans, and shimmering gold to visit the earth in disguise--where they sometimes transform offending mortals into new forms, too: a wolf, a spider, a craggy rock. Other mortals--both women and men--use their wits and strength to conquer the monsters created by the gods--gorgons, dragons, harpies, fire-breathing bulls. Featuring captivating original illustrations by Tristan Johnston, Gods and Mortals highlights the rich connections between the different characters and stories, draws attention to the often-overlooked perspectives of female characters, and stays true both to the tales and to the world in which ancient people lived. The result is an engaging and entertaining new take on the Greek myths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022) examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the most comprehensive and definitive text on the relationship between US empire and American religion. Whereas other works describe religion as a force that aided or motivated American imperialism, this comprehensive new history reveals how imperialism shaped American religion—and how religion historically structured, enabled, challenged, and resisted US imperialism. Chapters move chronologically from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, ranging geographically from the Caribbean, Michigan, and Liberia, to Oklahoma, Hawai’i, and the Philippines. Rather than situating these histories safely in the past, the final chapters ask readers to consider present day entanglements between capitalism, imperialism, and American religion. Religion and US Empire is an urgent work of history, offering the context behind a relationship that is, for better or worse, very much alive today. Tisa Wenger is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and Assistant Vice Provost the Center for Humanities. He is the author of African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom and co-editor of FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his websitethereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Upon the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, the territory quickly became a placeholder for French dreams, debates, and experiments in social engineering, economic development and even religious culture. Missionaries and Jesuit priests sent to minister to the new French colonial population there commented favorably on Arab Muslims’ religiosity, seeing in it both the possibility of effective missionization and an example of how religion and civil society might work together. After decades of failed missionary efforts, violent conquest and conflict, and influential international events, liberal Catholics in Algeria like the Bishop Charles Lavigerie—founder of the White Fathers—had abandoned active evangelization and instead embraced a visceral and violent rejection of racialized Islam as the antithesis of French civilization. These transitionary decades serve as the backdrop to Joseph W. Peterson’s wide-ranging and deeply human book, Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-century France and Algeria (Oxford UP, 2022). In it, he tells that stories of French Catholic missionaries and the Algerian men and women with whom they interacted, exploring the gray areas between faith and politics, between colonial ideology and colonized experience. Peterson balances micro-historical approaches with an awareness of global events to tell a new story about the role of religion in the development of the French civilizing mission, colonial ethnography and racial pseudo-science, as well as in the construction of regimes of legal difference. Sacred Rivals is deeply readable book and will be of interest to scholars of French Algeria, colonialism, and all those interested in the long and complex history of Christianity and Islam. Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman’s personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country’s top religion publisher. Exman’s role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962. In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

It’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the approach.  Guest Tulasi Srinivas, associate professor of anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism, among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Do scientists ever reject science? Research data on the controversial topic of extraterrestrial life has met with resistance from some in the scientific community and openness from communities of faith.  Guests Avi Loeb, professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard University, where he serves as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science. Author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.  Kate Dorsch, associate director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania . Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), longtime U.S. Senator (1987-2017) from the state of Nevada and former Senate Majority Leader (2007-2015. *The Senator died in December 2021.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Have faith and science always been enemies? The story of Robert Hooke, a revolutionary working in the Scientific Revolution, exemplifies the ways in which Christianity has actually provoked scientific inquiry.  Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Patricia Fara, director of studies and affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. Jim Bennett, Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, London and professor emeritus of the history of science, University of Oxford. Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Stephen Barr, professor emeritus at the University of Delaware’s department of physics and astronomy. This episode was produced by Rosalind Rei and Maria Devlin McNair. Illuminations is supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Razvan Porumb's Orthodoxy and Ecumenism: Towards an Active Metanoia (Peter Lang, 2019) explores the relationship between the Orthodox tradition and the ecumenical practice of engagement with other Christian traditions. This relationship has for a long time been compromised by an underlying tension, as the Orthodox have chosen to participate in ecumenical encounters while - often at the same time - denouncing the ecumenical movement as deficient and illegitimate. The author perceives this relationship to be even more inconsistent since the core of Orthodoxy as professed by the Orthodox is precisely that of re-establishing the unity and catholicity of the Church of Christ. This vision informs Orthodox identity as essentially a Church of exploration, of engagement and dialogue, a Church committed to drive all other traditions, but also itself back to the right primordial faith. The book exposes the risk of Orthodox theology turning into an oppositional picture of Orthodoxy as necessarily opposed to a heterodox antipode, rather than being the continuous dynamic reality of the living Church of Christ. The author proposes the rediscovery of a set of paradigms in an ethos of humble, active metanoia that would enable a more plenary ecumenical operation for the Orthodox as well as a renewed awareness of their own spirituality. Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Vinayaka Mahatmya is a late Puranic text which contains myths of eight of Gaṇeśa’s avatāras. It presents Gaṇeśa as the supreme deity who empowers Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva to perform their traditional activities of creation, preservation and destruction. It offers descriptions of many darśanas of Gaṇeśa and several stotras praising his worship. This book contains the first translation of this text into a modern European language and also includes a transliterated version of the Sanskrit text. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

I asked an exorcist, Monsignor Rosetti, about the spiritual world around us, the demons he fights, and the mischief they cause. He talks about his life and work as an exorcist, how people stumble into demonic ensnarement, and how we, in our daily practice and through the Sacraments and sacramentals, can steer clear of it. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti is the head of St. Michael’s Center for Spiritual Renewal and teaches at the Catholic University of America. He has a PhD in psychology and is the author of a number of books, including Diary of an American Exorcist. Msgr. Rossetti’s website and blog. Msgr. Rossetti on Instagram. Msgr. Rossetti’s Exorcism App. Msgr. Rossetti’s publications. Bishop Robert Barron’s recent talk in which he describes how far fewer people are going to Confession since the Council of Vatican II. Al Pacino’s rant—part 1 and part 2—from The Devil’s Advocate that Msgr. Rossetti praised in our discussion for its verisimilitude. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) statement about Exorcism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Some two thousand years ago, a group of Jews settled in Ethiopia and was for millennia cut off from the rest of world Jewry, preserving its heritage with great self-sacrifice. When this community, the Beta Israel, ultimately made its way to Israel to rejoin its brethren in the late twentieth century, a host of complex dilemmas emerged. Should the Beta Israel shed its venerated customs, based on ancient, pre-rabbinic Jewish law, and adopt the rabbinic halakhah of modern-day Jewry? Or is there a place for the unique legacy of the Ethiopian Jews within the umbrella of the wider Jewish community? Rabbi Shalom's startlingly original Shulhan ha-Orit delves into the history, customs, and law of the Beta Israel, codifying the ancient cultural heritage of Ethiopian Jewry for the first time and contrasting it with Orthodox rabbinic law. He offers suggestions for honoring Beta Israel tradition while fully participating in the greater Jewish community.  From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Ethiopian Jews (Gefen Books, 2016) provides an invaluable service to Jews of Ethiopian descent on how to practically conduct themselves throughout the Jewish year, but more than that it is a fascinating meditation on the tension each of us faces between individual practice and group togetherness, between difference and unity. For anyone who has ever pondered the balance between communal belonging and being true to one's own self, this is a mesmerizing read. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya’s Christian communities. Exploring the movements’ religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya (Baylor UP, 2020) highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision that attends to the process of translation and conversion in Christian history. While outlining a century of successive renewal movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated spirituality inform Kenyans’ reimagination of Christianity. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Luke Donner is a PhD student at Boston University School of Theology in the Missions Studies track. His research interests focus on the formation of corporate religious identity and praxis among Anabaptists in southern Africa, especially in places where individuals’ collective identities come (or seem to come) into conflict with one another. In general, he is interested in the issues of pacifism and violence, the navigation of complex identities, ecclesiology, and the history of African Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Materializing Ritual Practices (U Colorado Press, 2022) explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how rituals create, destroy, and transform social relations. Ritual action produces sequences of creation, destruction, and transformation, which involve a variety of materials that are active and agential. The materialities of ritual may persist at temporal scales long beyond the lives of humans or be as ephemeral as spoken words, music, and scents. In this book, archaeologists and ethnographers, including specialists in narrative, music, and ritual practice, explore the rhythms and materiality of rituals that accompany everyday actions, like the construction of houses, healing practices, and religious festivals, and that paced commemoration of rulers, ancestor veneration, and relations with spiritual beings in the past. Connecting the kinds of observed material discursive practices that ethnographers witness to the sedimented practices from which archaeologists infer similar practices in the past, Materializing Ritual Practices addresses how specific materialities encourage repetition in ritual actions and, in other circumstances, resist changes to ritual sequences. The volume will be of interest to cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists with interests in Central America, ritual, materiality, and time. Contributors: M. Charlotte Arnauld, Giovani Balam Caamal, Isaac Barrientos, Cedric Becquey, Johann Begel, Valeria Bellomia, Juan Carillo Gonzalez, Maire Chosson, Julien Hiquet, Katrina Kosyk, Olivier Le Guen, Maria Luisa Vasquez de Agredos Pascual, Alessandro Lupo, Philippe Nondedeo, Julie Patrois, Russel Sheptak, Valentina Vapnarsky, Francisca Zalaquett Rock. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ritual Theory and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Koren Tanakh Graphic Novel: Esther (Koren, 2023) contains the complete unabridged Hebrew text of Megillat Esther, and is suitable for use on Purim and for year-round study and enjoyment. Recommended for adults and older youth. The creative team of writer/producer Jordan B. Gorfinkel and Israeli illustrator Yael Nathan fully immerses you in the vivid world of Shushan, royal court of Ancient Persia. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Faith Fulfilled: Megillat Esther and Ma'ariv Evening Service for Purim (Urim Publications, 2022) presents selections of the writings of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, one of the major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, as a new and meaningful commentary for the Megillah and Ma'ariv Service. The Purim holiday experience will be enriched with the reading of the Purim story along with Rabbi Berkovits' insightful and refreshing ideas that address crucial topics for the modern era. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

We are in the midst of a new space race that pairs billionaire space barons with governments in an effort to exploit the cosmos for human gain. While Elon Musk and SpaceX work to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward mining operations on the moon, missions to asteroids to extract resources, and millions of people living in rotating near-Earth satellite dwellings. Despite the differences in their visions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity though the colonization of space. But we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier spirit in the centuries-long history of European colonialism.  Philosopher of religion and space enthusiast Mary-Jane Rubenstein wants to pull back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling. In Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (U Chicago Press, 2022), she explains why these myths are so problematic and offers a vision for how we might approach the exploration of space in ways that don't reproduce the atrocities of humanity's previous colonial endeavors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In her new ethnographic study Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (Duke University Press, 2023), Seema Golestaneh guides her readers through processes and praxes of mystical experience and knowledge acquisition amongst Sufi communities in contemporary Iran. The book focuses on the central conceptual paradigm of “ma‘rifat”, which Golestaneh has incisively translated as “unknowing.” From a Sufi perspective, this complicated concept renders any knowledge of the divine as ultimately limited, and it is from this unknowable state that one makes the effort to “know” the Divine, particularly through intellectual striving, such as hermeneutical interpretations of the Qur’an, literary, or poetic traditions or through practice, such as via zikr, a process that aims to achieve “non-subjectivity”. Using these frameworks then, the Golestaneh engages dimensions of knowing/unknowing of texts, bodies, memories, places, and spaces, as understood by diverse Sufi collectives, teachers, and students in Iran. This beautifully written monograph centers the voices of Golestaneh’s Iranian interlocutors to highlight complex Sufi states of being and knowing through accessible narratives of their everyday life. It is a must read for scholars who think and write on Sufism and mysticism, and anyone with interest in Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Garret Johnson works with Courage, the Catholic apostolate for people experience same-sex attractions. He describes his experience living the gay lifestyle and responds to my interview with Father Jim Martin, SJ, author of Building a Bridge, and several things Fr Jim said in that conversation that Garrett disagrees with. This is—please be warned—an honest, raw, and redeeming discussion about sex, gay culture, drugs, pornography, identity politics, Catholic doctrine, and the secular narrative. Garrett’s website, brotherwithoutorder.com. The websites for Courage and also Encourage. Courage serves people experiencing same sex attraction and Encourage is for the people—parents, siblings, others—who love them. Bishop Barron’s sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit, and wallet. Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America and inspires anti-establishment leaders from Trump to Bolsonaro. It throws itself into culture wars and social media, offering meaning and community to the rootless and marginalised in a fragmenting world. Reporting this revolution from twelve countries and six US states, Elle Hardy weaves a timeless tale of miracles, money, and power, set in our volatile age of extremes. Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (Hurst, 2022) exposes the Pentecostal agenda: not just saving souls but also transforming societies and controlling politics. These modern prophets, embedded in our institutions, have the cash and the influence to wage their holy war. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jason Bruner's How to Study Global Christianity: A Short Guide for Students (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) provides students with an accessible–yet critically oriented–introduction to the foundational methods and themes in Global Christianity scholarship over the past 40 years. While the field of Global Christianity is itself interdisciplinary, it largely has not reflected upon the various disciplines of which it is comprised. In addressing different methods that have constituted this field of scholarship, Jason Bruner draws students’ attention to the ways in which these elements have worked together, and what the implications for their use have been in the past and might be in the future. In addition to identifying themes within the discourse, this book offers a survey of where the field has been, what its analytical priorities are, and how future scholars might develop new research projects and trajectories in light of the its history. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, with a concentration in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Kenneth R. Stow about his book Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2016). After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation by Kenneth Stow of the incident's legal and historical significance. Stow's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts--and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses--provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the United States, elements of the religious right fuel fears of an existential Islamic threat, spreading anti-Muslim rhetoric into mainstream politics. In Indonesia, Muslim absolutists urge suppression of churches and minority sects, fostering a climate of rising intolerance. In India, Narendra Modi's radical supporters instigate communal riots and academic censorship in pursuit of their Hindu nationalist vision. Outbreaks of religious intolerance are usually assumed to be visceral and spontaneous. But in Hate Spin, Cherian George shows that they often involve sophisticated campaigns manufactured by political opportunists to mobilize supporters and marginalize opponents. Right-wing networks orchestrate the giving of offense and the taking of offense as instruments of identity politics, exploiting democratic space to promote agendas that undermine democratic values. George calls this strategy “hate spin”—a double-sided technique that combines hate speech (incitement through vilification) with manufactured offense-taking (the performing of righteous indignation). It is deployed in societies as diverse as Buddhist Myanmar and Orthodox Christian Russia. George looks at the world's three largest democracies, where intolerant groups within India's Hindu right, America's Christian right, and Indonesia's Muslim right are all accomplished users of hate spin. He also shows how the Internet and Google have opened up new opportunities for cross-border hate spin. George argues that governments must protect vulnerable communities by prohibiting calls to action that lead directly to discrimination and violence. But laws that try to protect believers' feelings against all provocative expression invariably backfire. They arm hate spin agents' offense-taking campaigns with legal ammunition. Anti-discrimination laws and a commitment to religious equality will protect communities more meaningfully than misguided attempts to insulate them from insult. Cherian George is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore and other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana UP, 2022) provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories—religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist—and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution. They also reveal how intrafaith variation in political attitudes is not due simply to doctrinal differences but is also a product of the social aspects of religious association operating within political contexts. Sabri Ciftci is a professor of political science and Michael W. Suleiman Chair at Kansas State University. His research interests include Islam and democracy, Middle East, and Turkish foreign policy. Ciftci is the author of Islam, Justice, and Democracy (2021, Temple University Press) and co-author of Beyond Piety and Politics (2022, Indiana University Press). He has also widely published in journals like Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, Democratization, and Foreign Policy Analysis among others. When not researching or teaching, Ciftci likes to spend time with his family, hike, or draw Islamic calligraphy. Michael Wuthrich is an associate professor of political science and the associate director of the Center for Global and International Studies at the University of Kansas. In addition to co-authorship of Beyond Piety and Politics, he is the author of National Elections in Turkey: People Politics and the Party System and numerous journal articles. His research explores campaigns and elections in Turkey, institutions and politics in Iran, and populism, religion, and gender in politics comparatively in MENA and beyond. Ammar Shamaileh is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research interests primarily reside at the intersection of comparative non-democratic politics and political behavior. His current research focuses on autocratic ruling networks. He is the author of the book Trust and Terror and the coauthor of Beyond Piety and Politics. His work has appeared in Comparative Politics, International Interactions, Political Research Quarterly and Omran, among other journals. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

We are finite creatures who struggle to accept our finitude. But if we can learn to embrace our limits, we will find that our relations with one another, the created world, and God allow us to experience a love so exquisite, it need not last forever. Guest:  Matthew Ichihashi Potts is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. He studies the thought and practice of Christian communities through attention to diverse literary and theological texts. Making Meaning is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that explores how life can be lived more meaningfully. Featuring meditations by some of the world’s most sensitive and insightful thinkers, Making Meaning will give you fresh perspective and encouragement to live with greater intention and fullness. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @ministryofideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The United States is in the midst of a religious revolution. Or, perhaps it is better to say a non-religious revolution. Around a quarter of US adults now say they have no religion. The great majority of these religious “nones” also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts: think “converts,” but from having religion to having none. Even on the most conservative of estimates, there are currently about 59 million of them in the United States.  Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford UP, 2022) by Professor Stephen Bullivant explores who they are and why they joined the rising tide of the ex-religious. It draws on dozens of interviews, original analysis of high-quality survey data, and a wealth of cutting-edge studies to present an entertaining and insightful exploration of America’s ex-religious landscape. While American religion is not going to die out any time soon, ex-Christian America is a growing presence in national life. America’s religious revolution is not only a religious one—it is catalyzing a profound social, cultural, moral, and political transformation. Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at St Mary’s University, London. He is professorial research fellow at University Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia. He holds doctorates in Theology (from Oxford) and Sociology (from Warwick). He joined St Mary’s in 2009, having previously held posts at Heythrop College, London, and Wolfson College, Oxford. He’s also held Visiting fellowship at the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, Blackfriars Hall at University of Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University College London.  Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

While every cultures cuisine tells a story, there are few foods that carry as much history and meaning as do those on the Passover Seder plate. Haroset: A Taste of Jewish History (Toby Press, 2019) is the first book ever written about this traditional Passover seder food. In a captivating historical journey, food historian Dr Susan Weingarten traces the development of this ancient dish through a tapestry of social, religious and cultural contexts. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The illuminations of The Saint John’s Bible have delighted many with their imaginative takes on Scripture. But many struggle to appreciate the calligraphy more deeply than merely noting its beauty. Does calligraphy mean something? How is it beautiful? Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022), written by a biblical scholar who has spent years working with this Bible, shows how calligraphic art powerfully interplays visual form, textual content, and creative process. Homrighausen proposes five lenses for this artform: gardens, weaving, pilgrimage, touching, and enfleshing words. Each of these lenses springs from the poetry of the Song of Songs, its illuminations in The Saint John’s Bible, and medieval ways of understanding the scribe’s craft. While these metaphors for calligraphic art draw from this particular illuminated Bible, this book is aimed at all lovers of calligraphy, art, and sacred text. Jonathan Homrighausen, a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible at Duke University, teaches in Judaic Studies at the College of William & Mary. His research explores the intersection of Hebrew Bible, calligraphic art, and scribal craft. He is the author of Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John's Bible (Liturgical Press, 2018) and articles in Religion and the Arts, Image, Teaching Theology and Religion, Transpositions, and Visual Commentary on Scripture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But professionals, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state’s authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost, South Asia Digital Librarian for the Center for Research Libraries, rejects narratives of stagnation and decline and shows in Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (UNC Press, 2022), how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change.  The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond. In our conversation we discussed legal pluralism under British colonialism, alternative archives of legal information, the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, the role of the category “religion” in colonial politics, Islamic legal publishing, Muslim marriage registers, the Muslim Personal Law Application Act of 1937, and the effects of Islamic legal practice in the lives of everyday people. Kristian Petersen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Science often draws a picture of the world as a giant machine, a meaningless mechanical clock ticking and tocking forever. But religion and poetry offer a different view, one that is teeming with life and overflowing with spirit. Guest:  Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion. Making Meaning is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that explores how life can be lived more meaningfully. Featuring meditations by some of the world’s most sensitive and insightful thinkers, Making Meaning will give you fresh perspective and encouragement to live with greater intention and fullness. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @ministryofideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Rick Repetti's Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (Routledge, 2022) provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of the field of the philosophy of meditation and engages primarily in the philosophical assessment of the merits of meditation practices. This Handbook unites novel and original scholarship from 28 leading Asian and Western philosophers, scientists, theologians, and other scholars on the philosophical assessment of meditation. It critically assesses the conceptual and empirical validity of meditation, its philosophical implications, its legitimacy as a phenomenological research tool, its potential value as an aid to neuroscience research, its many practical benefits, and, among other considerations, its possibly misleading interpretations, applications, and consequences. Following the introduction by the editor, the Handbook's chapters are organized in six parts: - Meditation and philosophy - Meditation and epistemology - Meditation and metaphysics - Meditation and values - Meditation and phenomenology - Meditation in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions A distinctive, timely, and invaluable reference work, it marks the emergence of a new discipline therein, the philosophy of meditation. The book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of philosophy, meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, theology, and Asian and Western philosophy. It will serve as the textbook in any philosophy course on meditation, and as secondary reading in courses in philosophy of mind, consciousness, selfhood/personhood, metaphysics, or phenomenology, thereby helping to restore philosophy as a way of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How does religious violence end? When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (U California Press, 2022) probes for answers through case studies and personal interviews with militants associated with the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, the Sikh Khalistan movement in India's Punjab, and the Moro movement for a Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines. Even the most violent of movements, consumed by grand religious visions of holy warfare, eventually come to an end. In order to understand what led to these drastic changes in the attitudes of men and women once devoted to all-out ideological war, Juergensmeyer takes readers on an intimate journey into the minds of religiously motivated militants. Readers will travel with Juergensmeyer to the affected regions, examine compelling stories of devotion and reflection, and meet with people related to the movements and impacted by them to understand how their worldviews can, and do, change. Building on the author's lifetime of fieldwork interviewing religious combatants around the world, When God Stops Fighting reveals how the transformation of religious violence appears to those who once promoted it as the only answer. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries. Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. In this episode, Dr. Plaster references an oral history that was produced called “Polk Street Stories.” You can listen to “Polk Street Stories” here. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What will the future bring? The ancient astrologer turned the impulse to answer this question into something meaningful by mapping the night skies and attempting to see in the movement of planets and stars an impact on human lives. But did all astrologers see the same night sky? Did the observations of the Hindu astrologer match those of the Greek? How did the Egyptians and the Chinese understand the influence of the Sun and the Moon on our lives? Over the centuries, as astrology developed and evolved, it also seeped into our philosophies, religions, literature and arts. And it grew and shape-shifted in step with the times. Whereas the ancient astrologer was as much seer as astronomer, the modern counterpart is a tech-savvy innovator.  Garima Garg's Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures (Penguin, 2023) examines the history of astrology, its many different systems and its development as a modern cultural phenomenon. Deeply researched and expertly narrated, the book contextualises the role of astrology in the ever-evolving human perspective of the cosmos and in understanding our place in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Stephanie Corigliano discusses TARKA, a quarterly journal published by Embodied Philosophy that explores yoga philosophy, contemplative studies, and the world’s wisdom and esoteric traditions. TARKA call for papers here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the excellent expansive book, Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur'anic Commentaries (Oxford UP, 2022), Hadia Mubarak explores the many different interpretations of four Qur’anic verses: 4:128 on nashiz or neglectful husbands, 4:34 on nashiz or rebellious wives, 4:3 on polygyny, and 2:228 on divorce. She does this through a careful examination of four of the most influential Arab male Sunni Qur’anic commentators of the 20th century, namely Seyyed Qutb, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and Ibn Ashur; she also compares their interpretations with several medieval, pre-modern commentators from the 9th to the 14th centuries. A part of Mubarak’s conclusion is that interpretations of the Qur’an cannot simplistically be reduced to a monolithic assessment like either patriarchal or feminist but that they are an evolving, complex engagement with phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and the commentator’s own personal background. In our conversation today, we discuss the individual modern exegetes on whom this study centers, their specific interpretations of the four verses, the unique ways in which they all depart from their predecessors’ interpretations of these verses, and the limits of the current genre of tafsir studies. For example, must we keep defining tafsir in such a way that it justifies our exclusion of scholarly interpretations of the Qur’an provided by those who have not written a complete commentary on the Qur’an? We also discuss whether the specific interpretations of the four verses are indeed diverse and if so, what exactly are those nuances that express diversity. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade.  In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously.  Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after. Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. Rachel Adelman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the rabbinic program at Hebrew College in Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“The most influential biblical interpreter in the world today is not a pastor, a Scripture scholar, or a bishop. He’s a clinical psychologist with no formal training in biblical studies and no church membership.” That is a quote from the 2021 book, Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life by Christopher Kaczor and Matthew Petrusek. These two scholars examine the public intellectual Jordan Peterson’s discourse on particular stories in the Bible (such as that of Cain and Abel) and point to commonalities between Peterson’s approach to religious questions with that of the Catholic intellectual tradition. They note, for example, how Peterson’s online lectures and published work resemble aspects of the thinking of such figures as Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. The authors also delve into how Peterson’s views on religious and philosophical matters resemble and differ from those of more modern figures, such as C.S. Lewis. This is a provocative, thought-provoking book about an often controversial figure. Like him or loathe him, Peterson has been a prominent voice on the public stage on matters philosophical and, in the authors’ views, theological for some time. This book critiques him from a Catholic standpoint that illuminates both Peterson and the Catholic moral universe. Kaczor and Petrusek show how elusive Peterson can be when it comes to declaring himself one way or the other on his own religious leanings. Their book is valuable reading for those with no particular religious feeling at all but who are intrigued by and have benefited from Peterson’s commentary on Biblical texts and for those of strong religious feeling (not necessarily Catholic, either) who want a better understanding of where Peterson stands. The book enhances our understanding of the appeal of Jordan Peterson for the spiritually questing among his audience and offers intelligent commentary on fundamental issues such as what is truth and the importance of free speech in the arrival at it, how to lead an upstanding life and how to face adversity courageously. Let’s hear from Christopher Kaczor, one of the two authors of this book on a major cultural figure of our time. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) edited by Molly H. Bassett and Natalie Avalos aims to answer many of the questions that come to mind when we think about the religious lives of Native and Indigenous peoples of the world. Scholars from many fields answer dozens of questions about a wide variety of specific Indigenous religious traditions and an array of the ideas, practices, and beliefs many people associate with them. Do Native peoples have “creator Gods?” What is shamanism? Why are there so many spellings of “voodoo?” Is Paganism considered an Indigenous religious tradition? The volume also interrogates the concept of “Indigenous religious traditions,” by asking what the phrase means in relation to the larger fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Religious Studies, whether all religions were at some point “indigenous,” and what the value of studying Indigenous religious traditions is today. Specialists respond to questions like these and many others in easily accessible language and provide references for further exploration, making this volume useful for personal study or classroom use. Because each chapter can be read in about five minutes, the books offer ideal supplementary resources in classrooms or an engaging read for those curious about the world around them. Molly Bassett is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Her first book The Fate of Earthly Things, a study of Aztec gods and god-bodies, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a second book tentatively titled The Bundle: Unwrapping Aztec Religion, an examination of the quimilli (bundle) and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle) as models for theory and method in the study of Aztec religion. Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder, which sits within Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Territories. Her work explores urban Native and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She takes an endogenous approach to Indigenous life to write about land-based logics, the embodiment of colonialism as historical trauma, and the liberatory and healing possibilities of engaging intersubjective realities. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Karaite Judaism emerged in the ninth century in the Islamic Middle East as an alternative to the rabbinic Judaism of the Jewish majority. Karaites reject the underlying assumption of rabbinic Judaism, namely, that Jewish practice is to be based on two divinely revealed Torahs, a written one, embodied in the Five Books of Moses, and an oral one, eventually written down in rabbinic literature. In Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022), Daniel Lasker presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of the entire story of Karaite Judaism. Daniel J. Lasker is Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values (Emeritus) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The experience of existence is one of bewilderment and even anguish. Anguish because we feel that we are incomplete beings longing for completion, mired in immanence yet yearning for transcendence. Often, that questing spirit can lead us on the journey to God. Guest:  John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow, St John’s College at Oxford University. He has published over thirty books—including In Search of the Soul and How to Believe. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @ministryofideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This book, or one might say sefer ('book of religious significance'), collects letters from leading Torah scholars to professor Marc B. Shapiro from over a 30 year period. Both the subject matter and the individuals in question are vast and fascinating. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul (Morehouse Publishing, 2022), written by Dr. Rolf R. Nolasco Jr., was published by Morehouse Publishing in 2022. In this powerful book, Dr. Nolasco takes us on a journey deeper into the queerness of Jesus and his movement. These meditations also address the spiritual needs of queer Christians. This book is a new look at ten selected parables of Jesus, that expands the scope of interpretation of each story to highlight God's extravagant welcome of all people. The perspective in the reflections is deeply personal and written to be used by both individuals and groups. Queer affirming churches, seminaries, and retreat centers will benefit from this resource as they continue to champion the flourishing of their queer siblings in Christ. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Golda Akhiezer's Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism Among the Karaites of Eastern Europe (Brill, 2017; translated by David Greenberg) is the first of its kind to deal with Eastern European Karaite historical thought. It focuses on the social functions of Karaite historical narratives concerning the rise of Karaism from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The book also deals with the image of Karaism created by Protestants, and with the perception of Karaism by some leaders of the Haskalah movement, especially the scholars of Hokhmat Israel. In both cases, Karaism was seen as an orientalistic phenomenon whereby the “enlightened” European scholars romanticized the “indigenous” people, while the Karaites (themselves), adopted this romantic images, incorporating it into their own national discourse. Finally, the book sheds new light on several conventional notions that shaped the study of Karaism from the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his innovative and conceptually ingenious new online, open-access, interactive book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), Shahzad Bashir invites his readers to rethink and reimagine Islam and time as unbounded, non-linear, and abundantly capacious beyond the confines of text, theology, and normative confessional projects limited to Muslims. Bashir presents this argument through a beautifully presented and lyrically written digital book that traverses an extraordinary variety of premodern and modern texts, places, figures, material objects, and conceptual nodes. While browsing through and reading this book, the reader will travel through multiple places, genres of text, and theoretical arguments as the multiplicity of time in Islamic thought, practice, and geographies is performed and unfolds. Theoretically invasive and ambitious, aesthetically and visually delightful, and eminently accessible, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts is bound to spark important and productive debates in islamic Studies and beyond. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem. Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices. Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As we start the second year of Almost Good Catholics, I asked my old friend David Basile, the theology teacher (and our very first guest last year) to come back and explain the mystery of our redemption in the sacrifice of Christ crucified. What is more central to our Christian faith, and yet – at least for me – what is more difficult to understand? David Basile is Chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana. He explains how Paul’s verdict—“the wages of sin are death” (Roman 6:23)—is not the bad news it sounds like and how the power of sacrifice and redemption—“whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:15)—is good news indeed. The episode ends with two Christmas carols from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band: What Child is This? and Silent Night. Bishop Robert Barron’s commentary on the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on Genesis and his anthropological discussion of sacrifice. Sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist.” (1966) Sermon by John Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (1741) David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 01: How Do We Know There is a God? Rational Proofs for a Loving Creator. David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 09: From Zen Monastery to Catholic Church: Talking about Buddhist and Christian Mysticism. Cathleen Chopra-McGowan on Almost Good Catholics, episode 33: The Mesopotamian Connection: Comparing the Bible to Other Literature of the Ancient Near East. Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 22: Better Call Paul: How Did the Early Jewish Christians “Works of the Law”? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology (T&T Clark, 2020) is a ground-breaking volume that gathers together the voices of veteran theologians and some of the most promising emerging scholars publishing in the field of theological anthropology today. The contributing essays outline the various approaches (classical, modern, postmodern) that Christian theologians have taken to present and interpret the doctrines of creation, the human person as imago dei, sin, grace, and the final destiny of humans and other creatures. In presenting theological anthropology, the editors have striven for ecumenical balance (Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox), inclusion of previously neglected voices (women, African American, Asian, Latino/a and LGBTQ), revisiting authors from the “Great Tradition” (early church, medieval, modern); as well those with theological perspectives that are critical and liberationist (feminist, theological, decolonial, intersectional, critical race theory, queer performance theory, etc). Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The philosophy of deconstruction, most famously pushed forward by Jacques Derrida, has left an undeniable dent on contemporary thought, and even religion has found itself in deconstruction’s sights, with Church, faith and even God put under philosophical scrutiny. But is this a one-way street, or is there something faith might teach deconstruction? This way of framing the relation is itself questionable, since deconstruction itself is an indifferent, impersonal force, something that simply happens as part of reality, but this gives it a certain seduction for theorists who don’t simply want to bear witness to it’s work but to master it as a tool, wielding it as they please, unwittingly falling into the very sort of traps deconstruction often unravels. This is one of the main ideas Chris Boesel wants to remind us of with his new book, In Kierkegaard’s Garden With the Poppy Blooms: Why Derrida Doesn’t Read Kierkegaard When He Reads Kierkegaard (Fortress Academic, 2021). Written as part academic monograph, part dialogue between a philosophy professor and theology student, the book stages a confrontation between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Derrida’s The Gift of Death, where he claims to draw deconstructive lessons from Abraham’s famous ‘leap of faith’, although Boesel finds the lessons he draws questionable. In fact, Boesel contends, Derrida doesn’t seem to have read the text at all! Derrida, renowned for his capacity to find the smallest cracks on the margins and in between the lines of philosophical and literary texts, blatantly misses many of the actual points Kierkegaard was trying to make, and in doing so illustrates the uniqueness of Kierkegaard’s inquiries into the nature of faith and subjectivity. In critically analyzing Derrida’s work, Boesel finds opportunity to remind us of what deconstruction can (and can’t!) do in animating commitments for justice, while also suggesting that a Kierkegaardian faith may offer a more productive possibility for thinking through those same commitments. Chris Boesel is an associate professor of theology at Drew University. His other publications include Reading Karl Barth: Theology That Cuts Both Ways and Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Burning Book (Common Consent Press, 2022) is an unusual and intriguing memoir about Jason Olsen's conversion from Judaism to Mormonism. But it tells no simple story of triumphant conversion away from error toward truth. Follow Olson's spiritual journey from aspiring rabbi to Latter-day Saint missionary, from Brigham Young University student to Israeli immigrant, and from Jewish Studies scholar to military chaplain. Co-written with novelist and poet James Goldberg (author of The Five Books of Jesus and A Book of Lamentations), The Burning Book offers readers a glimpse into Jewish and Mormon cultures while weaving spiritual longing together with scholarly thought.  Olsen and Goldberg join host Blair Hodges in this episode to talk about the nature of conversion, religious memoir, the life of the mind, anti-Semitism, and more.  Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle-Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the AHA’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of Jewish diaspora. In it, Michach Gottlieb looks at Bible translations by Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Gottlieb argues that each translator sought a "reformation" of Judaism along bourgeois lines, which involved aligning Judaism with a Protestant concept of religion. Michah Gottlieb is Associate Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sean Hannan offers a new interpretation of Augustine of Hippo's approach to temporality by contrasting it with contemporary accounts of time drawn from philosophy, political theology, and popular science. Hannan argues that, rather than offering us a deceptively simple roadmap forward, Augustine asks us to face up to the question of time itself before we take on tasks like transforming ourselves and our world. Augustine discovered that the disorientation we feel in the face of change is a symptom of a deeper problem: namely, that we cannot truly comprehend time, even while it conditions every facet of our lives. On Time, Change, History, and Conversion (Bloomsbury, 2020) puts Augustine into creative conversation with contemporary thinkers, from Pierre Hadot and Giorgio Agamben to Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking, on questions such as the definition of time, the metaphysics of transformation, and the shape of history. The goal is to learn what Augustine can teach us about the nature of temporality and the possibility of change in this temporal world of ours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion: Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a unique introduction to studying the philosophy of religion, drawing on a wide range of cultures and literary sources in an approach that is both methodologically innovative and expansive in its cross-cultural and multi-religious scope. Employing his expertise in interdisciplinary and Wittgenstein-influenced methods, Mikel Burley draws on works of ethnography and narrative fiction, including Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, to critically engage with existing approaches to the philosophy of religion and advocate a radical, pluralist approach. Breaking away from the standard fixation on a narrow construal of theism, topics discussed include conceptions of compassion in Buddhist ethics, cannibalism in mortuary rituals, divine possession and animal sacrifice in Hindu Goddess worship and animism in indigenous traditions. Original and engaging, Burley's synthesis of philosophical, anthropological and literary elements expands and diversifies the philosophy of religion, providing an essential introduction for anyone interested in studying the radical plurality of forms that religion takes in human life. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. 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 panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. He traces the Qur'anic origins of the protection of Jews and other minorities living under the rule of Islam, and shows how attitudes toward Jews in Shi'i Islam are substantially different from those in Sunni Islam. Bar-Asher sheds light on the extraordinary contribution of Jewish tradition to the Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an, and draws important parallels between Jewish religious law, or halakha, and shari'a law. An illuminating work on a topic of vital relevance today, Jews and the Qur'an (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a nuanced understanding of Islam's engagement with Judaism in the time of Muhammad and his followers, and serves as a needed corrective to common misperceptions about Islam. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Throughout much of history, the Jewish way of life has been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions legislated by the Torah: dietary laws, ritual purity, circumcision, Sabbath regulations, holidays, and more. But precisely when did this unique way of life first emerge, and why specifically at that time? In The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale UP, 2022), Yonatan Adler methodically engages ancient texts and archaeological discoveries to reveal the earliest evidence of Torah observance among ordinary Judeans. He examines the species of animal bones in ancient rubbish heaps, the prevalence of purification pools and chalk vessels in Judean settlements, the dating of figural representations in decorative and functional arts, evidence of such practices as tefillin and mezuzot, and much more to reconstruct when ancient Judean society first adopted the Torah as authoritative law. Focusing on the lived experience of the earliest Torah observers, this investigative study transforms much of what we thought we knew about the genesis and early development of Judaism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand has become the destination for a growing segment of the international tourism market: religious tourism. International tourists visit Buddhist temples, volunteer as English teachers, discuss Buddhism with student monks, and experiment with meditation. In her new book, Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks (University of Washington Press, 2021), Brooke Schedneck examines this growing phenomenon. While such interactions may constitute yet another case of the commodification of Buddhism, religious tourism in Buddhist Chiang Mai can also be seen as another way in which Thai Buddhism is adapting to a more globalized, market-oriented society. It may even constitute a new opportunity for Buddhist missionary work. Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand has been shortlisted for the EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize for 2022. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Peter Hall is my old friend, a once-atheist who now calls himself an agnostic; we’ve known each other for fifteen years since we both taught English literature at an international school in Egypt. He and I talk through our hopes and doubts about God and man. It’s an episode that departs from the Almost Good Catholics model and it begins with me explaining how and why the podcast was moving to the New Books Network: Academic Partners in December of 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2022), edited by Professor David Newheiser reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays gathered here show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age. David Newheiser is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, with research that explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He received a PhD in Religion from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in early Christian thought from Oxford. He was on New Books in Secularism in September of 2020 to discuss his book Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The idea of brotherhood has been an important philosophical concept for understanding community, equality, and justice. In Gendering Modern Jewish Thought (Indiana UP, 2021), Andrea Dara Cooper offers a gendered reading that challenges the key figures of the all-male fraternity of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy to open up to the feminine. Cooper offers a feminist lens, which when applied to thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, reveals new ways of illuminating questions of relational ethics, embodiment, politics, and positionality. She shows that patriarchal kinship as models of erotic love, brotherhood, and paternity are not accidental in Jewish philosophy, but serve as norms that have excluded women and non-normative individuals. Gendering Modern Jewish Thought suggests these fraternal models do real damage and must be brought to account in more broadly humanistic frameworks. For Cooper, a more responsible and ethical reading of Jewish philosophy comes forward when it is opened to the voices of mothers, sisters, and daughters. Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Many of the earliest time technologies were used to mark sacred time -- time set apart for the divine. But with the Industrial Revolution, efficient time use became its own sacred value. We now live in the age of capitalist time, where time is money and must be spent as productively as possible. As we struggle with a global pandemic, it’s time to rethink what we hold sacred. Guests: Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion, and affiliate associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Mary Gray, associate professor of informatics at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becoming embroiled in the imprisonment, torture, and death in flames that characterized the Inquisition. Without written texts, the Jewish liturgy lost, clans of cryptoJews created a unique body of religious poetry, connecting them to the Laws of Moses, seeking redemption from sin, or hoping for an escape from their embittered lives. The Carvajal clan was led by Luis el Mozo, an alumbrado, a mystic, and his Judaizing sisters. Once discovered to be secretly practicing Judaism, years of suffering at the hands of the Inquisitors were meticulously recorded in the transcripts of their long demeaning trials. The Carvajal's friends, spouses, children and grandchildren were implicated as Judaizers, with many being reconciled by the Church to secular authorities to be burned alive at massive public ceremonies. The burning of Luis and his sisters was the main attraction for cheering crowds at the auto de f of 1596 in Mexico City. The cruelty of the Inquisitors was matched by their attention to legal detail and testimonies made at trial. Buried within thousands of pages of transcripts, hiding in library special collections of rare books around the world are the only remnants of the religious poetry that sustained cryptoJews hiding in Mexico. Mark A. Schneegurt's Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews uncovers these hidden treasures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Persecution of Christians in the Middle East has been a recurring theme since the middle of the nineteenth century. The topic has experienced a resurgence in the last few years, especially during the Trump era. Middle Eastern Christians are often portrayed as a homogeneous, helpless group ever at the mercy of their Muslim enemies, a situation that only Western powers can remedy.  The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire (Baylor UP, 2021) revisits this narrative with a critical eye. Mitri Raheb charts the plight of Christians in the Middle East from the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 to the so-called Arab Spring. The book analyzes the diverse socioeconomic and political factors that led to the diminishing role and numbers of Christians in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan during the eras of Ottoman, French, and British Empires, through the eras of independence, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism, and into the current era of American empire. With an incisive exposé of the politics that lie behind alleged concerns for these persecuted Christians--and how the concept of persecution has been a tool of public diplomacy and international politics--Raheb reveals that Middle Eastern Christians have been repeatedly sacrificed on the altar of Western national interests. The West has been part of the problem for Middle Eastern Christianity and not part of the solution, from the massacre on Mount Lebanon to the rise of ISIS.  The Politics of Persecution, written by a well-known Palestinian Christian theologian, provides an insider perspective on this contested region. Middle Eastern Christians survived successive empires by developing great elasticity in adjusting to changing contexts; they learned how to survive atrocities and how to resist creatively while maintaining a dynamic identity. In this light, Raheb casts the history of Middle Eastern Christians not so much as one of persecution but as one of resilience. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Tala Raheb is a doctoral candidate in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Religions (AAMER) at Emory University. Her dissertation examines how Palestinian American Christians interact with Christian Zionism at the intersection of American religion and politics. In addition to her work in AAMER, Tala is pursuing a concentration in World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Menachem Brod's In Search of Truth: Three Yeshiva Students on a Spiritual Journey (BSD Publishers, 2022) describes the struggle of yeshiva students searching for a path in serving Hashem. Examining various paths within Torah tradition reveals challenging new concepts and exposes them to the fascination of Chassidism. Today I talked to the book's translator, Shprintza Goldberg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

With In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022), Stephen C. Finley, Inaugural Chair, Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, examines the religious practices and discourses that have shaped the Nation of Islam (NOI) in America. Drawing on the speeches and writing of figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammad, and Louis Farrakhan, Finley shows that the Nation of Islam and its leaders used multiple religious symbols, rituals, and mythologies meant to recast the meaning of the cosmos and create new transcendent and immanent black bodies whose meaning cannot be reduced to products of racism. Whether examining how the myth of Yakub helped Elijah Muhammad explain the violence directed at black bodies, how Malcolm X made black bodies in the Nation of Islam publicly visible, or the ways Farrakhan’s discourses on his experiences with the Mother Wheel UFO organize his interpretation of black bodies, Finley demonstrates that the Nation of Islam intended to retrieve, reclaim, and reform black bodies in a context of antiblack violence. In our conversation we discussed the theoretical framework of In- or Out-of-place, the body as both as social and symbolic, Nation of Islam mythological and cosmological narratives , Elijah Muhammad’s theological vision for African Americans, Malcolm X’ focus on civil and human rights movements, Warith Deen Mohammed’s notions of race, the identity of “Bilalians,” Louis Farrakhan’s mystical extraterrestrial experiences, and women’s embodiment in the Nation of Islam. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power. In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism. Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center. Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years. The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Maimonideanism, the intellectual culture inspired by Maimonides’ writings, has received much recent attention. Yet a central aspect of Maimonideanism has been overlooked: the formal reception of the Guide of the Perplexed through commentary. In Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed (de Gruyter, 2018), Igor H. De Souza offers a comprehensive analysis of six early philosophical commentaries, written in Italy, Spain, and France, by some of Maimonides’ most loyal followers. The early commentaries represent the most creative period of exegesis of the Guide. De Souza’s analysis dispels the notion that the tradition of commentary on the Guide is monolithic. Rather, De Souza’s study illuminates how each commentator offers distinctive readings. Challenging the hierarchy of text and commentary, Rewriting Maimonides studies commentaries on the Guide as texts in their own right. De Souza approaches the form of commentary as a multifaceted cultural practice. Employing historical, philosophical, and literary methods, this publication fills a lacuna in the history of the Guide through a global perspective on commentary. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide light, shadow, sound, and footsteps—Kaimal offers insights that complement what surviving texts tell us about Shaiva Siddhanta ideas and practices, providing a rare opportunity to walk in the distant past. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Heathenry, a modern movement drawing on pre-Christian pagan religions, has become associated with the violent, racialized politics of the alt-right. Less well known is the fight to make heathenry — and the progressive values it can promote — inclusive and open to all. Guests: Robert Schreiwer, Heathen activist, founder of the Heathen tradition of Urglaawe, Manager of Huginn’s Heathen Hof and Heathens Against Hate, and Steer of the Troth (2016-2019 and again in 2020). Founder of In-Reach Prison Services. Michael Strmiska, associate professor in global studies at SUNY-Orange and author of Modern Paganism in World Cultures. Lauren Crow, co-host of the Heathen History podcast. Ben Waggoner, co-host of the Heathen History podcast. Thomas Engelmann, outreach specialist at Life After Hate’s ExitUSA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ayyaz Gulzar, journalist and Catholic youth leader in Pakistan, describes the challenges and persecutions the Church faces in the Islamic Republic, which includes the county’s blasphemy laws. He also talks about the many successes and joys he has seen—and some surprises, for example Muslim women praying the ‘Hail Mary’ for Our Lady’s help during childbirth. We recorded this conversation during the floods of the summer of 2022 which have been described as the worst in the country’s history. Articles by Ayyaz Gulzar in UCA News (Union of Catholic Asian News): Caritas Pakistan Jesus Youth, Pakistan, Facebook Page Here is an excerpt from the National Geographic documentary, Inside the Vatican, that shows the humility, wisdom, and charm of Cardinal Joseph Coutts whom Ayyaz described in our interview Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Gospel of Matthew presents Jesus as ‘Shepherd. ’ Is this theme part of the Gospel’s divine Christology? Wayne Baxter, by exploring shepherd imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the literature of Second Temple Judaism, answers, ‘Yes!’  Tune in as we speak with Wayne Baxter about his recent book, Divine Shepherd Christology in the Gospel of Matthew (Fortress Academic, 2022). Wayne Baxter is professor of New Testament and Greek at Heritage College and Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the US for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society. (Part Two of Two) Guests: Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne, Washington Post columnist and Professor at Georgetown University Dan McKanan, Professor at Harvard Divinity School Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the majority date to the centuries after the Norman conquest. James Morton's Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy (Oxford UP, 2021) is a historical study of these manuscripts, exploring how and why the Greek Christians of medieval southern Italy persisted in using them so long after the end of Byzantine rule. The first part of the book provides an overview of the source material and the history of Italo-Greek Christianity. The second part examines the development of Italo-Greek canon law manuscripts from the last century of Byzantine rule to the late twelfth century, arguing that the Normans' opposition to papal authority created a laissez faire atmosphere in which Greek Christians could continue to follow Byzantine religious law unchallenged. Finally, the third part analyses the papacy's successful efforts to assert its jurisdiction over southern Italy in the later Middle Ages. While this brought about the end of Byzantine canon law as an effective legal system in the region, the Italo-Greeks still drew on their legal heritage to explain and justify their distinctive religious rites to their Latin neighbors. Diki Sherpa is a PhD candidate at the Chinese university of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the US for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society. Guests: Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne, Washington Post columnist and Professor at Georgetown University Dan McKanan, Professor at Harvard Divinity School Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Asking Better Questions of the Bible: A Guide for the Wounded, Wary, and Longing for More (Nav Press, 2023), written by Marty Solomon was published by Nav Press in 2023. In this insightful book, Solomon takes us on a journey reminding us that questions are not only good, but they are necessary for a rich faith experience. Too often when we come to the Bible, questions make us uncomfortable. But questions are often a good thing. When we stop viewing the Bible through the lens of our own agendas and ask the questions the Bible is asking, something extraordinary happens. We form a new and deeper way of thinking about Scripture and understanding the Bible. As we do, we move further into the depths and mystery of God. Asking Better Questions of the Bible is a journey into the original conversation of the inspired Text. In it, Marty Solomon (a host of The BEMA Podcast and the founder of the BEMA Discipleship ministry, a branch of Impact Campus Ministries) explores all the different portions of Scripture, examining how each is unique in structure and intent. When we ask the questions the Bible is asking, we will understand the ancient Near Eastern perspective of words, numbers, and core principles like eternal life, truth, sin, and faith; recognize the literary devices and the reclamation of stories used in the Torah; read the historical books both as sources of inspiration and as cautionary tales; interpret the distinct genres in wisdom literature, such as psalms and proverbs; decipher the unique elements of prophetic literature; perceive the subversive nature of the Gospel accounts; and view the New Testament letters as inspired, authoritative interpretation of the story of God. God can be trusted with our doubts and invites us to question. Let Asking Better Questions of the Bible show you a better way forward for interpreting Scripture. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this statement really mean at all, and how have Muslims historically understood it? How did this simple report become a doctrine in the Islamic tradition? What does this hadith mean for Muslims today, in an increasingly interreligious atmosphere and especially for those living in the West or in other non-Muslim-majority contexts? Finally, why do humans invest so much in being different and displaying their difference from those they declare as an ‘other’?  These and many other questions are answered in Youshaa Patel’s exciting book The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, published in 2022 with Yale University Press. The book explores the issue of difference and frames the hadith as significant to Muslim interreligious encounters, showing that ideas and examples of imitation—and Muslims’ understanding of the concept—have changed throughout times and in different contexts. And the debate around issues of religious difference, imitation, and Muslims’ effort to distinguish themselves from non-Muslims tells us about how Muslims understand and define religion. In our conversation today, we discuss the origins of the book, some of its main arguments and findings, the prophetic reports on imitation—specifically the hadith that “whoever imitates a people becomes one of them”—its role in establishing a Sunni orthodoxy given that the hadith or the concept of tashabbuh is not found in Shii collections, and influential scholars and thinkers’ development of the concept, individuals such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi. We also discuss examples of small differences that are not to be imitated, and Patel explains the significance and value of these small differences, which are quite powerful and symbolic. Our conversation ends with the relevance of imitation and emulation for today’s Muslims, including Muhammad Abduh’s Transvaal fatwa on, among other things, Muslims wearing European hats or Muslims doing Christian European things and how other Muslim scholars responded to this fatwa. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but stand in multiple relationships to other temples and sacred sites. They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist within a shared sacred space.  Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives (HASP, 2022) pays close attention to the connections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it within a particular place or on a trans-local level. These connections are described as temple networks, a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ever since early scientists began experimenting with immortality elixirs in the middle ages, religion has been influencing transhumanism. Now, we’re beginning to see transhumanism influencing religion. Guests Calvin Mercer, Professor of Religious Studies at East Carolina University Meghan O’Gieblyn, writer Blaire Ostler, Director and Former President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Between the Buddhist doctrine of ‘emptiness,’ the Jewish idea of Ayin, and the quantum mechanical zero-point energy of a vacuum, it turns out there’s quite a lot to be said about Nothing. Guests Janet Gyatso, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School Daniel Matt, Scholar of 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

Today I talked to Steven Lukes about Émile Durkheim's classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Lukes is the author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study among many other works. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia. For Durkheim, studying Aboriginal religion was a way "to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity." The need and capacity of men and women to relate to one another socially lies at the heart of Durkheim's exploration, in which religion embodies the beliefs that shape our moral universe. The Elementary Forms has been applauded and debated by sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, philosophers, and theologians, and continues to speak to new generations about the intriguing origin and nature of religion and society.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Schiffman about his book Psyched for Torah (Kodesh Press, 2022). His writings on the weekly parsha exude complete fluency in both traditional Jewish sources like Talmud, Rishonim, and Acharonim, as well twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychological research. Most importantly, his writing presents a stunning and seamless integration between modern and traditional sources, excavating meaningful, transformative, and unexpected insights from the weekly Torah portion. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Wout J. van Bekkum's The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.) (Brill, 2022) is a comprehensive edition of Hebrew hymns composed by Eleazar the Babylonian, a prolific composer and scholar who lived in 13th-century Baghdad. His poetic language and style show much affinity with contemporary Sufism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the Krishna avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? The Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes a massive war facilitated by God and the gods. That war took place between the third and the last ages of a 12,000-year cycle; within the cycle, moral behaviour and human lifespan always decrease in steps before being rebooted for the next cycle (initial lifespan 400 years). Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata-Or, Why Does the Krsna Avatāra Inaugurate the Worst Yuga? (Cardiff UP, 2022) describes and discusses this cycle and tries to explain why God and the gods are said to have descended and acted at that particular point within it. The trigger was the complaint of the Earth, who was suffering on account of the human beings upon her. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Contemporary diet culture is only the latest manifestation of a long history of religious fervor about food. Guests Isabel Foxen Duke, health coach Alan Levinovitz, Professor of Religious Studies at James Madison University Corrie Norman, Associate Director, Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the idea of natural rights look like? What is distinctive about such an approach and what are some of its pluses and minuses? These are some of the questions addressed in Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Vincent Phillip Muñoz. The book explores the fraught legal and philosophical terrain of religious freedom. It is a meticulous study of the Founders’ common concern for the protection for our inalienable right of religious free exercise and their surprisingly divergent views on how to navigate the relationships of privilege and control between church and state. Muñoz examines the attitudes of the Founding Generation on these topics as reflected in the understudied area of constitution making between 1776 and 1791 in America at the state level. He argues that we have to go beyond the First Amendment’s text to elaborate its meanings. We must, he contends, understand the intellectual and theological milieu of the time. Muñoz provides the historical context of the creation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment and the intellectual underpinnings of their original meanings. He explicates in a thorough but reader-friendly manner what we can and cannot determine about the original meaning of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses. The book is a mixture of legal, intellectual, and political history in which we learn that the Bill of Rights was in many ways an afterthought, designed by the Federalists to counter opposition to the Constitution by Anti-Federalists. Indeed, Muñoz shows that many, if not most, of the individuals who drafted the First Amendment did not even think it was necessary. His detailed examination of the drafting records illuminates the Federalists’ lack of enthusiasm for amendments and says, “the aim of many in the First Congress was to get amendments drafted, not to draft precise amendments.” He concludes the book with a discussion of the impact of natural rights constructions of those clauses. Muñoz contrasts fascinatingly, for example, his approach with those taken by recent Supreme Court justices (notably Samuel Alito) and argues that his novel church-state jurisprudence offers a way forward that could adjudicate First Amendment church-state issues in a legal, fair, coherent and, importantly, more democratic fashion. This book is an outstanding guide to the many schools of thought on religious liberty in the United States and in his argument for an inalienable natural rights understanding as the Founders’ most authoritative view, Muñoz convincingly shows that competing accounts—(e.g., “neutrality,” “accommodation,” “separation,” “non-endorsement,” “minimizing political division,” and “tradition”) do not capture the deepest understanding of the Founders’ thought. Muñoz notes that his constructions correspond to no existing approach. They do not fall into what are usually considered either the “conservative” or “liberal” positions on church-state matters. The aim of the book is to spur more robust conversations about whether we are interpreting the Founders correctly and what evidence is most relevant to develop the First Amendment Religion Clauses consistently with their original design. Let’s hear from Professor Muñoz himself. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Every year before the holiday of Sukkot, Jews all around the world purchase an etrog―a lemon-like fruit―to participate in the holiday ritual. In Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol (Palgrave Pivot, 2018), David Z. Moster tracks the etrog from its evolutionary home in Yunnan, China, to the lands of India, Iran, and finally Israel, where it became integral to the Jewish celebration of Sukkot. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. 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 of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Pierce Salguero sits down with Wakoh Shannon Hickey, who is a Soto Zen priest, hospice chaplain, scholar, and activist. She talks about her early experiences with social violence in the 1980s, her work as a hospital chaplain, and her 2019 book Mind Cure, which is a groundbreaking social history of religion and mindfulness in the U.S. Resources: Wakoh's Academia.edu page Hickey, Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine (Oxford UP, 2019) Helderman, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (2019) Brown, Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (2019) Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (2019) Find all episodes of the Blue Beryl Podcast here. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Robin Vose (St. Thomas University) talks about his new monograph, The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God (Reaktion, 2022), censorship, and the Reformation.The first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church’s notorious Index, with resonance for ongoing debates over banned books, censorship, and free speech. For more than four hundred years, the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum struck terror into the hearts of authors, publishers, and booksellers around the world, while arousing ridicule and contempt from many others, especially those in Protestant and non-Christian circles. Biased, inconsistent, and frequently absurd in its attempt to ban objectionable texts of every conceivable description—with sometimes fatal consequences—the Index also reflected the deep learning and careful consideration of many hundreds of intellectual contributors over the long span of its storied evolution. This book constitutes the first full study of the Index of Prohibited Books to be published in English. It examines the reasons behind the Church’s attempts to censor religious, scientific, and artistic works, and considers not only why this most sustained of campaigns failed, but what lessons can be learned for today’s debates over freedom of expression and cancel culture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hung-Yok Ip's Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence ( Lexington Books, 2022) examines Mohism as a movement in early China, focusing on the Mohists’ pursuit of power. Fashioning themselves as grassroots activists, the Mohists hoped to impact the elite by gaining entry in its community and influencing it from within. To create a less violent world, they deployed strategies of persuasion and negotiation but did not discard counterviolence in their dealings with the ruling class. In executing their activism, the Mohists produced knowledge that allowed them to hone their nonviolent strategies as well as to mount armed resistance to aggression. In addition, the Mohists paid significant attention to the issue of personhood, constructing a self-cultivation tradition unsparing in its demands for overcoming human conditions that would impede their performance as activists. This book situates Mohism in the history of nonviolent activism, and in that of negotiation and conflict resolution. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The decline of organized religion in the West has opened up new paths for individuals to pursue what once was once understood to be salvation. Guests Craig Calhoun, President of the Berggruen Institute and author of Rethinking Secularism Sean Kelly, Professor of Philosophy of Harvard University and author of All Things Shining Angie Thurston, fellow at On Being and author of How We Gather Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Reconstructing the Talmud: An Introduction to the Academic Study of Rabbinic Literature (Hadar Press, 2014), Joshua Kulp and Jason Rogoff introduce the modern Talmud student to the techniques developed over the last century for uncovering how this literature developed. This work introduces the reader to the world of academic Talmudic research and opens new venues of exploration and understanding of one of the world's great literary treasures. Joshua Kulp earned a PhD in Talmud from Bar Ilan University and is a co-founder of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem where he has taught Talmud and Jewish law for the last two and a half decades. Jason Rogoff earned a PhD in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and is a faculty member at Hadar. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and the philosophies of Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality. Roger A. Sneed is Professor and Chair of Religion at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. His work involves the intersections of African American religious thought and culture, Christian thought and gay male sexualities, and religious ethics. He is a contributor for Huffington Post and has previously published the book Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first century. My reasoning was that I thought our Judeo-Christian inheritance is the foundation—if partially forgotten—of the democratic principles of our republic. The resulting discussion was lively, fruitful, and surprising. Professor Fulton Brown teaches Medieval European History at the University of Chicago, specializing on Religious, Cultural, and Intellectual History, the History of Christianity, Liturgy and Prayer, and Devotion to the Virgin Mary. Professor Rachel Fulton Brown's faculty webpage at the University of Chicago is here. Rachel's blog, Dancing Bear at Prayer, is here. The Mosaic Ark livestream that Rachel does weekly with Kilts Khalfan on Dragon Common Room is here. The recent First Things interview (July 28, 2022), “The Spice Road of Today,” that Rachel did with Marc Bauerlein that we refer to is here. Rachel's blog, “Three Cheers for White Men,” that caused such a stir is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Matthew J Hart and Daniel J Hill's book Does God Intend that Sin Occur? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) argues, from a detailed consideration of the Christian Scriptures, that God intends that sin occur. It swims against the tide of current thinking in philosophy of religion, arguing for an unfashionable conclusion. The book begins by considering the history of views on the question, paying particular attention to the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition. The heart of the book is a detailed examination of key passages from the Christian Scriptures that, it is argued, show that God does intend that sin occur. It also discusses in detail two alternative views that could be used to reinterpret these texts, one view that God intends only that the substratum of the sinful action occur, not the sin itself, and the other that God acts because a sin will occur but not intending that that sin occur. The book argues that these interpretative strategies, even when combined together, do not produce a plausible interpretation of the texts adduced. This book is available open access.  Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of transhumanist ideas in India, Robert M. Geraci's book Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford UP, 2021) reveals how the nexus of religion and technology contributes to public life and our modern self-understanding while suggesting that the apocalyptic approach to AI should be tempered by other visions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar (Stanford UP. 2021) opens the profound treasure house at the heart of Judaism's most important mystical work: the Idra Rabba (Great Gathering) of the Zohar. This is the story of the Great Assembly of mystics called to order by the master teacher and hero of the Zohar, Rabbi Shim'on bar Yochai, to align the divine faces and to heal Jewish religion. The Idra Rabba demands a radical expansion of the religious worldview, as it reveals God's faces and bodies in daring, anthropomorphic language. For the first time, Melila Hellner-Eshed makes this challenging, esoteric masterpiece meaningful for everyday readers. Hellner-Eshed expertly unpacks the Idra Rabba's rich grounding in tradition, its probing of hidden layers of consciousness and the psyche, and its striking, sacred images of the divine face. Leading readers of the Zohar on a transformative adventure in mystical experience, Seekers of the Face allows us to hear anew the Idra Rabba's bold call to heal and align the living faces of God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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 history. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics?  In Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Joel Robbins argues that they can. To make this point, he draws on key theological discussions of atonement, eschatology, interruption, passivity, and judgement to rethink important anthropological debates about such topics as ethical life, radical change, the ways people live in time, agency, gift-giving, and the nature of humanity. The result is both a major reconsideration of important aspects of anthropological theory through theological categories and a series of careful readings of influential theologians such as Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Dalferth informed by rich ethnographic accounts of the lives of Christians from around the world. In conclusion, Robbins draws on contemporary secularism discussions to interrogate anthropology's secular foundations and suggests that the differences between anthropology and theology surrounding this topic can provide a foundation for transformative dialogue between them rather than being an obstacle to it. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world through relationships with Indigenous people from the Intermountain West to Tahiti and the Hawai'ian islands. This process found both successful conversions, as well as pain and violence, since despite LDS insistence that they offered an alternative to American settler colonialism, often church members could be just as imperially-minded as their non-Mormon peers. Nonetheless, Hendrix-Komoto argues that the history of Indigenous people and the LDS Church is complex, and cannot be understood without placing a uniquely Mormon idea of the family at the very center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods. In Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016), Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner's life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew. Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews--the freest in history--to be fully American and fully Jewish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it. This episode's host, Alison Renna, is a PhD candidate in religion and modernity at Yale University. 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

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. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical, and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast 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 Fessenden’s album, Upon the Water, is here. Silence (2016), official trailer The Scarlet and the Black (1983), trailer Inside the Vatican, “Deep Dive: The Secret Archives of Pope Pius XII” (article and podcast) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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.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) Saxer, Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine: The Creation of an Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness (2013) Reassembling Tibetan Meicine (www.ratimed.net) Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. I have a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teach Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 Atlanta and now as Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at RTS Jackson. He has been an ordained minister since 1998 in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church serving as a church planter, pastor, and now teacher. Dr. Fesko’s interests include early modern Reformation and post-Reformation theology, the integration of biblical and systematic theology, as well as soteriology, especially the doctrine of justification. Dr. Fesko has authored or edited more than twenty books and written fifty published essays for various journals and books. More of his writing can be found at his personal website. Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 languages—which showcase the variety of Christmas celebrations across the country. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. 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 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 the center of key American institutions like the assembly line, the family farm, the dance hall, and the public school, showing how the first two generations of Midwestern Syrians created a life that was Arab, Muslim, and American, all at the same time. Muslims of the Heartland recreates what the Syrian Muslim Midwest looked, sounded, felt, and smelled like—from the allspice-seasoned lamb and rice shared in mosque basements to the sound of the trains on the Rock Island Line rolling past the dry goods store. It recovers a multicultural history of the American Midwest that cannot be ignored. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 echoes as keys which unlock the hidden meaning of the Gospel, Vette argues that Mark often uses the Jewish scriptures simply for their ability to tell a story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 atheist and secular advances. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary rabbinical literature, Dr. Ben-Johanan shows that Jewish leaders welcomed the Catholic condemnation of antisemitism but were less enthusiastic about the Church’s sudden urge to claim their friendship. Catholic theologians hoped Vatican II would turn the page on an embarrassing history, hence the assertion that the Church had not reformed but rather had always loved Jews, or at least should have. Orthodox rabbis, in contrast, believed they were finally free to say what they thought of Christianity. Jacob’s Younger Brother pulls back the veil of interfaith dialogue to reveal how Orthodox rabbis and Catholic leaders spoke about each other when outsiders were not in the room. There Ben-Johanan finds Jews reluctant to accept the latest whims of a Church that had unilaterally dictated the terms of Jewish–Christian relations for centuries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built. In A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard UP, 2015), John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource. A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 Criticism, Cross-cultural Fluency, and Environmental Responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, Miller argues, scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and advocate for the value of studying religion. The future of religious studies will depend on how well it can articulate its goals as a basis for motivating scholarship in the field. David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines British anthropology's engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of "primitive cultures" that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1903, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America revised the Westminster Confession of Faith because they thought it was deficient regarding the Holy Spirit. In The Spirit of the Age: The 19th Century Debate Over the Holy Spirit and the Westminster Confession (Reformation Heritage, 2017), J. V. Fesko explores the differences between the pre-Enlightenment theology that formed the original Westminster Confession and the post-Enlightenment theology that called for its revision. This study reveals that the pneumatology of the original Westminster Confession is marked by catholicity, whereas the revisions of 1903 represent a doctrine of the Holy Spirt that departed from the common Christianity of the ages. It also reveals that some of the underlying issues linked to the 1903 revisions are still alive today, even among Presbyterian fellowships that refused to adopt the twentieth-century revisions to the Westminster Confession. Dr. J. V. Fesko has taught at Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) Atlanta since 2000 while he served as a pastor in Northwest Atlanta and now as Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at RTS Jackson. He has been an ordained minister since 1998 in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church serving as a church planter, pastor, and now teacher. Dr. Fesko’s interests include early modern Reformation and post-Reformation theology, the integration of biblical and systematic theology, as well as soteriology, especially the doctrine of justification. Dr. Fesko has authored or edited more than twenty books and written fifty published essays for various journals and books. More of his writing can be found at his personal website. Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Comparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism by Jingjing Li (Bloomsbury, 2022) starts its investigation with a longstanding question in the comparative studies of phenomenology and Yogacara. While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava). How is constructive cultural exchange possible when traditions hold such contradictory views? Answering this question and positioning both philosophical traditions in their respective intellectual and linguistic contexts, Jingjing Li argues that what Edmund Husserl means by essence differs from what Chinese Yogacarins mean by svabhava, partly because Husserl problematises the substantialist understanding of essence in European philosophy. Furthermore, she reveals that Chinese Yogacara has developed an account of self-transformation, ethics and social ontology that renders it much more than simply a Buddhist version of Husserlian phenomenology. Detailing the process of finding a middle ground between the two traditions, this book demonstrates how both can thrive together in order to overcome Orientalism. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kathleen Sprows Cummings asks what drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest for an American saint? A home-grown saint, she argues, would serve as a mediator between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings’s vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged. A Saint of Our Own won first place in the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in the Gender Issues/Inclusion in the Church Category, and second place in the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in the History Category. Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. She researches religion, media, and technology with a focus on Catholic communities around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith. The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The mission of The Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM) "is to identify strategies for, and undertake, the recovery, reclamation and reconstitution of Dharma traditions for the contemporary global era, with initial focus on Hindu Dharma and subsequently on other Dharma traditions." Where did DANAM come from? What is its future? Listen into this candid discussion with Rita D. Sherma about DANAM past and future.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This book addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing upon the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas. Focusing on the sensory and media experiences, the author examines the aesthetics and dynamics of the Ramkatha ethnoscape through participant-observation in everyday practices, and how it particularly, translates politics from the realm of religion. Besides being socially constructed, the Ramkatha heavily relies on technologies for its production and continuation. Negotiated through a telling of Hindu religious stories, the mediated voice of Morari Bapu, a former school-teacher turned narrator, is a major medium of performance transposed into multiple media such as theatre, stage, music and spectacle. The book engages with voice as a vehicle of meaning to scrutinize its discursive production, imagination and re-production across mobile contexts. It investigates how the transnationally disseminated practices re-contextualize religious subjectivities of an affective community enmeshed in spatio-sensorial modes. Mrinal Pande's Popular Hinduism, Stories and Mobile Performances: The Voice of Morari Bapu in Multiple Media (Routledge, 2022) will be of interest to academic audiences in the fields of South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, as well as Performance Studies and Religious Studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic.  Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Peter Fenner, Ph.D, is an adapter and teacher of non-duality, and an author. His two books, Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditioned Awareness (Sounds True, 2007) and Natural Awakening: An Advanced Guide for Sharing Nondual Awareness (Sumeru Press, 2015), draw on a dialectical method adapted from his monastic training with the Gelugpa School of Tibetan Buddhism. We discuss philosophical psychology, the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist thought, the challenge of patterns, meditation, and the relationship between the different vehicles in Buddhism. This episode features a longer introduction in order to update listeners on a slight change in direction or the podcast as well as an attempt to contextualize non-duality. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision.’ However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, Tom Bratrud's book Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (Berghahn Books, 2022) investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine. A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work against that of their major rivals, missionaries from the Protestant American Missionary Association. Using letters the Sisters wrote back to their motherhouse in France, the book provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional (pun intended) lives of these women religious in St. Augustine and other parts of Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth century through the era of anti-Catholicism in the early twentieth century South. It carries the story through 1922, the end of the pioneer years of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work in Florida, and the end of Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia’s existence as a distinct order. Through the lenses of Catholicism, Florida and Southern history, gender, and race, the book addresses the Protestant concept of domesticity and how it was reinforced in Catholic terms by women who seemingly defied the ideal. It also relates the Sisters’ contributions in shaping life in the South during Reconstruction as they established elite academies and free schools, created orphanages, ministered to all during severe yellow fever epidemics, and fought the specter of anti-Catholicism as it crept across the rural regions of the country. To date, little has been written about Catholics in the South, much less the women religious who served there. This book helps to fill that gap. Teaching in Black and White provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional lives of women religious in Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century. Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In a podcast about books that have changed the world, I bring you the book that I think changed the world the most: The Hebrew Bible. Specifically, the first book of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis. The Book of Genesis is an account of the origins of the world, human beings, and the Jewish people. It is a foundational text for three world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For thousands of years, Genesis has given its readers a foundation, a story that helps give an account of why the world exists, who we are, and how we should act. In a chaotic and unpredictable world, Genesis, this ancient set of stories, offers grounding, continuity, and deep meaning. Ronald Hendel is the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Book of Genesis: A Biography See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Michaelson explores the religious philosophy of the mercurial eighteenth-century figure Jacob Frank, who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, Michaelson challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism. Jay Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a visiting scholar at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. 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 interview Dr. Christina Civantos (University of Miami, FL, USA) about her open access book Jamón and Halal: Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía (Amherst College Press, 2022). This case study examines a rural town in Spain’s Andalucía in order to shed light on the workings of coexistence. The town of Órgiva’s diverse population includes hippies from across Europe, European converts to Sufi Islam, and immigrants from North Africa. Christina Civantos combines the analysis of written and visual cultural texts with oral narratives from residents. In this book, we see that although written and especially televisual narratives about the town highlight tolerance and multiculturalism, they mask tensions and power differentials. Toleration is an ongoing negotiation and this book shows us how we can identify the points of contact that create robust, respect-based tolerance. Christina Civantos is a professor of Hispanic and Arabic literary and cultural studies at the University of Miami in Florida (USA). Her research focuses on Arabic-speaking immigrants in Hispano-America and Spain, South-South relations between Latin America and the Arab world, empire and coloniality, nationalisms, memory studies, and tolerance. She is the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (2006), The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives (2017), and Jamón and Halal: Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía (2022), as well as numerous essays. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 874 CE, the eleventh Imam died, and the Imami community splintered. The institutions of the Imamate were maintained by the dead Imam's agents, who asserted they were in contact with a hidden twelfth Imam. This was the beginning of 'Twelver' Shiʿism.  In Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge UP, 2022), Edmund Hayes provides an innovative approach to exploring early Shiʿism, moving beyond doctrinal history to provide an analysis of the socio-political processes leading to the canonisation of the Occultation of the twelfth Imam. Hayes shows how these agents cemented their authority by reproducing the physical signs of the Imamate, including protocols of succession, letters and the alm taxes. Four of these agents were ultimately canonised as “envoys” but traces of earlier conceptions of authority remain embedded in the earliest reports. Hayes dissects the complex and contradictory Occultation narratives to show how, amidst the claims of numerous actors, the institutional positioning of the envoys allowed them to assert a quasi-Imamic authority in the absence of an Imam. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Atheism in Five Minutes, by Professor Teemu Taira, is part of Equinox Publishing’s “Religion in 5 Minutes” series. It offers insights into a number of commonly held questions about the ideas, practices, and attitudes concerning atheism and atheists. The volume highlights approaches based on the study of religion, sociology, history, anthropology, politics, and psychology. It also examines the implications and assumptions in common questions about atheism. Ideal for both classroom use and personal study, some of the questions asked include: Are atheists immoral? Are children born atheist? Do atheists have rituals? How has atheism related to politics? Why do some atheists remain members of religious groups? Is it difficult to be an atheist in Muslim countries? Do atheist parents have atheist children? Why are there so few black atheists? What are the most atheistic societies? And, has the Internet made atheism more popular? Each chapter is based on the latest research written by a leading scholar in the field. They offer concise and thoughtful answers along with suggestions for further reading. Because each chapter can be read in about five minutes, the books of this series offer ideal supplementary resources in classrooms or an engaging read for those curious about the world around them. Teemu Taira is senior lecturer in the study of religion, University of Helsinki, and Docent (Adjunct Professor) at the Department of Study of Religion, University of Turku, Finland. He researches religion in the media; atheism, secularism and nonreligion; and the discursive study of “religion” as a category. This year he has also published Taking ‘Religion’ Seriously: Essays on the Discursive Study of Religion with Brill, which he has also discussed on the New Books Network recently. Find him on Twitter: @TeemuTaira. For more interviews on the New Books Network from this series, check out Hinduism in Five Minutes and Buddhism in Five Minutes. Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (White Crow Books, 2022), historian of religions Gregory Shushan explores the relationships between extraordinary experiences and beliefs in life after death. He first shows how throughout history and around the world, near-death experiences have influenced ideas about the afterlife. Shushan also takes a deep dive into the problem of similarities and differences between NDE accounts. Not only do they vary widely, but so does a culture’s way of responding to them and integrating them into their belief systems. In this book, Shushan also compares NDEs with accounts of shamanic spirit journeys to afterlife realms, intermission states between reincarnations from people who remember past lives, and descriptions of otherworlds by souls of the dead communicating through mediums. Accounts of all these phenomena bear striking similarities to NDEs, though they also have significant differences. Examining them each in relation to the other results in a kind of reciprocal illumination in which each type of extraordinary experience sheds light on the other. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Henni Alava, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, on her fascinating new book published by Bloomsbury as part of the New Directions in Anthropology of Christianity book series: Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion (Bloomsbury, 2022). Alava's work sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda's largest religious communities, Henni Alava maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. The book describes how churches' responses to the war have been enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet it is also in the churches' embeddedness in structures of historical violence that religious faith nurtures peace liable to compound conflict. At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, translate as 'confusion', which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates 'confusion' as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence. 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, we chat with Dr. James Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin University about his most recent book How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Brazos Press, 2022). This text encourages us to cultivate the spiritual discipline of memento tempori, a temporal awareness of the Spirit's presence -- indebted to a past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present. To gain spiritual appreciation for our mortality. To synchronize our heart-clocks with the tempo of the Spirit, which changes in the different seasons of life. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, Smith provides insights for pastoring, counseling, spiritual formation, politics, and public life. Our conversation focuses on institutions and individuals reckoning with the past and discerning how to live in the light and shadows of the past, the role of liturgy, and finding stability with our community admits rewriting our own stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Through extensive use of primary resources and fieldwork, Karli Shimizu's book Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines overseas Shinto shrines and their complex role in the colonization and modernization of newly Japanese lands and subjects. Shinto shrines became one of the most visible symbols of Japanese imperialism in the early 20th century. From 1868 to 1945, shrines were constructed by both the government and Japanese migrants across the Asia-Pacific region, from Sakhalin to Taiwan, and from China to the Americas. Drawing on theories about the constructed nature of the modern categories of 'religion' and the 'secular', this book argues that modern Shinto shrines were largely conceived and treated as secular sites within a newly invented Japanese secularism, and that they played an important role in communicating changed conceptions of space, time and ethics in imperial subjects. Providing an example of the invention of a non-Western secularity, this book contributes to our understanding of the relationship between religion, secularism and the construction of the modern state. Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Eugenia Roussou's book Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The 'Evil Eye' in Greece (Bloomsbury, 2021) thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the ‘evil eye’ produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences concerning globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness, and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, who called him a “prophet and a peasant.” He helped the homeless on the Bowery, founded the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, and protested the US development of nuclear missiles, becoming in the process one of the most celebrated anarchists of the twentieth century. To our era, when so much “protest” happens on social media, his actual sacrifices seem unworldly. Ammon Hennacy was a forerunner of contemporary progressive thought, and he remains a beacon for challenges that confront the world and especially the US today. In this exceptional biography, William Marling tells the story of this fascinating figure, who remains particularly important for the Catholic Left. In addition to establishing Hennacy as an exemplar of vegetarianism, ecology, and pacificism, Marling illuminates a broader history of political ideas now largely lost: the late nineteenth-century utopian movements, the grassroots socialist movements before World War I, and the antinuclear protests of the 1960s. A nuanced study of when religion and anarchist theory overlap, Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left (NYU Press, 2022) shows how Hennacy’s life at the heart of radical libertarian and anarchist interventions in American politics not only galvanized the public then, but offers us new insight for today. William Marling is Professor of English and World Literature at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s (Oxford UP, 2016), which won the Nancy Dasher Prize and was the subject of an international conference in Hannover, Germany. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Russell McCutcheon shares his views on the academic study of religion, and the path ahead for religion graduates and the field itself. McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama, Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From Halloween expert Lisa Morton, bring us Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances (Reaktion, 2022), a level-headed and entertaining history of our desire and attempts to hold conversations with the dead. Calling the Spirits investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer’s Odyssey to the emergence of Spiritualism—when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born. Among our cast are the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by “spirit rappings”; Daniel Dunglas Home, the “greatest medium of all time”; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. The book also considers Ouija boards, modern psychics, and paranormal investigations, and is illustrated with engravings, fine art (from beyond), and photographs. Hugely entertaining, it begs the question: is anybody there . . . ? Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This recasting of Nathaniel's familiar question from the Gospel is a fair summary of many modern Christians' assessment of the Pentecostal tradition. Yet in recent years, a growing number of Pentecostals have been turning afresh to the ancient, creedal Christian faith. Bishop Emilio Alvarez has himself been at the forefront of this movement. In Pentecostal Orthodoxy he introduces the phenomenon, and extends the project of paleo-orthodox ressourcement (associated with scholars such as Thomas Oden and Robert Webber) to include orthodox expressions within Pentecostalism, particularly his own Afro-Latino Pentecostal movement. Pentecostal Orthodoxy: Toward an Ecumenism of the Spirit (InterVarsity Press, 2022) is a manifesto of sorts, promising not only to open up the possibility of a genuinely orthodox Pentecostalism, but to reframe modern ecumenical dialogue as well. Emilio Alvarez (PhD, Fordham University) is the presiding bishop of the Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches, a communion that embraces the one holy, catholic, apostolic tradition. He is also associate provost for lifelong learning at Asbury Theological Seminary. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt 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 interview, we speak with Dr. amina wadud about her latest book Once in a Lifetime (Kantara Press, 2022), a book that started out as a blog for her hajj journey back in 2012. Dr. amina wadud is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She earned her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. Her other books are Qur’an and Woman: Re-reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective published in 1992 with Oxford UP and Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam, published with Oneworld in 2006. The book is rooted in her experience of the famous five pillars of Islam, through a feminist, inclusive, and faith-centered lens. Each chapter includes relevant experiences related to the theme of the chapter, such as her specific experiences at hajj or the gendered nature of certain Islamic rituals and the ways that common understandings of these rituals might affect women. In our conversation, we talk about the theme of the masculine and the feminine that figures throughout the book, the gender of God, the Islamic concept of tawhid (monotheism, unity of God) and its relation to fractals and nature and the cosmos, and her experiences at hajj, which serve as the basis of the book. But mostly, I attempt to utilize my time with her to hear her speak about her journey through the last several decades as a Muslim academic committed to social justice and faith. The book’s accessible and approachable style makes it especially useful for undergraduate religion courses, including Islam and Islam and gender specific courses. Anyone interested in personal journeys in religion, Islam and gender, Islam and religion would also benefit from this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures (Maggid, 2020), Moshe Koppel explores the central differences between traditional societies - including traditional Judaism - and contemporary cosmopolitan ones. He explains the subtleties of Jewish morality, tradition, and belief, and how these have unfolded to beat cosmopolitanism at its own game: advancing cooperation, fairness, and freedom. Written with a scientific sensibility that draws on economics, game theory, and other disciplines - Judaism Straight Up attempts to explain Jewish traditionalism's endurance. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India’s electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly ‘Western’ concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of the modern nation-state. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Samuel J. Levine's Was Yosef on the Spectrum?: Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources (Urim Publications, 2018) offers a coherent and cohesive reading of the well-known Biblical story of Joseph, presenting a portrait of him as an individual on the autism spectrum. Viewed through this lens, he emerges as a more familiar and less enigmatic individual, exhibiting both strengths and weaknesses commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. 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, Pierce Salguero comes on to discuss two of his books: Buddhish, A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (Beacon Press, 2022) and A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (Columbia UP, 2022). Pierce is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, near Philadelphia. The major theme in his scholarship is discovering the role of Buddhism in the global transmission and local reception of knowledge about health, disease, and the body. After graduating in 1996, he lived in Asia for four years — more than two years in Thailand, with extended stays in India, China, and Indonesia as well. During this time, he trained as a practitioner of Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM). Pierce participated in extended stays at Buddhist meditation centers and monasteries in Northeast Thailand and India, including a summer as ananāgārika (white-robed monastic resident) in a Thai Forest-tradition monastery. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Elimelech’s family living in Moab, the conversion of Ruth, and Boaz’s efforts to establish his permission for marrying Ruth despite her Moabite roots, these were all important links in the chain that led to the establishment of the Davidic dynasty. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Boruch Twersky about his adaptation of the Maharal Tzinz’s commentary on the story of Ruth. Boston-born Boruch Twersky lives in Beitar, Israel, with his wife and 15 children. He has spent several years pursuing advanced Torah learning in kollel, authored many articles and translated a number of books.  Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. Al-Jallad reconstructs this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context. In this episode we discuss the lifestyles, worldviews, belief systems, languages, and gender and social norms of the nomadic peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia based on the epigraphic evidence. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today. At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and disability held significance for more than the body, opening opportunities for virtue, charity, and even redemption. Dunn demonstrates that when these reflections collide with modern thinking, the effect is a certain kind of freedom to reimagine what sickness and disability might mean to us. Reminding us that the meanings we make of embodied difference are historically conditioned, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See makes a forceful case for the role of history in broadening our imagination. Brenna Moore teaches in the Department of Theology at Fordham University and works in the areas of Catholic Intellectual History, particularly in modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Jame Malinson about The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: The Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition (Institut français de Pondichéry, 2021), a critical edition and translation of the Amṛtasiddhi, the earliest Haṭhayoga text. The book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022) present a portrait—arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible—of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe—and every part of the body in between—this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ernest M. Valea's Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature (Resource Publications, 2021) explores old and new hopes that have emerged in the human quest to defeat death. On the one hand, it answers questions such as: Are we just physical machines of great complexity, with the brain as the hardware on which consciousness operates as its software? If so, can we speculate on ways in which the mind could be uploaded to a machine and no longer suffer the frailty of this biological body? And could an android robot or a mindfile in a computer simulation be conscious? On the other hand, the book examines the hope of survival through reincarnation according to the teachings of Eastern religions and New Age thought. All these topics are discussed from the perspectives of Christian theology and the philosophy of mind. This dual investigation will help Christians formulate a coherent response to old and new challenges to their faith. Ernest M. Valea is the author of The Buddha and the Christ: Reciprocal Views (2008), Buddhist-Christian Dialogue as Theological Exchange (2015), and The Spiritual Dimension of Alternative Medicine (2020). Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial and Native life in Plymouth Colony, of religious toleration, and of historical memory. New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2019) brings together a wealth of insights that will surely benefit anyone interested in the origins of New England's first colony.  Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God (Duke University Press, 2022), Dr. Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in postindependence Nigeria, where Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions have all been associated with violence. He investigates the root causes and historical evolution of Nigeria’s religious violence, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule, which planted the seeds of discord that religion, elites, and domestic politics exploit. Dr. Alao discusses the histories of Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in the territory that became Nigeria, the effects of colonization on the role of religion, the development of Islamic radicalization and its relation to Christian violence, the activities of Boko Haram, and how religious violence intermixes with politics and governance. In so doing, he uses religious violence as a way to more fully understand intergroup relations in contemporary Nigeria. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ken Chitwood’s book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (Lynn Rienner Publishers Inc, 2021) is a provocation to its readers to include Latin American and Caribbean Muslim histories and contemporary expressions of piety in our studies of Islam and Muslim societies, particularly those committed to the theorization of global Islam. The book synthesizes histories and scholarship of Latin American and Caribbean Muslim’s narratives, but also draws on ethnographic study conducted across the hemisphere to provide complex textures and layers to how Muslim identities are constructed and negotiated in diverse regions of Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba and much more. The first half of the book maps historical lineages and conjectures of Muslim histories and claims that inform Latin American and Caribbean Muslim imaginations, such as of potential pre-Columbian contact, and connections with Spain, as well as the enduring legacies of enslaved African Muslims across the Black Atlantic and indentured servants (from India and Indonesia) and (Arab) immigrants. The second half shifts to contemporary Muslim communities and their various global entanglements as it is informed by Islamic praxis. Some of these expressions act as prisms that illuminate densities of Islamic orthodoxy, economics, capitalism, transnational flows (of material and popular culture), and politics. Examples of some topics discussed include the halal economy in Brazil, Sufi missionary activities in Mexico or contestations for Sunni hegemony over a mosque in Havana, Cuba. These chapters in the latter half of the book are insightful, fascinating, and nuanced case studies that would be of interest to various academic and non-academic readers, but can also be great teaching tools in the classroom as they work as stand-alone chapters. From its rich historical contextualization to its engagement of numerous contemporary issues that overlap and problematize topics of Islamophobia, orientalism, piety, spatial flows, geographies, transnationalism and diaspora, and global Islam, this book is a must read for scholars who work on Islam at the crossroads of various intersections. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky's book The Voice of Silence: The Story of the Jewish Underground in the USSR (Academic Studies Press, 2021) is the personal story of an underground Hebrew teacher in the communist Soviet Union who was sentenced to prison after false claims by the KGB. He kept a hunger strike for 207 days to draw international solidarity. But his book is more than exotic memoir literature. It is a vivid, touching and thoughtful account of his Jewish spiritual growth, a painful discovery of the most subtle inner aspects of faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots in Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--And What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023). Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country--communities of which Onishi was once a part--to ignite a cold civil war? Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture that birthed a movement and has taken a dangerous turn. In taut and unsparing prose, Onishi traces the migration of many White Christians to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in what is known as the American Redoubt. Learning the troubling history of the New Religious Right and the longings and logic of White Christian nationalism is deeply alarming. It is also critical for preserving the shape of our democracy for years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narratives often identified as Hindu. Suitable for beginning students and the general reader. Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Can concepts drawn from music theory help us to understand homiletics, the study of preaching? In Sermons that Sing: Music and the Practice of Preaching (IVP Academic, 2021) Noel A. Snyder considers how preaching that seeks to engage hearts and minds might be helpfully informed by musical theory—so that preachers might craft sermons that sing. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

It is traditional to think we should praise Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice his son as proof of his love for God. But have we misread the point of the story? Is it possible that a careful reading of Genesis 22 could reveal God was not pleased with Abraham's silent obedience? Widely respected biblical theologian, creative thinker, and public speaker J. Richard Middleton suggests we have misread and misapplied the story of the binding of Isaac and shows that God desires something other than silent obedience in difficult times. Middleton focuses on the ethical and theological problem of Abraham's silence and explores the rich biblical tradition of vigorous prayer, including the lament psalms, as a resource for faith. Middleton also examines the book of Job in terms of God validating Job's lament as "right speech," showing how the vocal Job provides an alternative to the silent Abraham. Abraham's Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Baker Academic, 2021) provides a fresh interpretation of Genesis 22 and reinforces the church's resurgent interest in lament as an appropriate response to God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Narasimha is one of the least studied major deities of Hinduism. Furthermore, there are limited studies of the history, thought, and literature of middle India. Lavanya Vemsani redresses this by exploring a range of primary sources, including classical Sanskrit texts (puranas and epics), and regional accounts (sthalapuranas). The latter include texts, artistic compositions, and oral folk stories in the regional languages of Telugu, Oriya, and Kannada. She also examines the historical context as well as contemporary practice. Hinduism in Middle India: Narasimha, The Lord of the Middle (Bloomsbury, 2022) offers a rich contribution to Hindu studies and Indian studies in general, and Vaishnava Studies and regional Hinduism in particular. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The issue of how science and religion relate to one another has been a major controversy of our age. It helped fuel the rise of the New Atheist movement in the early 21st century for example. It has also been a major area of contention within the growing field known as "Big History" that seeks the scientific study of the history of the entire universe. How can Big History and religion truly relate to one another, are they inevitably hostile or perhaps do we need to rethink our established paradigms to truly grasp this subject? To discuss this and much more is Lowell Gustafson, editor of Science, Religion, and Deep Time (Routledge, 2022) alongside Barry H. Rodrigue and David Blanks. Lowell Gustafson is currently a member of the International Big History Association (IBHA) Board, IBHA Treasurer, Associate Editor of the Journal of Big History, and editor of Origins: The Bulletin of the IBHA. He earned his PhD in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1984 and has been on the Political Science faculty of Villanova University since 1986. Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long (T&T Clark: 2020), provides a wide-ranging survey and analysis of the Christian Church. This foundational text explores the scriptural foundations of ecclesiology, historical and confessional aspects of the topic, contemporary and topical themes. Compiled and written by leading scholars in the field, this accessible volume covers a range of key topics in the context of their development and importance in each stream of historic Christianity and the confessional traditions. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of race and religion together created identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and its diasporas. When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the problem, they imported indentured “coolie” laborers, Hindus and a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent. Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917. The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies—where Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for work and worship—and ranges to present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas. Aisha Khan focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which are racialized as “African” and “Indian” despite the diversity of their participants. Obeah, a catch-all Caribbean term for sub-Saharan healing and divination traditions, was associated in colonial society with magic, slave insurrection, and fraud. This led to anti-obeah laws, some of which still remain in place. Hosay developed in the West Indies from Indian commemorations of the Islamic mourning ritual of Muharram. Although it received certain legal protections, Hosay’s mass gatherings, processions, and mock battles provoked fears of economic disruption and labor unrest that led to criminalization by colonial powers. The proper observance of Hosay was debated among some historical Muslim communities and continues to be debated now. In a nuanced study of these two practices, Aisha Khan sheds light on power dynamics through religious and racial identities formed in the context of colonialism in the Atlantic world, and shows how today these identities reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition. Aisha Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on the ways that race and religion intersect in the Atlantic world, particularly in the production of identities and political culture. Her work also is concerned with Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, indenture as a system of labor, the carceral state, and the prison industrial complex. She has published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her other books include Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2004) and Islam and the Americas (University Press of Florida, 2015). She has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. 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 we speak to Patrick Beldio, academic professor, sculptor, devotee of Mehar Baba and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, about the intersection of theology and religious studies in his work. We discuss the nuances of the scholar-practitioner model of scholarship and how one can approach an integral pedagogy from this perspective. Stephen and I read a chapter from Patrick’s upcoming book Mirra Alfassa: Divine Mother and Child of Tomorrow, titled Spiritual Dualite: Mirra’s Intellectual and Spiritual Influence on Sri Aurobindo, and we discuss with Patrick how he approached building a methodology for this work. The conversation explores the deep rooted Western influences in the formation of Integral Yoga and cross-cultural approaches to symbology in the Mother’s life. We end by briefly discussing Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vision of the supramental manifestation and the transformation of the human into a radially new androgynous sexless being. Patrick Beldio is a scholar of comparative religion and theology with a focus on Hindu-Christian studies, the Integral Yoga of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Meher Baba and the Chishti Sufi lineage in the West, and Franciscan Spirituality, with sub-interests in art, gender, and sustainability studies. His current book project is Mirra Alfassa: Mother & Child of the Divine of Tomorrow (working title), which critically analyzes the role and influence of Mirra (aka the Mother, 1878-1973) on the Integral Yoga that she and Aurobindo Ghose (aka Sri Aurobindo, 1872-1950) co-created. The book evaluates Mirra’s influence on Aurobindo’s spiritual practice and teaching and critically describes the nature of their relationship, intellectually and spiritually. It also focuses on how Aurobindo influenced Mirra’s teaching in Pondicherry, India and how she developed their yoga tradition after his passing and then explores her relevance today. Beldio is also a professional sacred artist with a studio at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC. His sculptures are in private and public collections across the USA. www.reunionstudios.com The EWP Podcast credits East-West Psychology Podcast Website Connect with EWP: Website • Youtube • Facebook Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP adjunct faculty, program manager) and Jonathan Kay (PhD student, EWP assistant) Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay Edited and Mixed by: Jonathan Kay Introduction music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala Music at the end of the episode: Sound - Space Entanglement (4x + 1), from becoming - song: contemplative transnomadic sono - fictioning by Jonathan Kay Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Don't Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy (U Notre Dame Press, 2022), Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom. Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlid, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtihad, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlid,” according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought. Peter Adamson is professor of philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has broadened that framework radically to encompass the understanding that religions are fundamentally embodied, material forms of practice. The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (UNC Press, 2021) shows readers how to study what has come to be termed material religion—the ways religious meaning is enacted in the material world. Material religion includes the things people wear, eat, sing, touch, look at, create, and avoid. It also encompasses the places where religion and the social realities of everyday life, including gender, class, and race, intersect in physical ways. This interdisciplinary approach brings religious studies into conversation with art history, anthropology, and other fields. In the book, Morgan lays out a range of theories, terms, and concepts and shows how they work together to center materiality in the study of religion. After integrating carefully curated visual evidence, Morgan then applies these ideas and methods to case studies across various religious traditions, modeling step-by-step analysis and emphasizing the importance of historical context. The Thing about Religion will be an essential tool for experts and students alike. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Whenever we reach for our phones or scan a newspaper to get caught up, we are being not merely informed but also formed. News consumption can shape our sense of belonging, how we judge the value of our lives, and even how our brains function. Christians mustn't let the news replace prayer as Hegel envisioned, but neither should we simply discard the daily feed. We need a better understanding of what the news is for and how to read it well. Jeffrey Bilbro invites readers to take a step back and gain some theological and historical perspective on the nature and very purpose of news. In Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News (IVP Academic, 2021) he reflects on how we pay attention, how we discern the nature of time and history, and how we form communities through what we read and discuss. Drawing on writers from Thoreau and Dante to Merton and Berry, along with activist-journalists such as Frederick Douglass and Dorothy Day, Bilbro offers an alternative vision of the rhythms of life, one in which we understand our times in light of what is timeless. Throughout, he suggests practices to counteract common maladies tied to media consumption in order to cultivate healthier ways of reading and being. When the news sets itself up as the light of the world, it usurps the role of the living Word. But when it helps us attend together to the work of Christ--down through history and within our daily contexts--it can play a vital part in enabling us to love our neighbors. Reading the Times is a refreshing and humane call to put the news in its place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and government pensions. Their political allies used the fabricated plot as a tool to undermine the ministry of Thomas Lord Danby and replace him themselves. The result was the trial and execution of over a dozen innocent Catholics, and the imprisonment of many more, some of whom died in custody.  In Hoax: The Popish Plot that Never Was (Yale University Press, 2022), Victor Stater examines the Popish Plot in full, arguing that it had a profound and lasting significance on British politics. He shows how Charles II emerged from the crisis with credit, moderating the tempers of the time, and how, as the catalyst for the later attempt to deny James II his throne through parliamentary action, it led to the birth of two-party politics in England. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How can we understand the processes through which political leaders, god-men, stars of all kinds, and big or small deities mingle together in the public sphere? And what are the consequences of deifying politicians, or opening politics to the gods? In this episode, we discuss South Asian politicians who are treated like gods, and gods who enter politics. We focus, in other words, on political deification, a phenomenon that is in display across South Asia, but also beyond. In India, both national and regional parties work to reclaim the symbols of Hinduism, in order to compete with the discourse and politics of Hindu Nationalism, espoused by the incumbent government. As a result, both Hindu nationalism and its counter-cultures are now squarely placed in the domain of religious symbols, mythological narratives, and deified political figures. Similarly, deified and martyred figures of past conflicts now serve as national icons that cohere the polity in both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Moumita Sen, Michael Stausberg, Praskanva Sinharay and Sharika Thiranagama to discuss the phenomenon of political deification in South-Asia. Their discussion draws on a new thematic issue of the journal Religion, edited by Sen and Nielsen: Religion, volume 52, number 4. Moumita Sen is an associate professr of Culture Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society. Michael Stausberg is editor in chief of the journal Religion and professor of the Study of Religion at the University of Bergen. Praskanva Sinharay is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and also a Research Consultant with the Election Commission of India. Sharika Thiranagama is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Ágúst Magnússon about his new book Kierkegaard and Eastern Orthodox Thought: A Comparative Philosophical Analysis (Gorgias Press, 2019). Throughout the years, there has been an extensive engagement with the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard from the perspective of Western philosophy and theology. Kierkegaard's thought has been examined through the lenses of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, existentialism, post-modernism, feminism, and literary theory, to name just a few. Scholars have also offered fruitful comparative analyses of Kierkegaard's work in relation to Asian philosophical and religious traditions such as Buddhism. It is therefore surprising that the engagement between Kierkegaard's philosophy and that of Eastern Orthodox philosophy and thought has heretofore been minimal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Professor Martin’s A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (Yale, 2022) is a survey of Early Modern European history from the Age of Discovery to the French Revolution with two important distinctions. First, Professor Martin views modernity through the enduring dream of the Apocalypse (which he calls the “stamp of modernity,” 250); second, he compares the Christian philosophy of the Apocalypse to the views of the two other great European religious traditions in this era—Judaism and Islam. The result is a magisterial survey of the age that presents familiar stories examined from a new angle. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike understood the rapidly-changing, modern world they shared in terms of their common Abrahamic faith with its messianic elements, or “Apocalyptic Braid” (13). And, in addition, Christian Habsburgs and Muslim Ottomans entertained competing narratives of World Empire contested on continental battlefields and in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in literature. The Beautiful Ending ultimately was both the balm for the terrible uncertainties of the age but also a motivation for the modern Europeans to shape their own destiny—a motivation that Professor Martin argues has remained with us until today—“the idea that we are not simply made by history but also make history continues to stem from faith, and it matters little whether or not this faith is religious” (247). John Jeffries Martin is a historian of early modern Europe at Duke University. He specializes in social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), which won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), as well as this book, A Beautiful Ending. He is the author of over 50 articles and essays and several edited volumes, including The Renaissance World (2007). After recording this interview about history for the New Books in History Podcast, Krzysztof Odyniec and John Jeffries Martin recorded a second conversation about Apocalypse from the Early Modern period to the present day for the Almost Good Catholics podcast; the link is here. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. His forthcoming book is Diplomacy at the Edges of Empires: Johannes Dantiscus in Spain, 1519-1352 (published by Brepols). He also hosts and produces the Almost Good Catholics podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What can we know about ourselves and the world through the sense of touch and what are the epistemic limits of touch? Scepticism claims that there is always something that slips through the epistemologist's grasp.  A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism (de Gruyter, 2021) explores the significance of touch for the history of philosophical scepticism as well as for scepticism as an embodied form of subversive political, religious, and artistic practice. Drawing on the tradition of scepticism within nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume discusses how the sense of touch uncovers contradictions within our knowledge of ourselves and the world. It questions 1) what we can know through touch, 2) what we can know about touch itself, and 3) how our experience of touching the other and ourselves throws us into a state of doubt. This volume is intended for students and scholars who wish to reconsider the experience of touching in intersections of philosophy, religion, art, and social and political practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture (Cornell UP, 2022), Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Micha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engaged in Tikkun Olam – fixing the world – locally and globally. Tevel B’Zedek provides community development support for sustainable agriculture in remote rural areas. Odenheimer is an activist and former journalist who reported from worldwide locations including Somalia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. Born in California and educated at Yale, Odenheimer is an ordained Orthodox rabbi for whom reducing global poverty is a religious imperative. Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but hundreds of millions of people still go hungry. After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise today, reportedly affecting nearly 10% percent of people globally. The growing food crisis is driven largely by wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America.  Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. To nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers who invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. And a Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms. Telling these stories and many more, Michael Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire follows interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turn asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage. Michael Francis Laffan is professor of history and Paula Chow Chair in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (2011) as well as the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (2017). Kelvin Ng co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Tamara Fernando co-hosted the episode. She is a Past & Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and an incoming assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook University. Her present book project, Of Mollusks and Men, is a history of pearl diving across the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar and the Mergui archipelago. She is interested in histories of science, environment, and labour across the Indian Ocean. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at PrincetonUniversity, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his fascinating and painstakingly research new book Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2022), the noted scholar of Islam Yohanan Friedmann details the religious thought and political movements of multiple actors who made messianic claims in premodern and modern Islam, spanning sites including South Asia, North Africa, and the Sudan. Over the course of this book, we learn extensively about a range of less known intellectual traditions-in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu-on questions of messianism and apocalypse in Muslim thought and history. Centered on the lives, messianic claims and aspirations, as well as the tensions and contradictions hovering over some of the most prominent Muslim actors across time and space, Friedmann highlights with glistening brilliance the importance of messianism to Sunni Islam. Throughout the book, Friedmann unleashes his signature prowess of presenting unexpected, finely grained, and yet eminently accessible readings of an encyclopedic reservoir of difficult texts and sources. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Darrel Perkins new book The End is at Hand (Feral House, 2022) is a collection of short essays about how people throughout history believe the world could end. The book explores how it has all ended before, when we mistakenly thought it would end again, and the many ways it could end in the future. Though organized chronologically, beginning with prehistoric extinctions and extending in the distant future when the universe may (or may not) collapse. Nothing lasts forever, including the worlds we inhabit – human society, our planet, or the entire universe. The End is at Hand entertains as much as it informs, striking a balance of wry humor with scientifically backed research. Perkins complements these cataclysmic tales with finely crafted linocut illustrations that beautifully evoke impending doom. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over. Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society's foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit's personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole--an attitude that helps explain the Society's widespread appeal from its first days. Focusing on the Jesuits' own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age (Harvard UP, 2022) offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code--a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022) will recognize exactly what that means. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Martin Fárek's India in the Eyes of Europeans: Conceptualization of Religion in Theology and Oriental Studies (Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2021) is centred around the claim that although the research in Oriental and religious studies seemingly presents unbiased, objective interpretations of Indian traditions, it really puts forward distorted images which primarily reflect the researchers’ own European culture. A thorough examination demonstrates to what extent Oriental studies as well as other humanities are still influenced by theological preconceptions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms to expose “ecologies of interpretation” in both nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholarship and Inner Asian monastic cultures. Although Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Foguoji) is a fifth-century CE travelogue about the Chinese Buddhist monk’s journey into Central and South Asia, it later became the subject of Europe’s first study of “Buddhist Asia” in the nineteenth century in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Relation des Royaumes Bouddhiques, which was then translated from French into Mongolian by the Buryat scholar Dorji Banzarov, and then by the Mongolian monk Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin from Mongolian into Tibetan. Tracing this fascinating history of trans-Eurasian circulation of knowledge production, King argues that “the circulatory history of Faxian’s Record is not simply about Buddhist Asia forged in Europe into other places that were not Europe,” rather, the story is organized “by a chain of site-specific and differing orientations to knowledge itself – of treatments for traces of the past, of methodology.” In six creatively organized chapters, King discusses first discusses how Faxian’s Record “orders time by means of space” in its early Chinese context, and then delves into the history of Orientalist Buddhist Studies showing how Abel-Rémusat’s “poaching” of Qing sources facilitated the disciplining of Buddhist Asia into an object of a transregional science. In Chapters 3 and 5, we see an inversion of the Orientalist gaze and learn about the reception and reinterpretation of Orientalist scholarship among the “Oriental” subjects themselves, who attempted to make sense of Buddhist history, geography, and Asia’s place and time in the world through Faxian’s Record, via Abel-Rémusat’s translation and scholarship. Here, King shows us that Abel-Rémusat’s science of Buddhist Asia was turned, or rather silenced, into chö-jung (history of the Dharma). Unlike models from world history and transcultural studies that tend to focus on movement, contact, and exchange, In the Forest of the Blind instead focuses innovatively on connected but place-bound interpreters who hardly knew of each other and “who began anew from the silence of analytical practices staged elsewhere.” As an example of an “anti-field history,” this book, in King’s words, attempts “not to look past the fetish of the subject, but to find the disciplinary implications of centerless, overlapping, and mutually incomprehensible relations of knowledge-power that are coproductive but unbeholden to any specific relation of force (such as colonizer/colonized).” The aim of the book, King explains, is “to imagine new disciplinary futures in Buddhist and Asian studies by implicating the disciplinary present in a more diverse, global, subversive, and dispersed disciplinary past that is more attentive to negative space and absence than to impact or influence.” Ending the book with a complete, annotated English translation of the Tibetan version of Faxian’s Record, which was translated from a Mongolian translation of the French translation of the Chinese original, In the Forest of the Blind provides the readers with rich notes about continuities and discrepancies across all four trans-Eurasian versions. Matthew King is an Associate Professor in Transnational Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dehumanization has led to serious misinterpretation of the Gospels. On the one hand, Christians have often made Jesus so much more than human that it seemed inappropriate to ask about the influence other human beings had on him, male or female. On the other hand, women have been treated as less than fully human, their names omitted from stories and their voices and influence on Jesus neglected.  When we ask the question this book does--what did Jesus learn from women?--puzzling questions that have frustrated readers of the Gospels throughout history suddenly find solutions. Weaving cutting edge biblical scholarship together with an element of historical fiction and a knack for writing for a general audience, James McGrath makes the stories of women in the New Testament come alive, and sheds fresh light on the figure of Jesus as well. What Jesus Learned from Women (Cascade Books, 2021) is a must read for scholars, students, and anyone else interested in Jesus and/or in the role of ancient women in the context of their times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Evan Haefeli tells a more complex story in Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662 (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In this ambitious contribution to the origins of American religious tolerance, Haefeli argues that religious diversity was rarely the hoped-for goal of English expansion in the Atlantic. Rather, toleration arose of necessity from the collapse of political control over the English state church in the highly contested landscape of early modern religious conflict. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Athena Itonia: Geography and Meaning of an Ancient Greek War Goddess (Brill, 2019) Gerald V. Lalonde offers a comparative study of the social, political and military aspects of the cult of Athena Itonia and its propagation among the four regions of ancient Greece where major evidence has come to light. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What is the function and meaning of the Kābôd of the LORD in the Old Testament, and how is it integral to the Book of Ezekiel especially? Pieter de Vries takes a canonical and synchronic approach to these questions, demonstrating that in Ezekiel "kābôd" is used almost exclusively as a hypostasis of YHWH.  Tune in as we speak with Pieter de Vries about his monograph, The Kābôd of YHWH in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to the Book of Ezekiel (Brill, 2015). Pieter de Vries is assistant professor of biblical theology and hermeneutics at Free University of Amsterdam. He is also a scholar of Christian doctrine, with a thesis on John Owen. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Christianity is now a majority-global South religion, with more believers living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America than in Europe and North America. However, most Americans have little exposure to Christians around the world. In addition, the United States is still the country that sends the most international missionaries. While many American churches support missionaries overseas, they may not understand the beliefs, practices, histories, and challenges Christians' experience abroad. Gina Zurlo's book Global Christianity: A Guide to the World's Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Zondervan Academic, 2022) is an accessible quick-reference guide to the global church. Filled with at-a-glance maps and charts, it puts relevant and up-to-date information into the hands of churches, mission organizations, and individuals. Useful for prayer, missions, outreach, and study of the global church, this is the new standard resource on the world's largest religion. Understand Christianity within each continent, country, tradition, and movement with: - Current demographic information from the United Nations - Research from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity - A focus on historical, sociological, political, and religious contexts - "Things to consider" within each local context, such as political conflicts, church-state relations, religious freedom, gender equality, education, health, economics, and climate change. This resource will satisfy those looking for background on the global church and equip individuals and churches to strategically pray for, give to, and unite with fellow Christians around the world. Byung Ho Choi is a PhD candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (Harvard UP, 2022) tells the story of Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic who introduced the West to yoga and to a tolerant, scientifically minded universalist conception of religion. Ruth Harris explores the many legacies of Vivekananda's thought, including his impact on anticolonial movements and contemporary Hindu nationalism. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

John Behr's book John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford UP, 2021) brings three different kinds of readers of the Gospel of John together with the theological goal of understanding what is meant by Incarnation and how it relates to Pascha, the Passion of Christ, how this is conceived of as revelation, and how we speak of it. The first group of readers are the Christian writers from the early centuries, some of whom (such as Irenaeus of Lyons) stood in direct continuity, through Polycarp of Smyrna, with John himself. In exploring these writers, John Behr offers a glimpse of the figure of John and the celebration of Pascha, which held to have started with him. The second group of readers are modern scriptural scholars, from whom we learn of the apocalyptic dimensions of John's Gospel and the way in which it presents the life of Christ in terms of the Temple and its feasts. With Christ's own body, finally erected on the Cross, being the true Temple in an offering of love rather than a sacrifice for sin. An offering in which Jesus becomes the flesh he offers for consumption, the bread which descends from heaven, so that 'incarnation' is not an event now in the past, but the embodiment of God in those who follow Christ in the present. The third reader is Michel Henry, a French Phenomenologist, whose reading of John opens up further surprising dimensions of this Gospel, which yet align with those uncovered in the first parts of this work. This thought-provoking work brings these threads together to reflect on the nature and task of Christian theology. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own.  In Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

rom the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (U Chicago Press, 2019), by Dr. Peter Coviello offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism. Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in American literature and queer theory. His research considers the entangled histories of intimacy and empire in nineteenth-century America, with particular attention to questions of secularism, biopolitics, and sex. His books include Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia UP 2013) and Long Players (Penguin 2018, a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018. His work has appeared in a range of academic journals as well as magazines and reviews. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. @carrielynnland carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical.  Vibha Joshi's book A Matter of Belief: Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India (Berghahn Books, 2012) focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness, and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Raj Balkaran speaks with Jacqui Hargreaves & Ruth Westoby about SOAS’ exciting new online learning platform: Yoga Studies Online. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, Aubrey Thamann and Kalliopi M. Christodoulaki's edited volume Beyond the Veil: Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying (Berghahn Books, 2021) explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are the Afghan Taliban now unbeatable? They have had two remarkable victories, first seeing off the Soviets and then the Americans. But while Afghans may be prepared to fight for them, do they actually want to live under them? And what kind of government have they formed? Join this conversation between Owen Bennett Jones and Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid whose book Taliban: The Power of Militant Islam in Afghanistan and Beyond became an international best seller. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (MIT Press, 2022), Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it, we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). Levy contends that we need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergirds the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit. Second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms. Bringing Donald Davidson’s philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that to understand religions, we must take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction, and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The etrog is a curious fruit. The Bible commands its readers: “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day beautiful tree-fruit (peri etz hadar), palm fronds, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” Native to the Far East and adapted to the culture of the eastern Mediterranean, the rituals of the etrog are among the very few that are dependent upon a particular environment for growth. In their wanderings across the globe, the etrog has remained part of Jews’ practices and of the annual rhythms of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, the Feast of Booths.  This book is a lovely collection, both intellectually and visually, covering everything from the sale of etrog throughout its history to visual representations, medical remedies and much more. This interview is with Joshua Teplitsky, Jordan Katz, and Jonathan Surnow. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals.  In The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022), Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race. Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer Zitkála-Sá, who proudly claimed the label of "heathen" for themselves. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard UP, 2022) thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tenzan Eaghll and Rebekka King's Representing Religion in Film (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between religion, film, and ideology. It shows how religion is imagined, constructed, and interpreted in film and film criticism. The films analyzed include The Last Jedi, Terminator, Cloud Atlas, Darjeeling Limited, Hellboy, The Revenant, Religulous, Earth, and The Secret of my Success. Each chapter offers: - an explanation of the particular representation of religion that appears in film - a discussion of how this representation has been interpreted in film criticism and religious studies scholarship - an in-depth study of a Hollywood or popular film to highlight the rhetorical, social, and political functions this representation accomplishes on the silver screen - a discussion about how similar analysis might be pursued for other films of a similar genre, topic, or theme. Written in an accessible style, and focusing on Hollywood and popular cinema, this book will be of interest to both movie lovers and experts alike. Listeners might be interested in Tenzan Eaghll's podcast "Fascism in Cinema."  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it. Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat.  Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), written by Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2022. In this rich and insightful book, Dr. O’Dell takes us through her own spiritual and physical travels, as well as gives us historical and Islamic mystic context to help us understand and cherish the words of Rumi on a deeper level. As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualizing his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily Jane O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes in Istanbul. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi’s classic work. At the heart of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love” which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gift of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. In The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön: A Woman of Power and Privilege (U Washington Press, 2022), Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun's disciple Gyurmé Ösel, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their position in gendered contexts, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities.  Mingyur Peldrön's story challenges the dominant paradigms of women in religious life and adds nuance to our ideas about the history of gendered engagement in religious institutions. Her example serves as a means for better understanding of how gender can be both masked and asserted in the search for authority—operations that have wider implications for religious and political developments in eighteenth-century Tibet. In its engagement with Tibetan history, this study also illuminates the relationships between the Geluk and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism from the eighteenth century, to the nonsectarian developments of the nineteenth century. The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön is available for free open-access download here.  Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, politics, and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light.  In The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2017), Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the church in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the church's relationship with the Jewish community in Romania, with Judaism, and with the state of Israel, as well as the extent to which the church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa's highly original analysis illuminates how the church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sara Brown and Stephen Smith have edited a much needed and fascinating compilation of essays on the intersection of religion and mass atrocity. Their intent is not to theorize the relationship, but rather to explore how religious faith, institutions and leaders have participated in, resisted and remembered genocide and mass violence.  The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (Routledge, 2021) is notable for both for its regional and chronological breadth. There are several essays on the Holocaust, as one would expect. But contributions range from mass violence in the Roman world to the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and from the Abrahamic religions to Buddhism, animism and other faith traditions. Most notable are essays that look at how changing understandings of genocide and mass atrocities reshape our understanding of the role of religious beliefs and institutions (see especially the section on colonial violence). But readers can learn much from each section of this fine volume. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant professor of Religion at UNC Chapel Hill and holds a PhD from Yale. In Hidden Caliphate, Ziad offers an incredibly rich, fascinating, and detailed study of Sufi networks. These are expansive networks that span a wide array of geography, from Afghanistan to China to Siberia. Challenging dominant and often simplistic narratives of the region, reduced to the story of the Great Game, the book centers on the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order, the hidden caliphate in Ziad's title, who play instrumental roles in shaping the religious, social, political, and intellectual landscapes of Central and South Asia. Ziad shows that these networks stay alive well into the 20th century, in a period that other scholars have argued is one of decline, with their legacy and influence still alive today, embedded in everyday life and culture throughout the region. The book is a riveting telling of the mujaddidis’ impact on Muslim reformist movements and their responses to the decline of Muslim political power. In our discussion today, we talk about Ziad’s arguments and contributions. Some of the specific themes we cover in this discussion are Islamic sovereignty and kingship, millenarian eschatology, Sufis as scholars and scholars as Sufis, intellectuals, and teachers, Sufism’s connection with orthodoxy, parallels between Sufi training and Tantric Buddhist esoterism, the woman question in the book, and colonialism and its impact on the Mujaddidis. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Welcome to the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a well-earned and challenging summer filled with drought, war, political strife and ridiculous heat, we’re back in the saddle and raring to go with some intellectual stimulation aimed at the practicing life. Four episodes are lined up with Buddhist scholars, philosophers and practitioners. First off we have Jin Y. Park. She is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the American University and also served as Founding Director of the Asian Studies Program from 2013-2020. She specializes in East Asian Buddhism, Buddhist and comparative ethics, intercultural philosophy, and modern East Asian philosophy. We touch on Derrida, non-western philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, and two fascinating figures from Korea she has carried out research on; Kim Iryop and Pak Ch’iu, philosopher-practitioners well-worth taking a look at for their unique engagement with Buddhism. Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Maria Berbara, illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions—expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images—and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The intricacies of imperialism and colonialism within the context of the Bible are nuanced and varied. Understanding the legacy of European Imperialism requires careful reflection of the Bible’s affinity with the empire and concentration of power. In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Steed Vernyl Davidson, author of Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective (Brill, 2017) elaborates on the ambiguities of the Bible as an anti-imperial tool and his work in tracing the evolution of the Bible from its production in ancient empires to its role in the development of modern imperialism. The book sets the context within which further exploration of postcolonial biblical critical work can take place and lays out the challenges of intersectional work with queer studies, terrorism studies, technology, and ecological studies as future tasks. Summary: A discussion on the interpretations of the Bible as a tool of colonialism and imperialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In For the Faith, Against the State: Old Calendarism in Romania (1924-1936)* (De Gruyter, 2022), Andreea Kaltenbrunner uses Old Calendarism, a movement of orthodox believers against the introduction of a new church calendar, to show that the formation of the state and nation in "Greater Romania" also produced tensions among ethnic Romanians living in Bessarabia, which had been ruled by the the Russian Empire before 1919. While the new calendar was intended to signal Romania's symbolic orientation to the West, Old Calendarists perceived it as an imposed modernization and a departure from right-wing beliefs. The author examines the development of Old Calendarism and its suppression in the autumn of 1936 by the Romanian gendarmerie. The official church and the state lacked the initiatives and means to win peasants in the east of the country over to their Westernizing project. The price for the implementation of the symbolic reform was the turning away of the rural population of Bessarabia from the new state and from the official church, causing the to organize themselves through local networks and new religious movements. *Für den Glauben, gegen den Staat: Der Altkalendarismus in Rumänien (1924-1936) Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them. The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine, considers the spiritual journeys of family members and the ‘spiritual community’ of which he was a part, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Balkans where that community was based. Jamie Barnes considers three main elements: firstly, the role that sensory aspects of experience play in constituting one’s lived world and one’s ideas about the kinds of beings inhabiting it; secondly, how stories and metaphors are tactically employed, not only in the process of expressing aspects of past experience but also in shaping and forming both desired worlds and future pathways; thirdly, how such sensed, narrated and lived worlds are tentatively held together - in hope, trust and love – through charismatic relationships of devotion with a divine Other. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, d’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. Charles Devellennes looks at the religious, social, and political thought of the first four thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Pierre Bayle, Jean Meslier, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Denis Diderot to explicitly argue for atheism as a positive philosophy. He shows how atheism evolved considerably over the century that spans the works of these four authors: from the possibility of the virtuous atheist in the late 17th century, to a deeply rooted materialist philosophy with radical social and political consequences by the eve of the French revolution. The metamorphosis of atheism from a purely negative phenomenon to one that became self-aware had profound consequences for establishing an ethics without God and the rise of republicanism as a political philosophy. Charles Devellennes is a Senior Lecturer in Political and Social Thought at University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area of the history of political thought, specifically with eighteenth century political thought in the field of religion and politics, and the rise of atheism in France at this time. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. @carrielynnland carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction, and reception. In examining these fascinating sources of visual and material culture, Moerman argues for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism—one that compels us to recognize the role of the Buddhist geographic imaginary in a culture that encompassed multiple cartographic and cosmological world views. The contents and contexts of Japanese Buddhist world maps reveal the ambivalent and shifting position of Japan in the Buddhist world, its encounter and negotiation with foreign ideas and technologies, and the possibilities for a global history of Buddhism and science. Moerman’s visual and intellectual history traces the multiple trajectories of Japanese Buddhist world maps, beginning with the earliest extant Japanese map of the world: a painting by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk charting the cosmology and geography of India and Central Asia based on an account written by a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim-monk. He goes on to discuss the cartographic inclusion and marginal position of Japan, the culture of the copy and the power of replication in Japanese Buddhism, and the transcultural processes of engagement and response to new visions of the world produced by Iberian Christians, Chinese Buddhists, and the Japanese maritime trade. Later chapters explore the transformations in the media and messages of Buddhist cartography in the age of print culture and in intellectual debates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over cosmology and epistemology and the polemics of Buddhist science. The Japanese Buddhist World Map offers a wholly innovative picture of Japanese Buddhism that acknowledges the possibility of multiple and heterogeneous modernities and alternative visions of Japan and the world. D. Max Moerman is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea explores how practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, A Spiritual Revolution argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observers called a religious revolution. Embedded with lively portrayals of historical actors and vivid descriptions of political details,  A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) is the first large-scale effort to fully identify exactly how Western thought influenced the Russian Church. These new ideas played a foundational role in the emergence of the country as a modernizing empire and the rise of the Church hierarchy as a forward-looking agency of institutional and societal change. Ivanov addresses this important debate in the scholarship on European history, firmly placing Orthodoxy within the much wider European and global continuum of religious change. Andrey Ivanov, Associate professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Plattsville Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Phiroz Mehta, was a self-taught philosopher of religion who became the revered core figure of a universal religion and philosophy centred on concepts of existential freedom. Less well known than his contemporary and associate Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mehta nonetheless cultivated a significant following over some 25 years and influenced an early generation of yoga and meditation teachers and practitioners in the UK, as well as international New Age figures such as Fritjof Capra. His teachings centred on freedom in several ways: by focussing on the soteriologies of liberation in Indian religions, but also in the way that he combined teachings from Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism with Christianity, Judaism (specifically Kabbalah) and Daoism. He offered his tutees the freedom to practice philosophy and religion in whatever way they wished by drawing on a broad range of traditions concurrently. This talk hopes to raise further awareness about the unknown history of this compelling figure and his contribution to the cultural transmission of Indian concepts of spirituality to Britain. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Pilgrimage to the Museum: Man's Search for God through Art and Time (Sophia Institute Press, 2022), Stephen Auth takes you on a provocative and colorful journey through the history of Western art, interpreted through a lens of Christian spirituality -- appropriately so since, in Auth's view, much of Western art expresses humanity's search for God, the Divine Artist-Creator. Leaving all the art-history jargon behind, Auth will transport you in his spiritual time machine from Egypt's Old Kingdom, through Greece and Rome, to medieval Europe; from the age of the Renaissance, through the Ages of Exploration and Enlightenment; and from the rise of atheism in the late 1800s to the seeds of a spiritual rebirth in the modern era. Along the way, you will experience anew the masterpieces of many artists, from Polykleitos to Raphael, Duccio to Rembrandt, Monet to Picasso. Through the works of these great artists, you will discover how the various themes and motifs of man's spiritual struggle occur, morph, fade, and then reoccur centuries later. And you will never look at a work of art the same way again. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (including essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: A Feminist Critique (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity. Mary J. Magoulick is professor of English at Georgia College and State University. Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion--team sports--to reveal their surprising connections.  In Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022), Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, The Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means. Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

By its very nature, the ideals of religion entail sin and failure. Judaism has its own language and framework for sin that expresses themselves both legally and philosophically. Both legal questions―circumstances where sin is permissible or mandated, the role of intention and action―as well as philosophical questions―why sin occurs and how does Judaism react to religious crisis―are considered within this volume. This book will present the concepts of sin and failure in Jewish thought, weaving together biblical and rabbinic studies to reveal a holistic portrait of the notion of sin and failure within Jewish thought. The suffix "agogue" means to lead or grow. Here as well, Sin•a•gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2019) will provide its readers frameworks and strategies to develop even in the face of failure. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press, 2022), Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons. Ronis contextualizes the Talmud's thought within the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia, placing rabbinic thinking in conversation with Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac Christian, Zoroastrian, and Second Temple Jewish texts about demons to delve into the interactive communal context in which the rabbis created boundaries between the human and the supernatural, and between themselves and other religious communities. Demons in the Details explores the wide range of ways that the rabbis participated in broader discussions about beliefs and practices with their neighbors, out of which they created a profoundly Jewish demonology. Sara Ronis is Associate Professor of Theology at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022), Mohamed Abdou reimagines the parameters of political Islam and the possibilities of anarchistic interpretation of Islam and Islamic interpretation of anarchism, which is conceptualized as “Anarcha-Islam.” Rooted in the hermeneutical tradition of the Qur’an, the study draws from radical Indigenous, Black, Islamic anarchistic, and social movements discourses, as well as BIPOC and Queer thought. In outlining the commitments of anarcha-Islam, the book covers topics of non-authoritarian structures of governmentality, non-capitalist approaches to property and caretaking, and approaches to self-defensive violence. The book will be of use to scholars who think and teach on Qur’anic hermeneutics, political Islam, social movements, critical race studies, and decolonial approaches to Islam and Muslim communities. The book is also written particularly for activists on the ground involved in social movements and organizing. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion's fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers' understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists' understanding of the past. As I say in the interview, Buddhist Historiography in China (Columbia University Press, 2022) is one of those that you hope exists out there somewhere, and are delighted when you find out it does! This book is highly recommended not only for those with a keen interest in Buddhism and Chinese history, but also those fascinated by questions of historiography and temporarily more broadly.  Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael S. Allen's book The Ocean of Inquiry: Niscaldas and the Premodern Origins of Modern Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on a single remarkable work and its place within that history: "The Ocean of Inquiry," a vernacular compendium of Advaita Vedåanta by the North Indian monk Niâscaldåas (ca. 1791 - 1863). Though not well known today, Niâscaldåas's work was once referred to by Vivekananda (himself a key figure in the shaping of modern Hinduism) as the most influential book in India. The present book situates "The Ocean of Inquiry" as a representative of both a neglected genre (vernacular Vedåanta) and a neglected period (ca. 17th-19th centuries) in the history of Indian philosophy. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1988, Sandi and Larry Zobrest sued a suburban Tucson, Arizona, school district that had denied their hearing-impaired son a taxpayer-funded interpreter in his Roman Catholic high school. The Catalina Foothills School District argued that providing a public resource for a private, religious school created an unlawful crossover between church and state. The Zobrests, however, claimed that the district had infringed on both their First Amendment right to freedom of religion and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest V. Catalina Foothills School District (U Illinois Press, 2020), Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber use the Zobrests' story to examine the complex history and jurisprudence of disability accommodation and educational mainstreaming. They look at the family's effort to acquire educational resources for their son starting in early childhood and the choices the Zobrests made to prepare him for life in the hearing world rather than the deaf community. Dierenfield and Gerber also analyze the thorny church-state issues and legal controversies that informed the case, its journey to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the impact of the high court's ruling on the course of disability accommodation and religious liberty. D​​​​avid A. Gerber taught American History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) from 1971 to his retirement in 2012. He was founding Director of the Center for Disability Studies at UB, and served in that capacity from 2009 through 2012. His interests in History have been grown over the course of years to encompass manifestations of personal and social identity in a wide variety of groups and individuals including during the course of his career: African Americans; American Jews; American Catholics; European immigrants, and people with disabilities. Bruce Dierenfield has long been interested in the history of American race relations, and has written a popular textbook on the civil rights movement and another on African-American leadership since enslavement. As Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor, Dierenfield organized the “African-American Experience,” led student trips to West Africa and the Deep South, and invited distinguished historians and many influential activists of the 1960s to speak on campus Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

We're being formed by our devices. Unpacking the soft tyranny of the digital age, Felicia Wu Song combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and theology as she considers digital practices through the lens of "liturgy" and formation. The book is called Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (IVP Academic: 2021). Exploring pathways of meaningful resistance found in Christian tradition, this resource offers practical experiments for individual and communal change. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life. This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew – not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In his monograph How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022), Sasha Senderovich finds this new cultural figure through close readings of post-1917 Russia/Yiddish literature, films, and reportage. Suddenly mobile after more than a century of restrictions under the tsars, Jewish authors created characters who traversed space and history, carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost world. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape. Sasha Senderovich is an Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Miriam Chorley-Schulz is the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Often represented as a tradition of ancient origins, Shugendō has retained a quality of mystery and nostalgia in the public imagination and scholars as the “original” champions of mountain asceticism.  In his monograph, A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi. By focusing on themes of narratives, institution, and ritual, Carter explores how the transmission of this complex religious system at Togakushi was not a natural phenomenon, but a conscious act by a practitioner from Mount Hiko. Using a variety of textual sources including origin stories (engi) and temple records, Carter demonstrates how the practitioners of Mount Togakushi utilize storytelling, institutional support, and ritual processes to not only provide legitimacy but also establish a foundation for Shugendō at Togakushi. With discussions on Shinto and women’s exclusion (nyonin kekkai), staple topics in Japanese religions, A Path Into the Mountains offers something for those interested in not just Shugendō but also Buddhism, mountain religions, and religious history. Raditya Nuradi is a Phd candidate at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1827 a young farmer named Joseph Smith was visited by an angel. The angel led him to a hillside where he uncovered a set of ancient gold plates written in strange characters in an ancient language. The translation of these plates became The Book of Mormon, a sacred text revered by members of the Latter-Day Saint movement, often known as Mormons. The Book of Mormon is a text with many similarities to the Bible. But it emerged in a very different context—19th century America. David Holland is a professor of American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. He is also the author of Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovative interpretations of scripture.  The women writers, from all denominations and beyond, of all political stripes and ethnic backgrounds, contribute their Torah to fill the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. This book reflects dramatic changes in the agency of women in the world of religious writings. The volume features a comprehensive introduction to Midrash for the uninitiated reader by the distinguished scholar Tamar Kadari and extensive annotation and commentary by Tamar Biala. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

You’ve seen hilarious videos of the evangelicals for Trump. You might be inclined to ignore them, mock their excesses, or dismiss their threat. But the evangelical right is a force to be reckoned with, even with Trump on his way out. So, who are these evangelicals? What do they believe? For years, evangelicals have been plotting a political course, a far-right “theology” that includes Christian nationalism and spiritual warfare. It’s paying off. And we need to understand why it works, and for whom. This is one of the first-ever episodes of Darts and Letters, originally released in late 2020. In it, you’ll hear the beginnings of one of our main subjects of study:the political philosophies of radical right-wing movements. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Silvia Schwarz Linder's Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya (Routledge, 2022) is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Since its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to a countrywide sociopolitical movement with representation in the Israeli legislature. But how did it get here? How does it differ from other Islamic movements in the region? Particularly, what are the differences and connections – if any – with Hamas? And why does its membership continue to grow? Tilde Rosmer examines these issues in The Islamic Movement in Israel (U Texas Press, 2022) as she tells the story of the movement, its identity, and its activities. Using interviews with movement leaders and activists, their documents, and media reports from Israel and beyond, she traces the movement’s history from its early days to its 1996 split over the issue of its relationship to the state. She then tell us how the two factions have functioned since, revealing that while leaders of the two branches have pursued different approaches to the state, until the outlawing of the Northern Branch in 2015, both remained connected and dedicated to providing needed social, education, and health services in Israel’s Palestinian towns and villages. The first book in English on this group, The Islamic Movement in Israel is a timely study about how an Islamist movement operates within the unique circumstances of the Jewish state that may also help the listeners to make sense of the upcoming Israeli elections. Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Liz Bucar is the Director of Sacred Writes, Professor of Religion, and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. Bucar is an expert in comparative religious ethics who has published on topics ranging from gender reassignment surgery to the global politics of modest clothing. Bucar’s current book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022), is on the ethics of religious appropriation. She is also the author of award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017). Bucar’s public scholarship includes bylines in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and Zocalo Public Square as well as several podcasts. She has a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter @BucarLiz. You can find an NBN podcast with Bucar talking about Pious Fashion here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

After its founding in 1540 by an aristocrat turned spiritualist turned intellectual, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus—or the Jesuits—established itself as one of the most influential and successful of all religious orders. The Jesuits were important in doctrine, politics, missionary work and of course education. At times they have been out of favour in the Vatican but they have produced a Pope too – Pope Francis. Markus Friedrich, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Hamburg, has written The Jesuits: A History (Princeton UP, 2022), a comprehensive and readable history of the Jesuits – it was originally published in 2016 and is now out in an English translation. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Throughout a hugely productive intellectual career spanning more than half a century, the Austrian-born philosopher Martin Buber returned repeatedly to the question of Israel’s divine election. Buber, who left Nazi Germany to settle in Mandatory Palestine in 1938, found in chosenness a historically enacted and contested concept that could either the world under divine kingship, or divide and alienate its different cultures and continents. In Humanity Divided: Martin Buber and the Challenges of Being Chosen, published by De Gruyter in 2021, Manuel Oliveira of Portuguese Catholic University calls upon more than 30 years of research to explore in depth Buber’s teleological concept of chosenness, and the strands of philosophy, theology, and history that shaped it. Professor Oliveira does more than this, however: he also brings unprecedented depth and scholarly acuity to bear on how chosenness has been infused with a poisonous nationalism. The author analyzes Buber’s increasing concern over the influence of Zionism on the co  ncept of chosenness, and his tireless work to ameliorate its nationalist and self-glorifying variants, by bringing to bear a vast range of sources and concepts that illuminate chosenness as, in the end, a sacred task and not an elite status. David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 2022), Dr. Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Dr. Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Robert Edmund Cotter's book John Cennick (1718-1755): Methodism, Moravianism and the Rise of Evangelicalism (Routledge, 2022) explores the life and spirituality of John Cennick (1718-1755) and argues for a new appreciation of the contradictions and complexities in early evangelicalism. It explores Cennick's evangelistic work in Ireland, his relationship with Count Zinzendorf and the creative tension between the Moravian and Methodist elements of his participation in the eighteenth-century revivals. The chapters draw on extensive unpublished correspondence between Cennick and Zinzendorf, as well as Cennick's unique diary of his first stay in the continental Moravian centres of Marienborn, Herrnhaag and Lindheim. A maverick personality, John Cennick is seen at the centre of some of the principal controversies of the time. The trajectory of his emergence as a prominent figure in the revivals is remarkable in its intensity and hybridity and brings into focus a number of themes in the landscape of early evangelicalism: the eclectic nature of its inspirations, the religious enthusiasm nurtured in Anglican societies, the expansion of the pool of preaching talent, the social tensions unleashed by religious innovations, and the particular nature of the Moravian contribution during the 1740s and 1750s. Offering a major re-evaluation of Cennick's spirituality, the book will be of interest to scholars of evangelical and church history. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Book of Esther has inspired and impacted the American project since its very inception. Rabbis and ethicists, abolitionists and artists, preachers and presidents, have understood the text to speak to their moment. It has offered solace to immigrants, forged solidarity, impacted politics, and, in the spirit of Esther 4:14, roused individuals to realize that deliverance was not to come from some other place, but from their own heroic actions on behalf of their people. Esther in America (Maddig, 2020) is a splendid collection of essays on the complex history of the Book of Esther in American — and particularly American Jewish — culture. Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern has assembled a range of essays from some of today's sharpest scholars. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

To Know the Soul of a People: Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk (Oxford UP, 2022) is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities. Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Journal of Black Religious Thought advances critical scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies – with special attention to Black religious studies, which includes and intersects, but not limited to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, New Testament, Intertestamental, Quran, theology, history, ethics, practical theology, religion-science, philosophy of religion, Black hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, womanist, intersectionality, cultural studies, among others – offering African American, African, and/or African Diaspora points of view. Dr. John Ahn is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Howard University School of Divinity. He is trained in ancient Near Eastern and Religious Studies. He specializes in the historical and social reconstructions of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE with interests to the first century CE. Dr. Ahn is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Black Religious Thought (Brill). Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza's co-written book An Anthology of Qur’anic Commentaries (vol. 2): On Women (Oxford UP, 2022) is a collection of historical and contemporary commentaries on the Qur’an. It covers five issues: human creation and the idea of “a single soul”; marital roles, specifically Qur’anic verse 4:34 and women’s status in a marriage; Mary, mother of Jesus; women’s legal testimony; and Qur’anic ideas of modesty, specifically of veiling. A chapter is devoted to each of these topics, comprising classical, medieval, modern, and contemporary interpretations of these verses. All chapters include various Muslim perspectives, such as Sunni, Twelver Shia, Ismaili, Ibadi, and Sufi; with the exception of the chapter on Mary, each chapter also includes interviews with contemporary scholars, namely amina wadud, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Fariba Alasvand, Yusuf Saanei, and Nasser Ghorbannia. The various and competing perspectives explored in this volume highlight the diversity and plurality of the Islamic exegetical tradition, portraying commentaries as a very human and engaging endeavor. These commentaries are always in conversation with the cultural and political milieu of the commentator’s time and place, but they also deeply honor the commentaries of past generations as a way to demonstrate authority and knowledge of the historical male tradition. The book also includes an important and powerful chapter, a prolegomenon, on the Qur’anic lexicon on women, which offers a chronological sequence of women in the Qur’an and which traces the development of the Qur’an’s worldview from the earliest Meccan revelations through the later Medinan period. So, for instance, in the early Meccan verses, women are addressed rather implicitly and largely as a part of an anti-pagan polemic, but by the later Medinan verses, women have emerged as active pious and social subjects. In this very engaging and enriching conversation with Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza, we discuss many of these issues and all of the chapters. We talk extensively about Qur’anic verse 4:34 on marital roles and responsibilities, about what it means to read the Qur’an literally—and is it even possible not to?—about tradition and tafsir and the limits of both, and about lived reality and religious authority. The interview was done in video format, and some listeners might enjoy watching it in its original form on my YouTube channel, What the Patriarchy. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From ancient myth to contemporary art and literature, a beguiling look at the many incarnations of the mischievous—and culturally immortal—god Pan. Pan—he of the cloven hoof and lustful grin, beckoning through the trees. From classical myth to modern literature, film, and music, the god Pan has long fascinated and terrified the western imagination. “Panic” is the name given to the peculiar feeling we experience in his presence. Still, the ways in which Pan has been imagined have varied wildly—fitting for a god whose very name the ancients confused with the Greek word meaning “all.” Part-goat, part-man, Pan bridges the divide between the human and animal worlds. In exquisite prose, Paul Robichaud explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. At times, Pan is a dangerous, destabilizing force; sometimes, a source of fertility and renewal. His portrayals reveal shifting anxieties about our own animal impulses and our relationship to nature. Always the outsider, he has been the god of choice for gay writers, occult practitioners, and New Age mystics. And although ancient sources announced his death, he has lived on through the work of Arthur Machen, Gustav Mahler, Kenneth Grahame, D. H. Lawrence, and countless others. Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion Books, 2021) traces his intoxicating dance. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Singing the Goddess Into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad (SUNY Press, 2022) demonstrates how folk narratives reflect local context while also actively working to upend social inequities based on caste and ritual/devotional practices. By delving into this world, the book helps us understand how a landscape is transformed through people's relationship with it and how this relationship helps build meaning for the communities that call it home. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Set against the backdrop of the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism in Eastern Europe, this book declares that Catholic theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals: socially and historically situated creators of national cultural traditions. While the Romanian government funds thriving schools for the country’s Hungarian minority, NGOs founded by Transylvanian Hungarians continue to organize volunteers to supplement this formal pedagogy. These volunteers understand themselves to be reviving a national tradition of “serving the people” by educating the region’s rural Hungarian populace. While this book is about the challenges Catholic educators face in teaching villagers, it is just as much about their new effort to call groups of volunteers from across the border in Hungary to teach alongside them. In these encounters, Transylvanian Hungarian educators remake their intellectual tradition, especially ideas about the basis of pedagogical authority, the ethical character of the nation, and the social location of selfhood. When contemporary Catholic intellectuals urge teachers to manifest their national self-consciousness, they carry with them the assumption that selfhood emerges where humans collaborate with God. While Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals are enmeshed in constant competition, by focusing on contemporary theologians Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania: Reforming Apostles (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) unmasks the struggle over the nature of divine presence that animates this revival of a Christian national tradition of intellectual service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I spoke to anthropologist William Mathews about his new book, Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination (Berghahn Books, 2021). This book explores how humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. Mathews explains the role that cognition plays in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

It is not terribly controversial to say that castration fear is one of the key conceptual engines driving the psychoanalytic project overall. Whether one thinks of it manifesting as a looming, retributive threat for incestuous longings or as a struggle to face one’s shortcomings, contending with what we are at risk of losing or what has already gone missing animates both the field and the consulting room. Imagine the profession if it didn’t contend with this subject: without castration we would have neither Oedipal conflict nor a theory of repression. As such, it is noteworthy to consider the paucity of writing about circumcision in psychoanalysis, especially when you remember that circumcision and castration both involve cutting male genitalia. And before you protest that a penis is not a testicle, it should not come as a surprise that in the unconscious the bits and bobs of male genitalia might not be represented as separately as they are in medical discourse—in the unconscious sometimes a penis is a scrotal sac and sometimes the balls include the dick. Jordan Osserman’s  Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery (Bloomsbury, 2022), approaches the subject of penile cutting née circumcision from myriad angles. It represents the pining of contemporary “intactivists” in search of lost foreskins and lost chances as both poignant if not also politically pregnant with neoliberal meaning. It fleshes out the pondering of St. Paul (of “love thy neighbor as thyself’ fame) on the importance of the unimportance of circumcision. It illuminates the ways in which what appears to be a fear of childhood sexuality run amok also belies a prurient interest in it. The discussion of 19th century American medicine’s invention of reflex theory, which employed circumcision to cure boys’ perceived ailments, investigates a mode of thinking that will be familiar to readers of feminist medical history of the same period. The removal of the foreskin and the removal of the uterus share a close, perhaps twinned, relationship. Osserman has written a book that invites the reader to see circumcision as a rite, experience, discourse and practice that offers itself up to unabashedly efflorescent and ambivalent readings. Is a penis without a foreskin more masculine because it lacks a flowery covering— think of tulip petals or better yet pansies strewn on the roadside? Or is a penis without a foreskin a tad castrated, having been bloodied, (and a tad envious—sorry Alice Cooper but not only women bleed) and so ultimately feminized? We are encouraged to wonder what might keep this practice—the world’s oldest surgery—in seemingly perpetual, if at times contested, circulation? What are the unconscious roots of the wish to cut penises anyway? I found myself a little surprised at how little I or others I know have given thought to the beautifully irrational reasons that underlie a surgical practice (performed the world over and without any singular religious allegiance as it ends up) laden with meaning and yet not medically necessary. What has given it such staying power? What unconscious conflicts might circumcision sate, if not actually resolve? In trying to answer these questions, I find myself asking if there is any relationship between circumcision and Freud’s idea that the repudiation of femininity functions as a kind of bedrock? What is bedrock is challenging to crack open (intellectually, philosophically) precisely because it is foundational. It is the ground upon which we stand. We fear fucking with it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Beyond Missio Dei: Contesting Mission, Rethinking Witness (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), Sarosh Koshy strives to go beyond the mission model of Christianity that emerged alongside and within the colonial enterprise and ethos since the sixteenth century. Rather than denouncing the inheritance of the mission movement that transformed both the church and world in innumerable ways, it is a simultaneous expression of appreciation for this precious heritage and an attempt to do justice to it through a yearning quest for relevant paradigms of Christian engagement. This work enlists postcolonial and poststructuralist resources pedagogically to reflect on mission, missiology, World Christianity, and intercultural theology. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This intimate and insightful account of the life of Dr. Harry (Hari) Dickman, referred to by Swami Sivananda as “the yogi of the West,” features more than fifty years of correspondence between Dickman and well-known yoga masters such as Swami Sivananda, Ramana Maharshi, Paramhansa Yogananda, and almost one hundred others. Marion (Mugs) McConnell, Dickman’s student, has created a brilliant and loving tribute to her teacher, who founded the Latvian Yoga Society in the early 1930s and later spread his knowledge in the U.S. with the blessings of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi.  Offering a broad range of information on yoga history, theory, and techniques from a variety of different paths, Letters from the Yoga Masters (North Atlantic Books, 2016) contains a treasure trove of previously unavailable material and presents detailed teachings about pranayama, mudras, diet, and much more, all interwoven with stories and personal anecdotes. Taken together, the rare correspondence and personal chronicles provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life of a yogi, the development of yoga in the West, and the ways that spiritual wealth is disseminated across generations. Some resources:  -SOYA (South Okanagan Yoga Academy) -Letters from the Yoga Masters -Yoga Masters playlist Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jordan Denari Duffner is an author and scholar of Muslim-Christian relations, interreligious dialogue, and Islamophobia. Jordan is currently pursuing a PhD in Theological and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. A former Fulbright scholar, she is also an associate of the Bridge Initiative, where she previously worked from 2014 to 2017 as a research fellow. Jordan’s writing on Islam and Catholicism has appeared in numerous outlets including TIME, The Washington Post, and America. This episode discusses her newest book Islamophobia: What Christians Should Know (and do) about Anti-Muslim Discrimination (Orbis, 2021) You can find her at JordanDenari.com and on twitter @JordanDenari. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Koushiki Dasgupta's Sadhus in Indian Politics: Dynamics of Hindutva (Sage, 2021) maps the changing face of contemporary Hindu politics, evaluating the influence of sadhus (ascetics) on the course of politics in India. This book explores the anxieties around ascetic engagement with public affairs, understanding politics as janaseva and polities as rajniti, and the authority exercised by these sadhus. It investigates the spirit of ‘individualism’ reflected by the sadhus in the organized and unorganized domains of politics, and traces the dialectics of ‘Hindutva’ reflected through selected case studies, exposing the patterns of how the sadhus got involved in the muddled world of politics. This book also demonstrates the uneasy conflict between the modern Hindu right wing and Hindu traditionalists with their advocacy of Sanatan Dharma. It turns towards sadhus and gurus to explore the ‘Hindu-ness’ of the Hindus and confronts the metanarrative of Hindutva offered by various institutions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Rabbi Ari Kahn’s The Crowns on the Letters: Essays on the Aggada and the Lives of the Sages (OU Press, 2020) represents a major achievement in the study of the lives of our Sages, as well as in the study of rabbinic Aggada. This work is an immensely learned and deeply creative interpretation of many fundamental aggadot relating to the intellectual biographies of the Tannaim and Amoraim, including Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan, and many others. Additionally, it covers aggadot dealing with major themes in Jewish thought, including the nature of the Oral Law, mysticism and its perils, the messianic era, teshuvah and Eretz Yisrael. Rabbi Kahn presents close readings of Talmudic and Midrashic sources about events in the lives of the Sages, together with the gamut of interpretations, especially those of Kabbalistic and Hasidic commentators, to arrive at original and compelling conclusions. His insights shed light on the Talmudic narrative as well as on broader philosophical questions. Full Hebrew sources are included to enable readers to study the source material on their own. For all those interested in rabbinic lives and rabbinic Aggada, The Crowns on the Letters is essential reading. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Compared to their Uyghur and Kazakh co-religionists in Xinjiang, China’s largest single Muslim group – the Hui – has received less media and scholarly attention lately, perhaps understandably so since the former groups have borne the brunt of the campaigns of ethnic enclosure and erasure launched in recent years by the Chinese Communist Party. But as a near-ubiquitous presence across China and thus a community deeply involved in the waves of migration and urbanisation affecting many PRC citizens in recent decades, the Hui offer a compelling case through which to examine how religious, ethnic, class and other identities intersect with these processes. Focusing on communities in four diverse Chinese cities, David Stroup’s Pure and True: The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims (U Washington Press, 2022) provides a careful dissection of the complex negotiations of intersecting identities that face today’s Hui. Based on dozens of interviews and ethnographic observation, this clearly written and persuasive book has much to say about how people’s day-to-day understandings of ‘Huiness’ intersect with the categories put forward by the state, and how local debates unfolding internally within Hui communities may be reframed as they themselves fall under the gaze of the ‘people’s war on terror.’ Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton UP, 2022) shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism. Kim Haines-Eitzen draws on ancient monastic texts from Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine to explore how noise offered desert monks an opportunity to cultivate inner quietude, and shows how the desert quests of ancient monastics offer profound lessons for us about what it means to search for silence. Drawing on her own experiences making field recordings in the deserts of North America and Israel, she reveals how mountains, canyons, caves, rocky escarpments, and lush oases are deeply resonant places. Haines-Eitzen discusses how the desert is a place of paradoxes, both silent and noisy, pulling us toward contemplative isolation yet giving rise to vibrant collectives of fellow seekers. Accompanied by Haines-Eitzen’s evocative audio recordings of desert environments, Sonorous Desert reveals how desert sounds taught ancient monks about solitude, silence, and the life of community, and how they can help us understand ourselves if we slow down and listen. You can listen to a series of recordings that go with each chapter of the book here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches. Though 'pretty much worn away' the belief in witchcraft still lingered on for more than a century after their deaths. In turn, ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, it seems that the memory of these three women - and of their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – was transformed from canker to regret, and from regret into celebration in our own age. Indeed, their example was cited during the final Parliamentary debates, in 1951, that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, and their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by the women beyond the wire at Greenham Common. In The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition (Bloomsbury, 2021), Dr. John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the remarkable tale of the Bideford Witches. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke UP, 2021), Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the "infrastructures of the sensible." Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020), Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include the creation of the world, the role of Adam and Eve, the Suffering Servant of Isiah, the book of Jonah, and Psalm 22, whose words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” Jesus quotes as he dies on the cross. Comparing various interpretations – historical, literary, and theological - of each ancient text, Levine and Brettler offer deeper understandings of the original narratives and their many afterlives. They show how the text speaks to different generations under changed circumstances, and so illuminate the Bible’s ongoing significance. By understanding the depth and variety by which these passages have been, and can be, understood, The Bible With and Without Jesus does more than enhance our religious understandings, it helps us to see the Bible as a source of inspiration for any and all readers. Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Marc Zvi Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

oday I talked to Rabbi Wayne Allen about his book Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finally, modern thinkers such as Cohen, Buber, Kaplan, and Plaskow. Each chapter analyzes individual thinkers’ arguments and synthesizes their collective ideas on the nature of good and evil and questions of justice. Allen also exposes vastly divergent Jewish thinking about the Holocaust: traditionalist (e.g., Ehrenreich), revisionist (e.g., Rubenstein, Jonas), and deflective (e.g., Soloveitchik, Wiesel). Rabbi Allen’s engaging, accessible volume illuminates well-known, obscure, and novel Jewish solutions to the problem of good and evil. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; her first book, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, we are discussing Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. In Bad Humor, Professor Coles charts how concerns around lineage, religion and nation converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. Professor Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Professor Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White. John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Where did the idea of sin arise from? In The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2022), David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings. He argues that the fundamental idea of “sin” arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations. Through close philological examination of the words for “sin,” in particular the Hebrew hata’ and the Greek hamartia, he traces their uses over the centuries in four chapters and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the “thorough deist” who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals in Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2018), deist writers influenced Franklin’s beliefs, to be sure, but devout Christians in his life kept him tethered to the Calvinist creed of his Puritan upbringing. Thomas Kidd is Research Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., and a Senior Research Scholar at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are you a born, revert, or convert Muslim who is trying to navigate the puzzle that is Muslim marriage in America? Do you want an egalitarian and fair Muslim marriage? Have you ever wondered how you can institute equality, respect, and care in your marital relationship? Do you want an interfaith and/or a non-heteronormative marriage? Are you planning or drafting a marriage contract that is more suitable for you and your marital goals? How can you build an ethics of care that facilitates and accommodates you, your partner, and your broader community? If you are curious about these and other questions related to Muslim marriages, then Tying the Knot: A Feminist/Womanist Guide to Muslim Marriage in America (Open BU, 2021) is the book for you. This book is edited by Dr Kecia Ali and advances the conversation that Dr Ali, along with her contributors, initiated in a reader, Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century. Tying the Knot is a collection of reflections and guides to facilitate Muslim women on their path to marriage. It addresses curiosities, questions, controversies, and needs of women from diverse Muslim communities in America. It also provides the solutions, guides, and sample contract drafts to equip them with the tools that they need to make the best decision for themselves before, during, or after their marriages. The book contains chapters that address issues as diverse as Muslim women’s interfaith/interracial/interethnic marriages, Muslim LGBTQ+ marriages, Muta’h marriage, pre-marital counseling and contracts, officiating the diverse Muslim marriages, and Muslim widows and their challenges. This book is available open-access here.  Iqra Shagufta Cheema (@so_difoucault) is a researcher, writer, teacher, and a chronic procrastinator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Story of Religion in America: An Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021) presents the broad scope of the story of religion in the American colonies and the United States. While following certain central narratives, including the long shadow of Puritanism, the competition between revival and reason, and the defining role of racial and ethnic diversity, the book also tells the story of American religion in all its historical and moral complexity. To appeal to its broad range of readers, this text includes charts, timelines, and suggestions for primary source documents that will lead readers into a deeper engagement with the material. Unlike similar history books, The Story of Religion in America: An Introduction pays careful attention to balancing the story of Christianity with the central contributions of other religions. James P. Byrd is Professor of American Religious History, Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Research, and Chair of the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. James Hudnut-Beumler is Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Professor of History in the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding of the United States. Its liberal humanistic principles influenced institutions such as Harvard University and philosophical movements like Transcendentalism. Yet, its role in the history of American architecture is little known and studied. In American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion (U Massachusetts Press, 2021), Ann Marie Borys argues that the progressive values and identity of the Unitarian religion are intimately intertwined with ideals of American democracy and visibly expressed in the architecture of its churches. Over time, church architecture has continued to evolve in response to developments within the faith, and many contemporary projects are built to serve religious, practical, and civic functions simultaneously. Focusing primarily on churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church, Borys explores building histories, biographies of leaders, and broader sociohistorical contexts. As this essential study makes clear, to examine Unitarianism through its churches is to see American architecture anew, and to find an authentic architectural expression of American democratic identity. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern historiographical readings of Cypriot identity in medieval and early modern times have been colored by British colonialism, Greek nationalism, and Cyprocentric revisionism. Although these perspectives have offered valuable insights into the historical experience of Latin-ruled Cypriots, they have partially failed to capture the dynamics of non-coercive resistance to domination, and of identity preservation and adaptation.  Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571 (Lexington Books, 2018) readdresses the question of Cypriot identity by focusing on the Greek Cypriots, the island’s largest community during the medieval and early modern period. By bringing together theories from the fields of psychology, social anthropology, and sociology, this study explores continuities and discontinuities in the Byzantine culture and religious tradition of Cyprus, proposing a new methodological framework for a more comprehensive understanding of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Crusader and Venetian rule. A discussion of fresh evidence from hitherto unpublished primary sources enriches this examination, stressing the role of medieval and Renaissance Cyprus as cultural and religious province of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox world. Chrysovalantis Kyriacou (Ph.D.) is a lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the Theological School at the church of Cyprus. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has also taught at the University of Cyprus. His area of specialty is late antique, Byzantine, medieval, and early modern history and culture, focusing on the role of Cyprus as a place of ethnoreligious encounter, interaction, and contention. Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked to Elliott Rabin about his book The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility (Jewish Publication Society, 2020). Approaching the Bible in an original way—comparing biblical heroes to heroes in world literature—Rabin addresses a core biblical question: What is the Bible telling us about what it means to be a hero? Focusing on the lives of six major biblical characters—Moses, Samson, David, Esther, Abraham, and Jacob—Rabin examines their resemblance to hero types found in (and perhaps drawn from) other literatures and analyzes why the Bible depicts its heroes less gloriously than do the texts of other cultures. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. 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 thought provoking book entitled PostSecular History:Political Theology and The Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Max Kennel explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Francine Friedman's Like Salt for Bread: The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Brill, 2021) is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather “exotic” Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bosnian Jews might have remained a mostly unknown community to the rest of the world had it not played a unique role within the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, providing humanitarian aid to its neighbor Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

An inspiring approach to a happier, more fulfilling life through Sikh teachings on love and service.  As a boy growing up in South Texas, Simran Jeet Singh and his brothers confronted racism daily: at school, in their neighborhood, playing sports, and later in college and beyond. Instead, Singh delved deep into the Sikh teachings that he grew up with and embraced the lessons to seek the good in every person and situation and to find positive ways to direct his energy. Singh reaches beyond his comfort zone to practice this deeper form of living and explores how everyone can learn the insights and skills that have kept him engaged and led him to commit to activism without becoming consumed by anger, self-pity, or burnout. Part memoir, part spiritual journey, The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life (Riverhead, 2022) is a transformative book of hope that shows how each of us can turn away from fear and uncertainty and move toward renewal and positive change. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes?  Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors, assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war: they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi.  In The Genocide Against the Tutsi, and the Rwandan Churches: Between Grief and Denial (James Currey, 2022), Denis examines in detail the responses of two churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex, and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to the Catholic parish La Crête Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide and of having close links with the authorities and some of the perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion persist. Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism, and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity. Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life (U Illinois Press, 2020) explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community. Tony Perman is an associate professor music at Grinnell College.  Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. "Repatriation is a must!" they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora.  In Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land (NYU Press, 2014), Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society. Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it argues that migrant and diaspora identities are the products of negotiation, and it illuminates the implications of this negotiation for concepts of citizenship, as well as for our understandings of pan-Africanism and south-south migration. Providing a rare look at migration to a non-Western country, this volume also fills a gap in the broader immigration studies literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2022) is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, environment policy, and global politics. From small island nations confronting sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms to high-elevation communities in the Andes and Himalayas wrestling with accelerating glacial melt, there is tremendous variation in the ways that societies draw on religion to understand and contend with climate change. Climate Politics and the Power of Religion offers 10 timely case studies that demonstrate how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies and how such moral claims find purchase in activism and public debates about climate policy. Whether it be Hindutva policymakers in India, curanderos in Peru, or working-class people's concerns about the transgressions of petroleum extraction in Trinidad—religion affects how they all are making sense of and responding to this escalating global catastrophe. Evan Berry is an associate professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Hagiographer and the Avatar: The Life and Works of Narayan Kasturi (SUNY Press, 2021), Antonio Rigopoulos explores the fundamental role of a hagiographer within a charismatic religious movement: in this case, the postsectarian, cosmopolitan community of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. The guru's hagiographer, Narayan Kasturi, was already a distinguished litterateur by the time he first met Sathya Sai Baba in 1948. Drawing on years of research on the movement as well as interviews with Kasturi himself, this book deepens our understanding of this important pan-Indian figure and his charismatic religious movement. You can find oral testimonies about Sai Baba here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language.  This study of the years before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904 (Academic Studies Press, 2021) traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture (Oxford UP, 2022) analyze how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Through case studies of New Testament texts, Gnostic treatises, and early Christian church fathers, Travis W. Proctor notes that early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, “fattened” and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound. Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functioned as personifications of “deviant” bodily practices such as “magical” rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and pagan religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. The tandem construction of demonic and human corporeality demonstrates how Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos - human, demon, and otherwise as part of overlapping networks or “ecosystems” of humanity and nonhumanity. Through this approach, Proctor provides new resources for reimagining the enlivened ecosystems that surround and intersect with our modern ideas of “self.” Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Shivan Mahendrarajah’s book, The Sufi Saint of Jam: History, Religion, and Politics of a Sunni Shrine in Shi‘i Iran (Cambridge UP, 2021), which explores the history and politics of Ahmad-i-Jam’s shrine, which is located in Iran. The shrine is of particular interest and importance today given that Ahmad of Jam (d. 1141 C.E.) was a Sunni-Sufi, while contemporary Iran is majority Shia, and the shrine has lasted and even thrived for 900 years; the renaissance of the shrine in Iran is also of particular relevance given prevailing assumptions about Iran’s alleged sectarian and intolerant Shi‘i theocracy. Complete with photographs, this exciting book would appeal to academics, researchers, and others interested in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Sufism, medieval Islam, and Iran. It will also be of use to anyone interested in Islamic art and architecture. In our conversation today, Mahendrarajah discusses the origins of this book, explains why and how Ahmad-i-Jam, whose shrine is the focus of the book, became known as the patron saint of kings, why the shrine has lasted for 900 years including in a contemporary Shia majority, the sorts of services the shrine has provided historically, its funding sources, and the ways the shrine operates today. We also talk about the architecture of the shrine, and the author explains how the book might also appeal to scholars interested in Islamic art and architecture. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Marriage's central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint marriage mean for men?  In Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-Day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships (U Illinois Press, 2022), Holly Welker presents a collection of essays exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness, addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender. An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in fact, the result of a strategic campaign of religious propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of the national motto, "In God We Trust," revises the very meaning of the contemporary American nation. Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, exploited denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant support for free economic markets, local control of education and housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status quo, and limited taxation and regulation. Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides that describe the American polity today. Andrew R. Polk is Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious? Our species diverged from the great apes six to eight million years ago. Since then, our propensity toward spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when, and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today? In How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Oxford UP, 2022), Robin Dunbar explores these and other questions, mining the distinctions between religions of experience--as practiced by the earliest hunter-gatherer societies--and doctrinal religions, from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their many derivatives. Examining religion's origins, social functions, its effects on the brain and body, and its place in the modern era, Dunbar offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of the quintessentially human impulse to reach beyond. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1973, Billy Graham, "America's Pastor," held his largest ever "crusade." But he was not, as one might expect, in the American heartland, but in South Korea. Why there? Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) seeks not only to answer that question, but to retell the story of modern American evangelicalism through its relationship with South Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the first "hot" war of the Cold War era, a new generation of white fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals forged networks with South Koreans that helped turn evangelical America into an empire. South Korean Protestants were used to bolster the image of the US as a non-imperial beacon of democratic hope, in spite of ongoing racial inequalities. At the same time, South Koreans used these racialized transpacific networks for their own purposes, seeking to reimagine their own place in the world order. They envisioned Korea as the "new emerging Christian kingdom," that would beat the American evangelical empire in a race for revival. Yet these nonstate networks ultimately foreshadowed the rise of the Christian Right in the US and South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s. Employing a bilingual and bi-national approach, Race for Revival reexamines the narrative of modern evangelicalism through an innovative transpacific framework, offering a new lens through which to understand evangelical history from the Korean War to the rise of Ronald Reagan. Byung Ho Choi is a PhD candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia, Korea in particular. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion and indigenous religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Annette G. Aubert and Zachary Purvis' edited volume Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity (Brill, 2021) offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century American Christianity that takes into account the century’s major transformations in politics, philosophy, education, and religious doctrine. The book includes previously unexamined material to explain the influences of European ideas on the intellectual diversity and cultural specifics of American Christianity. It gives readers access to a new analytical approach to the transatlantic development of religion in America, one that acknowledges the role of ecumenical and partisan religious journalism, academic-religious mentoring, profound changes in the field of scientific inquiry, and the aims of institution builders. Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A powerfully original thinker, Rav Kook combined strict traditionalism and an embrace of modernity, Orthodoxy and tolerance, piety and audacity, scholasticism and ecstasy, and passionate nationalism with profound universalism. Though little known in the English-speaking world, his life and teachings are essential to understanding current Israeli politics, contemporary Jewish spirituality, and modern Jewish thought. Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale UP, 2014), the first biography of Kook in English in more than half a century, offers a rich and insightful portrait of the man and his complex legacy. Yehudah Mirsky clears away widespread misunderstandings of Kook’s ideas and provides fresh insights into his personality and worldview. Mirsky demonstrates how Kook's richly erudite, dazzlingly poetic writings convey a breathtaking vision in which "the old will become new, and the new will become holy." Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (NYU Press, 2021) uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape. During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society. Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today’s immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the Pulitzer Prize finalist book Home, Land, Security: Deradicalisation and the Journey Back from Extremism (One World, 2021), Carla Power explores: what are the roots of radicalism? Journalist Carla Power came to this question well before the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington, D.C., that turned the US’ attention to the problem of domestic radicalization. Her entry point was a different wave of radical panic—the way populists and pundits encouraged us to see the young people who joined ISIS or other terrorist organizations as simple monsters. Power wanted to chip away at the stereotypes by focusing not on what these young people had done but why: What drew them into militancy? What visions of the world—of home, of land, of security for themselves and the people they loved—shifted their thinking toward radical beliefs? And what visions of the world might bring them back to society? Power begins her journey by talking to the mothers of young men who’d joined ISIS in the UK and Canada; from there, she travels around the world in search of societies that are finding new and innovative ways to rehabilitate former extremists. We meet an American judge who has staked his career on finding new ways to handle terrorist suspects, a Pakistani woman running a game-changing school for former child soldiers, a radicalized Somali American who learns through literature to see beyond his Manichean beliefs, and a former neo-Nazi who now helps disarm white supremacists. Along the way Power gleans lessons that get her closer to answering the true question at the heart of her pursuit: Can we find a way to live together? An eye-opening, page-turning investigation, Home, Land, Security speaks to the rise of division and radicalization in all forms, both at home and abroad. In this richly reported and deeply human account, Carla Power offers new ways to overcome the rising tides of extremism, one human at a time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke UP, 2022), Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women's religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters--such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965--were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation--and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Teemu Taira's book Taking ‘Religion’ Seriously: Essays on the Discursive Study of Religion (Brill, 2022) demonstrates through methodological reflections and carefully chosen case studies a new way to conduct the study of religion. It focuses on how social actors negotiate what counts as “religion” and how discourses on religion are part of how contemporary societies organize themselves. It draws on examples from judicial processes, media discourses, and scholarly debates related to Wiccans, Druids, and Jedi knights, among others. By analyzing discourses on religion and building on, rather than rejecting, genealogical critiques of religion, Taira argues that the study of religion can be constructive and socially relevant. Teemu tweets @TeemuTaira.  Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Krishnamacharya on Kundalini: The Origins and Coherence of His Position (Equinox Publishing, 2022) explores a distinctive teaching of 'the father of modern yoga', T. Krishnamacharya. Whereas most yoga traditions teach that kuṇḍalinī is a serpentine energy that rises, Krishnamacharya defined it differently. To him, kuṇḍalinī is a serpentine blockage which prevents prāṇa (breath or life-force) from rising and which represents avidyā (spiritual ignorance). Simon Atkinson draws from over 20 years of study and practice under teachers following Krishnamacharya. He combines analysis of quotations from yoga workshops with a detailed study of traditional Sanskrit texts. Atkinson challenges claims that Krishnamacharya's position can be found in his religious tradition of Śrīvaiṣṇavism. He questions the tradition's reliance on textual sources, showing how the coherence of Krishnamacharya's position can only be maintained by employing elaborate arguments and rejecting texts that teach otherwise. Atkinson also explores how Krishnamacharya's teaching on kuṇḍalinī influences how yoga is practiced. He argues that Krishnamacharya's position is best viewed as a model for experience that guides practice. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke UP, 2022), Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan's most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place's patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state's infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints. Mathew Gagné in an independent writer, scholar, and educator, currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called "providence"), Franklin became one of Philadelphia's most prominent leaders, a world recognized scientist, and the United States' leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Protestant ethics and cultural habits he learned and observed as a youth in Puritan Boston.  Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (Oxford UP, 2021) follows Franklin's remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. His work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventor, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesmen was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured. Through its alternatives to medieval church and society, Protestants built societies and instilled habits of character and mind that allowed figures such as Franklin to build the life that he did. Through it all, Franklin could not assent to all of Protestantism's doctrines or observe its worship, but for most of his life he acknowledged his debt to his creator, reveled in the natural world guided by providence, and conducted himself in a way (imperfectly) to merit divine approval. In this biography, D. G. Hart recognizes Franklin as a cultural or non-observant Protestant, someone who thought of himself as a Presbyterian, ordered his life as other Protestants did, sometimes went to worship services, read his Bible, and prayed, but could not go all the way and join a church. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Peter Oborne’s The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam (Simon and Schuster 2022) is as much a history of US, British, and French attitudes towards Islam and Muslims as it is about a relationship that was almost doomed from the outset. Not because of inherent problems with either the essence of the West or the essence of Islam but due to prejudice, bias, and, certainly in the 21st century, politicisation and weaponization of religion on both sides of the divide. Nonetheless, the book sketches how many of the Western and non-Western policy assumptions about Islam echo past fears, prejudices, and debates that that have fuelled a widening gap and Islamophobia. Oborne, the scion of a military and old-style politically conservative family, is passionate but well-documented, well-researched, and well-argued, in his description of the United States, France, and Britain’s encounters with Islam and Muslims, who initially were either subjects with very different experiences of colonialism or slaves. Although these encounters vary widely, Islam, whose adherents were often not granted full and equal recognition in society, has in Oborne’s telling in the 21th century replaced replaced communism as the enemy in the post-Cold War and post 9/11 era. Based on extensive historical research and investigative journalism, Oborne debunks myths and distortions of the truth. In doing so, he is clear about where he stands in the debate on whether non-violent political Islam poses a threat. Terms that have become fashionable such as Islamism and non-violent extremism constitute in his mind part of the vocabulary developed to force Muslims into a cultural straight jacket. With a well-put together list for further reading and spiced with historical nuggets, Oborne’s book is a valuable and important contribution to discussions about Islamophobia, political Islam, and the relationship between the United States, European countries, and Islam – a relationship that is likely to co-shape the 21st century world order. Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Srilata Raman's book The Transformation of Tamil Religion: Ramalinga Swamigal and Modern Dravidian Sainthood (Routledge, 2022) analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity - Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Nagas of Northeast India gives great importance to dreams as sources of divine knowledge, especially knowledge about the future. Although British colonialism, Christian missions, and political conflict have resulted in sweeping cultural and political transformations in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands, dream sharing and interpretation remain important avenues for negotiating everyday uncertainty and unpredictability. Agency and Knowledge in Northeast India: The Life and Landscapes of Dreams (Routledge, 2018) explores the relationship between dreams and agency through ethnographic fieldwork among the Angami Nagas. It tackles questions such as: What is dreaming? What does it mean to say ‘I had a dream’? And how do night-time dreams relate to political and social actions in waking moments? Michael Heneise shows how the Angami glean knowledge from signs, gain insight from ancestors, and potentially obtain divine blessing. Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book advances research on dreams by conceptualizing how the ‘social’ encompasses the broader, co-extensive set of relations and experiences - especially with spirit entities - reflected in the ethnography of dreams. It will be of interest to those studying Northeast India, indigenous religion and culture, indigenous cosmopolitics in tribal India more generally, and the anthropology of dreams and dreaming. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality -- the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole -- is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being (New World Library, 2022), Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense. Drawing on decades of Zen practice, he traces the interlocking relationship between Zen metaphysics and ethics, showing how a true understanding of reality -- and the ultimate unity of all things -- instills in us a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all beings. When we realize that our feeling of separateness from others is illusory, we have no desire to harm any creature. Warner ultimately presents an expansive overview of the Zen ethos that will give beginners and experts alike a deeper understanding of one of the world's enduring spiritual traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Representing Magic in Modern Ireland: Belief, History, Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Andrew Sneddon argues that Ireland did not experience a disenchanted modernity, nor a decline in magic. It suggests that beliefs, practices and traditions concerning witchcraft and magic developed and adapted to modernity to retain cultural currency until the end of the twentieth century. This analysis provides the backdrop for the first systematic exploration of how historic Irish trials of witches and cunning-folk were represented by historians, antiquarians, journalists, dramatists, poets, and novelists in Ireland between the late eighteenth and late twentieth century. It is demonstrated that this work created an accepted narrative of Irish witchcraft and magic which glossed over, ignored, or obscured the depth of belief in witchcraft, both in the past and in contemporary society. Collectively, their work gendered Irish witchcraft, created a myth of a disenchanted, modern Ireland, and reinforced competing views of Irishness and Irish identity. These long-held stereotypes were only challenged in the late twentieth-century. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Telugu Christians: A History (Fortress Press, 2022) narrates the history of Telugu Christians, a faith community located in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry in southern India. A social history of a faith community, this volume analyzes how social aspirations of the community, local worldviews, and historical contingencies shaped the beliefs and practices of Telugu Christians. It relates and interprets the history of Telugu Christians chronologically from the sixteenth century until the current times. The first two chapters of the book examine the earliest encounters between the Christian message that European missionaries introduced and the local Christians. Covering three centuries, this section highlights the appropriation of the Christian message among the caste converts. Later chapters analyze the impact of Dalit conversions and women's leadership on the social fabric and theological texture of Telugu Christianity in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The book ends with a consideration of three dominant movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first, namely the process of Sanskritization, the influences of Pentecostalism, and those of Holiness movements on the Telugu church. In conclusion, Taneti recaps how caste and empire shaped the faith and practices of Telugu Christians. Byung Ho Choi is a PhD candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Akhil Thomas is a PhD student at the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. His areas of concentration are Comparative Studies, South Asian Studies, Christianity and Hinduism. His present project involves Portuguese - Thomas Christian relations in the early modern world and the study of Tamil and Malayalam poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Unlike many books that examine the how of making theater, Brian Kulick's The Secret Life of Theater: On the Nature and Function of Theatrical Representation (Routledge, 2019) examines the why. Using Jorge Luis Borges' story Averroes's Search as a guide, Kulick defines theatre via its proximity to play, ritual, imitation, and religion, all of which share elements of theatricality. He then takes us on a whirlwind tour of theatrical history by examining key stage moments from some classic works of theater, from Agamemnon to Angels in America. Finally, Kulick looks at theater's changing relationship to fellow-feeling, whether pity, sympathy, or empathy, and articulates how the union of thought and feeling is a key insight of theatrical representation. By rekindling our sense of fellow-feeling and allowing us to see the world anew, Kulick suggests theater may provide valuable emotional and intellectual resources for our troubled times. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Genius or Charlatan? This is the story of Jacob Taubes, the controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life. Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. Jerry Muller traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, and how his journey led him from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism. Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton UP, 2022) offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Debates about science and religion are rarely out of the news. Whether it concerns what's being taught in schools, clashes between religious values and medical recommendations, or questions about how to address our changing global environment, emotions often run high and answers seem intractable. Yet there is much more to science and religion than the clash of extremes.  As Thomas Dixon and Adam Shapiro show in Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), a whole range of views, subtle arguments, and fascinating perspectives can be found on this complex and centuries-old subject. They explore the key philosophical questions that underlie the debate, but also highlight the social, political, and ethical contexts that have made the tensions between science and religion such a fraught and interesting topic in the modern world. In this new edition, Dixon and Shapiro connect historical concepts such as evolution, the heliocentric solar system, and the problem of evil to present-day issues including the politicization of science; debates over mind, body, and identity; and the moral necessity of addressing environmental change. Ranging from medical missionaries to congregations adopting new technologies during a pandemic, from Galileo's astronomy to building the Thirty Meter Telescope, they explore how some of the most complex social issues of our day are rooted in discussions of science and religion. Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He taught at universities in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for over a decade before accepting a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and shifting to work in public policy and science communication. He is the author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013) as well as several articles on science and religion from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism (Bloomsbury, 2021) revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law. Steven K. Green finds that conservative criticisms of a separation of church and state overlook the strong historical and jurisprudential pedigree of the idea. Yet, arguing with liberal advocates of the doctrine, he notes that the idea remains fundamentally vague and thus open to loose interpretation in the courts. As such, the history of a wall of separation is more a variable index of American attitudes toward the forces of religion and state. Indeed, Green argues that the Supreme Court's use of the wall metaphor has never been essential to its rulings. The contemporary battle over the idea of a wall of separation has thus been a distraction from the real jurisprudential issues animating the contemporary courts. Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer people belong to a religion – the number for the UK is now around 50% - and in the US around a third of people are religiously unaffiliated. But elsewhere in the world religions are growing – and in the world as a whole nearly 90% of people are religious. Robin Dunbar – Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University has been thinking about the reason for religion’s appeal for his book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures (Oxford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Brown’s research examines the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemologies and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in the Caribbean, Latin America and North America. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard and is a research associate at the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton. Our conversation explores the humbling power of ethnographic research as well as ways in which race and gender influence perceptions about academic identity and power. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In her latest book Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam (Oneworld Publications, 2022) Ziba Mir-Hosseini interviews several Muslim scholars of gender in different settings over the course of a decade. These folks are Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, amina wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohsen Kadivar, and Sedigheh Vasmaghi. Mir-Hosseini is a scholar of Islam, a film-maker, an anthropologist, and an activist. She is a founding member of Musawah: Global Movement for Equality in Muslim Family Laws, and the convenor of its knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Currently, Mir-Hosseini is a professorial research associate at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at SOAS, University of London. Her other books include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002) and Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999). She is also co-editor of Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (Oneworld Academic, 2015), and co-director of two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran, Divorce Iranian Style from 1998 and Runaway from 2001 (2001). Ziba and the six other scholars she speaks with are contemporary influential scholars of Islam who have been working for decades on gender and social justice issues from an Islamic perspective, using Islamic sources, and in most cases, working with Islamic institutions in Muslim-majority countries. As the tittle of the book suggests, it describes these scholars’ journey toward gender equality. Some of the themes covered in the book are these scholars’ opinion on the role of Muslim institutions in bringing gender justice in Muslim societies, that of the meaning and role of the Qur’an, their approaches to sharia and fiqh, and so on. In our conversation today, I talk with Ziba about each of the scholars covered in the book, some of the main issues and themes that arise in their journeys toward gender justice in Islam, sharia and fiqh – and in particular about the social construction of sharia – about maintaining hope and faith in working toward gender justice, about experience as a source of theological knowledge, the consequences of these scholars’ work on their lives, the future of Islamic feminism, and the work of Musawah, which is a movement for gender equality in Muslim family laws. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Many people search for heavenly bliss on earth, allured by all the world has to offer. In Paradiso, the third volume of his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, Dante corrects our lack of vision, showing us that heavenly paradise is more real and fulfilling than anything we have experienced or even dreamt of here on earth. Tune in as we speak with Father Paul Pearson about his recent book Spiritual Direction from Dante: Yearning for Paradise (Tan Books, 2022),  as we explore Dante’s Paradiso as an invitation to eternal happiness. Father Paul Pearson was ordained to priesthood in 1985 and serves as Dean of Saint Philip’s seminary run by the Oratorians in Toronto. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Although Buddhism is one of the religious traditions best known for asserting rebirth, the history and scope of Buddhist approaches to the idea has not received comprehensive treatment—until now. This first-ever guide to ideas and practices surrounding rebirth in Buddhism covers the historical context for the Buddha’s teachings on the topic, explains what Buddhists believe is actually reborn and where, surveys rebirth-related practices in multiple Buddhist cultures, and considers whether all Buddhist traditions agree about what happens after death. Roger R. Jackson's book Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World (Shambhala, 2022)is, in short, the first truly comprehensive overview of rebirth across the major Buddhist traditions, written by a leading scholar and teacher of Buddhism. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The culture of mainstream American childhood is vastly different than the culture of Orthodox Jewish childhood - which is itself a rich and varied landscape of texts, music, toys, and more, with nuanced shadings from one sect of Orthodox Judaism to the next. In Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods: Personal and Critical Essays (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022), Dainy Bernstein has collected a treasury of essays examining the artifacts of Orthodox Jewish childhood and how they influence a child's developing view of the wider world - and their inner world. Interviewees: Dainy Bernstein holds a PhD in English and a Certificate in Medieval Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches college composition, medieval literature, and children's and Young Adult literature at Lehman College, CUNY. Goldie Gross earned a bachelor’s degree in art and business from Baruch College and earned a master’s degree in the history of art and archeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University Yehudis Keller earned a BA in psychology and fine arts from Brooklyn College and is pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology at Case Western Reserve University. Hannah Lebovits is an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas-Arlington Miriam Moster is a doctoral student in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive, institutional, and political conditions and processes that have normalized anti-Muslim hate in the United States, especially over the last two decades. How does fear for a caricatured and dehumanized religious minority become an entrenched part of public discourse? Elfenbein engages and answers this question through a painstaking analysis of a range of actors and discourses across the political spectrum that have contributed to establishing Islamophobia as a formidably pernicious form of violence. In our conversation, we discuss the key themes and arguments of this book that is ideally suited to be taught in various undergraduate courses, especially the introductory Islam course and Islam in North America. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that movement at every stage. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant mother, explores the history and theology of what he terms the "Brown Church." In his book Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (InterVarsity Press, 2020), Romero considers how this movement has responded to these and other injustices throughout its history by appealing to the belief that God's vision for redemption includes not only heavenly promises but also the transformation of every aspect of our lives and the world. Walking through this history of activism and faith, readers will discover that Latina/o Christians have a heart after God's own. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The three stages of keeping Sabbath—a full day of uninterrupted practice—is tied to the natural cycle of the sun’s setting, rising, and setting again. In his recent book, Stop, Look, Listen, Nehemia Polen invites readers to move beyond a mere cessation of technology and business, to explore and embrace the beautiful sacred gift of the Sabbath, Shabbos. Tune in as we speak with Nehemia Polen about his newly released book, Stop, Look, Listen: Celebrating Shabbos Through A Spiritual Lens. Nehemia Polen is Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. He received his talmudic education at Ner Israel Rabbinical College, earned a degree in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University (honors), and wrote his doctoral dissertation at Boston University under the direction of Elie Wiesel. Dr. Polen teaches and publishes on Tanakh, especially Vayikra/Leviticus, as well as early Rabbinic literature. His other works include The Holy Fire and The Rebbe’s Daughter, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Together with his wife, Lauri, he lives in the Boston area and has often been invited to teach in Jerusalem. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that “materialize the Bible,” including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the late 19th-century to the present. In Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (Bloomsbury, 2021), Bielo argues that materializing the Bible works as an authorizing practice to intensify intimacies with scripture and circulate potent ideologies. Performed through the sensory experience of bodies, physical technologies, and infrastructures of place, Bielo illustrates how this phenomenon is always, ultimately, about expressions of power. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, Mohammed Ayoob and Danielle N. Lussier's The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies (U Michigan Press, 2020) thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and shows its impact on global relations. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Richard G. Marks's book Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries) (Routledge, 2021) explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and religion in India. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Despite the Talmud being the richest repository of medical remedies in ancient Judaism, this important strain of Jewish thought has been largely ignored – even as the study of ancient medicine has exploded in recent years. In a comprehensive study of this topic, Jason Sion Mokhtarian recuperates this obscure genre of Talmudic text, which has been marginalized in the Jewish tradition since the Middle Ages, to reveal the unexpected depth of the rabbis' medical knowledge. Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies Between Magic and Science (U California Press, 2022) argues that these therapies represent a form of rabbinic scientific rationality that relied on human observation and the use of nature while downplaying the role of God and the Torah in health and illness. Drawing from a wide range of both Jewish and Sasanian sources – from the Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides to texts written in Akkadian, Syriac, and Mandaic, as well as the incantation bowls – Mokhatarian offers rare insight into how the rabbis of late antique Babylonia adapted the medical knowledge of their time to address the needs of their community. In the process, he narrates an untold chapter in the history of ancient medicine. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (McFarland, 2021), by Ray Argyle is the first modern biography of the founder of Secularism, describing a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion’s control over daily life. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake has been hailed for having won “the freedoms we take for granted today.” With Secularism again under siege, Argyle argues that Holyoake’s vision of a “virtuous society” rings today with renewed clarity. Ray Argyle is the author of eleven books, including five biographies, three political histories, a memoir, and a novel of Victorian Canada. He’s worked as a journalist, a publishing executive, and a communications consultant, with articles appearing in Canada’s major newspapers, as well as magazines such as Reader’s Digest, France Today, and World War II History. Having grown up in British Columbia, he is now based in Canada’s province of Ontario. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) Ariela Marcus-Sells examines two Sufi Muslim theologians, known as Kunta scholars, who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Through textual analysis of their devotional aids, such as prayers and magic squares, we are provided a picture of their understanding of “the realm of the unseen” and the resulting practices of the “sciences of the unseen.” Marcus-Sells captures how Kunta scholars engaged with contested Sufi and Islamic praxis that contained cosmology, metaphysics, magic, sorcery, and occultism. The study also contextualizes these magical and Sufi practices within social and political context of the Saharan desert, such as Transatlantic slavery, while mapping the broader legacies of these devotional practices within Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. The book further invites a methodological intervention in the study of religion, in terms of how scholars construct boundaries around emic and etic terminologies of magic, especially in Islamic Studies and broadly in religious studies. This remarkable book will be of interest to those who think and write about Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, magic, Sufism, and Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I speak with Alejandro Nava about his new book, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (U Chicago Press, 2022). This book explores an important aspect of hip-hop that is rarely considered: its deep entanglement with spiritual life. The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but rarely is that element given serious consideration. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this aspect of the music and culture in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. Street Scriptures offers a refreshingly earnest and beautifully written journey through hip-hop’s deep entanglement with the sacred. Nava reveals a largely unheard religious heartbeat in hip-hop, exploring crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Bad Bunny to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, mystical-prophetic, and theological qualities in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest. The result is nothing short of a new liberation theology for our time, what Nava calls a “street theology.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Howard Mortman's book When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill (Cherry Orchard, 2020) is about the rabbis. It’s an unprecedented examination of 160 years of Jewish prayers delivered in the literal and figurative center of American democracy. With exhaustive research written in approachable prose, it uniquely tells the story of over 400 rabbis giving over 600 prayers since the Civil War days―who they are and what they say. Few written works examine the tradition of prayers in government. This new angle will appeal to students and lovers of American history, Congress, American Jewish history, and religion. It’s a welcome, important addition to our understanding of Congress and Jewish contribution to America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Saudi global export of an ultra-conservative strand of Islam and its impact on Muslim countries and communities across the globe has been a hotly debate topic for more than two decades. The rise of jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and their attacks in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa fuelled the debate, particularly since the September 11, 2001, strikes in New York and Washington. Critics of Saudi Arabia charge that Wahhabism and Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam associated with the kingdom, created the theological and ideological incubator and the breeding ground for jihadism. Wahhabism and the World, Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam (Oxford UP, 2022) edited by Peter Mandaville constitutes one of the few, if not the first comprehensive, impassionate interrogations of the impact on the faith of Saudi financial and other support for the global spread of what Mandaville calls Saudi religious transnationalism and is more colloquially referred to with catchall phrases such as Saudi funding or support for ultra-conservatism. Mandaville’s volume with chapters that provide fresh insights into the Saudi export drive and a set of case studies illustrates that the reality of the campaign is far more complex and layered. Interest in Saudi religious influence goes far beyond Middle East and Islam scholars and policymakers, journalists, and analysts, particularly given the dramatic social change in Saudi Arabia since King Salam ascended to the throne in 2015, and his son, Mohammed bin Salman, became the country’s effective ruler. However, social liberalization, including enhanced professional and personal opportunity for women and the creation of a Western-influenced entertainment sector has much to do with socio-political factors and little, if anything, to do with religious reform. As a result, understanding Saudi Islam and the impact of its export that outlives the Salmans’ steep cutbacks in the funding of its global propagation coupled with their effort to alter its austere and puritan image and give it a more moderate, tolerant and outward-looking makeover remains key to understanding the geopolitics of the Middle East and the broader Muslim world. Mandaville’s volume makes a ground-breaking contribution to that understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting, ancient dream interpretation practices avoided constructing the possessive individual subjectivity of modern consumerism, Buddhist rituals and ethics promoted compassion for animals and modern recycling, Confucian ancestor rituals and tombs have deterred industrial expansion, and also how Daoism’s potential role to deter desertification in northern China was stymied by state operations in contemporary China. A significant advance in the field of Chinese environmental anthropology, the outstanding scholars in this volume provide a unique and much needed contribution to the scholarship on China and the environment. Mayfair Yang is professor of religious and East Asian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored two monographs: Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China (American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting Modernity in China: Ritual Economy and Religious Civil Society in Wenzhou) and has edited two books: Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Elijah is a zealous prophet, attacking idolatry and injustice, championing God. He performs miracles, restoring life and calling down fire. When his earthly life ends, he vanishes in a whirlwind, carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot. Was this a spectacular death, or did Elijah escape death entirely? The latter view prevailed. Though residing in heaven, Elijah revisits earth--to help, rescue, enlighten, and eventually herald the Messiah. Because of his messianic role, Jews open the door for Elijah during each seder--the meal commemorating liberation from slavery and anticipating final redemption. Tune in as we speak with Daniel C. Matt about his recent book, Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation. PLEASE NOTE: For a limited time, anyone can order the title at a 25% discount with free shipping, by using the code ELIJAH during checkout, at this link. Also here are several video links related to Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation: 1) A conversation about Becoming Elijah between Daniel Matt and Barry Holtz at an event sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, in Manhattan, March 3, 2022: 2) A conversation between Daniel Matt and Estelle Frankel, sponsored by Chochmat HaLev, in Berkeley, March 31, 2022. 3) A talk by Daniel Matt on Becoming Elijah, sponsored by New Lehrhaus, in Berkeley, Sunday, April 3, 2022. Daniel C. Matt is a leading authority on Jewish mysticism. He served as professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications, in addition to the The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (12 vols.), include The Essential Kabbalah (1995), God and the Big Bang (1996), and Zohar: Annotated and Explained (2002). Daniel also teaches an online Zohar course: www.sup.org/zohar/course Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain. This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

"I've been a philosopher for all my adult life and the three most profound books of philosophy that I have ever read are Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs." This is the opening line of Peter Kreeft's Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs (Ignatius Press, 2016). He reflects that there are ultimately only three philosophies of life and each one is represented by one of these books of the Bible-life is vanity (Ecclesiastes); life is suffering (Job); life is love (Song of Songs). A Jew and a Catholic in conversation about matters transcendent out of the sources of three book in the Writings in the Hebrew Bible. Though not a new book, it remains in print and remains the basis for an interesting exploration of three key theological topics. Phil Cohen is a rabbi in Columbia, MO. He's also the author of Nick Bones Underground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory to reimagine cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (U Chicago Press, 2022), Annabella Pitkin explores intersecting imaginaries of devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity. Jue Liang is scholar of Buddhism in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. My research examines women in Tibetan Buddhist communities past and present using a combination of textual and ethnographical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Frontier Religion: The Mormon-American Contest for the Meaning of America, 1857-1907 (U Utah Press, 2019) Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic influence these perceptions of the frontier had on Mormonism and other religions in America. Endeavoring to better understand the sway of the frontier on religion in the United States, this book follows several Mormon-American conflicts, from the Utah War and the antipolygamy crusades to the Reed Smoot hearings. The story of Mormonism’s move toward American acceptability represents a larger story of the nation’s transition to modernity and the meaning of religious pluralism. This book challenges old assumptions and provokes further study of the ever changing dialectic between society and faith. Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Emma Natalya Stein's book Constructing Kanchi: City of Infinite Temples (Amsterdam UP, 2021) traces the emergence of the South Indian city of Kanchi as a major royal capital and multireligious pilgrimage destination during the era of the Pallava and Chola dynasties (circa seventh through thirteenth centuries). It presents the first-ever comprehensive picture of historical Kanchi, locating the city and its more than 100 spectacular Hindu temples at the heart of commercial and artistic exchange that spanned India, Southeast Asia, and China. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Postcolonial feminist scholarship on the formation of gender relations primarily uses the analytic of colonizer-colonized dyad. In her new monograph, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (Cambridge UP, 2020), Professor Hyaeweol Choi makes an important intervention by examining colonial Korea to propose a new framework that accounts for transnational encounters between national reformists, missionaries, and colonial authorities. Drawing from both major and minor archives in various geographic sites such as Korea, Japan, the US, Sweden, and Denmark, Choi locates the voices of the educated Korean women whose reform rhetoric and activities reflect transnational encounters. Postcolonial studies have shown us how archives are a contentious, political site with prominent feminist scholar Antoinette Burton pointing out the need to understand the interdependence between discursive visibility of minoritized people and their experiences. Through her research, Choi is able to show how educated women, despite their status as an elite minority, points to the larger structure of patriarchy and how it is constantly contested and reshaped by forces such as the state, ideologies of western domesticity, and religion. Gender Politics at Home and Abroad is an important read for scholars and public who are interested in postcolonial feminism, domesticity, transnational history, and colonial modernity.  Hyaeweol Choi is a Professor who holds joint appointments with Religious Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is also a C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. Her publications include Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013), and Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The history of the Palestine War does not only concern military history. It also involves social, humanitarian and religious history, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Jerusalem. A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956 (Brill, 2020) offers a complex narrative of the Latin patriarchal diocese, commonly portrayed as monolithically aligned with anti-Zionist and anti-Muslim positions during the “long” year of 1948. Making use of largely unpublished archives in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, including the recently released Pius XII papers, Maria Chiara Rioli depicts a church engaged in multiple and sometimes contradictory pastoral initiatives, amid harsh battles, relief missions for Palestinian refugees, theological reflections on Jewish converts to Catholicism, political relations with the Israeli and Jordanian authorities, and liturgical responses to a fluid and uncertain scenario. The pieces of this history include the Jerusalem grand mufti’s appeal to Pius XII to support the Arab cause, the Catholic liturgies for peace and international mobilization during the Palestine War and Suez crisis, refugees petitioning the patriarch for aid, and Jewish converts establishing Christian kibbutzim. New archival collections and records reveal hidden aspects of the lives of women, children and other silenced actors, faith communities and religious institutions during and after 1948, connecting narratives that have been marginalized by a dominant historiography more focused on military campaigns or confessional conflicts. A Liminal Church weaves diocesan history with global history. In the momentous decade from 1946 to 1956, the study of the transnational Jerusalem Latin diocese, as split between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus, with ties to diaspora and religious international networks and comprising clergy from all over the world, attests to the possibilities of contrapuntal narratives, reintroducing complexity to a deeply and painfully polarized debate, exposing false assumptions and situating changes and ruptures in a long-term perspective. Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and the war on terror have been constructed over the last twenty years and the various ways in which they have justified state violence against Muslims. Hilal offers answers to many questions, including and especially how the war on terror started, what its impact on American Muslims and Muslims abroad has been, and how to work to dismantle it. Hilal holds a PhD in Justice, Law, and Society from American University and has received many awards, including the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and a Reebok Human Rights Fellowship. The book is written accessibly, making difficult concepts and themes easy to follow and understand. It is easily assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses and makes for an essential read for policymakers and for anyone interested in the Muslim American experience post-9/11, and perhaps anyone who denies the existence of institutional Islamophobia and naively thinks the U.S. is the beacon of light and justice in the world—because this book shows with ample evidence that it’s not. In our conversation today, Hilal tells us the story of the origins of the book, what its contributions are, what makes it different from other books on Islamophobia, the roles that U.S. presidents since 9/11 have played in reinforcing and exacerbating Islamophobic rhetoric in the U.S. We also talk about the many U.S. policies, domestic as well as international, that legitimate the existence of Islamophobic state violence, the ways in which the FBI uses informants to entrap Muslims, the legal and narrative strategies that allow for the U.S. to commit extreme forms of torture against Muslims. We end with a discussion on internalized Islamophobia and, among other things, its harmful impact on Muslim Americans. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (U Chicago Press, 2022), Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America's Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Andrew M. Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Boston University and founder of the educational YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast. Andrew has produced over 50 video lectures on a variety of religious studies topics, used by educators worldwide. You can follow him on twitter @andrewmarkhenry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of religious identity in their culture. Amid the rise of so-called "nones," though, there has also been a countervailing trend: an increase in religious piety among some millennial Catholics. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), which began evangelizing college students on American university campuses in 1998, hires recent college graduates to evangelize college students and promote an attractive and culturally savvy Catholicism. These millennial Catholics have personal relationships with Jesus, attend Mass daily, and know and defend papal teachings, while also being immersed in U.S. popular culture. With their skinny jeans, devotional tattoos, and large-framed glasses, FOCUS missionaries embody a hip, attractive style of Catholicism. They promote a faith that interweaves distinctly Catholic identity with outreach methods of twentieth-century evangelical Protestants and the anxieties of middle-class emerging adulthood. Though this new generation of missionaries lives according to strict gender essentialism prescribed by papal teachings-including the notions that men lead while women follow and that biology dictates gender roles-they also support stay-at-home fatherhood and women earning MBAs.  Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool (Oxford UP, 2019) examines how these young people navigate their Catholic and American identities in the twenty-first century. Illuminating the ways missionaries are reshaping American Catholic identity, Katherine Dugan explores the contemporary U.S. religious landscape from the perspective of millennials who proudly proclaim "I am Catholic"-and devote years of their lives to convincing others to do the same. Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals. Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How does queer life fit into Buddhism and ritual? What role do gay men and trans women play in the practice of spirit mediumship and how do queer spirit mediums mediate between Thailand’s religious fields? How can we understand the increasing numbers of queer spirit mediums across mainland Southeast Asia? Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann provide important insights into their new book Deities and Divas, Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond (NIAS Press 2021). Deities and Divas is the first book to trace commonalities between queer and religious cultures in Southeast Asia and the West. The book details the very prominent roles that gay men and trans women are playing in the spirit medium cults rapidly growing in Myanmar, Thailand and beyond. Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book. Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV. Benjamin Baumann is an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg. His ethnographic work examines rural lifeworlds, socio-cultural identities and local language games in Thailand's lower Northeast, focusing on how the ghostly structures the imagination, reproduction of social collectives and communal sentiments of belonging. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The return to religion has arguably become the dominant theme of contemporary culture. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era where political action flows directly from theological, indeed cosmic, conflict. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2014) lays out the philosophical and political framework of this idea and seeks to find a way beyond it. Should we defend a version of secularism or quietly accept the slide into theism? Or is there another way? Mehdi Sanglaji is writing a PhD thesis on political violence, religion, and all that jazz. Find me here: @mehdisanglaji on Musk’s new website grab, formerly known as Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within South Sudan, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke UP, 2021), Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. Exploring the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and postindependence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan. Christopher Tounsel is Catherine Shultz Rein Early Career Professor in the College of the Liberal Arts and Assistant Professor of History and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Demons! Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons (2021) published by Fortress Academic views demons through two lenses: that of western religion and that of cinema. Sketching out the long fear of demons in western history, including the Bible, Steve A. Wiggins moves on to analyze how popular movies inform our beliefs about demonic forces. Beginning with the idea of possession, he explores the portrayal of demons from ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical world (including in select extra-biblical texts), and then examines the portrayal of demons in popular horror franchises The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror, and Paranormal Activity. In the final chapter, Wiggins looks at movies that followed The Exorcist and offers new perspectives for viewing possession and exorcism. Written in non-technical language, this book is intended for anyone interested in how demons are perceived and how popular culture informs those perceptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion. McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state. This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era. Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Read more by Charles McCrary: "The Supreme Court and the Strange Politics of the 'Sincere Believer,'" Religion & Politics, Apr. 2022 "The Antisocial Strain of Sincere Religious Beliefs Is on the Rise," The New Republic, Apr. 2022 "The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates," The New Republic, Sept. 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In God’s Image: The Making of the Modern World (Yediot Aharonot, 2021) examines the central role that the biblical idea of the “image of God” has played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes—selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning—this book guides the reader through a cultural history of the Judeo-Christian tradition, from biblical times through modernity. It explains how each of these ideals was profoundly influenced by a central ancient conception – that every human being was created in the divine image of God. The book makes the case for a cultural, ideational understanding of history that places the development of the individual at the core of Western civilization. In our interview, we will focus not only on the ideas of the book but also on how they are deeply relevant to our existential Western society challenges around spirituality, anxiety, social media, and more. This interview is relevant not only for scholars but also for students, lay leaders, and anyone interested in how ideas have been shaped in history. In God’s Image posits the fundamental role of the idea of the Image of God – running through the Jewish and Christian traditions and being constantly reinterpreted – in the making of the moral ideals and social institutions that we hold dearly today. Dr. Tomer Persico serves as the Academic Director at Kolot and a member of the senior management team, and a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Between 2018 and 2021 he was the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand (University of California Press, 2020) is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Scott Stonington’s gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a “debt of life” to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world. Scott Stonington, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA (U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power. Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Are you curious about Buddhism but find yourself met with scholarly texts or high-minded moralizing every time you try to pick up a book about it? Well, if so, relax. This is no ordinary introduction to Buddhism; there are none of the saccharine platitudes and dense pontification that you may have come to expect. Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (Beacon Press, 2022) is a readable introduction for complete newcomers that provides an objective, streamlined overview of the tradition--from unpacking the Four Noble Truths to understanding what "nirvana" actually means. For those who have already dipped their toes into the tradition through the practice of mindfulness or meditation, this guide will help you create a more well-rounded and informed experience by delving into the history of the Buddhist traditions that shape a mindful practice. Buddhist scholar Dr. Pierce Salguero analyzes the ideas and philosophy of the complex tradition through the eyes of both a critic and an admirer. He shares anecdotes from his time at a Thai monastery, stories from the years he spent living throughout Asia, and other personal experiences that have shaped his study of Buddhism. Through this guide, readers will have the opportunity to develop an approach to practice that is not quite Buddhist but Buddhish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Spiritual Empires in Europe and India: Cosmopolitan Religious Movements from 1875 to the Interwar Era (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order—to spiritually re-engineer the world. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion