New Books In Christian Studies

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

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

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

The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses black social gospel to chart an intellectual and theological map of the tradition that gave birth to the leader of one of America’s most radical social movements: Dr. Martin Luther King. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached

How do students become LGBT activists at Christian Universities and Colleges? And what is the impact on the school but also on the activists themselves? In his new book, Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jonathan S. Coley uses interviews with LGBT activists on Christian campuses and other sources of data to answer these questions. LGBT activists in his study fall into three participant identities which tie to the “group ethos” he discovers. These typologies help to understand the ways in which students participate as activists but also how they come to know themselves. In addition, Coley situates his findings in the literature but also explains how his study differs and expands on previous findings. In general, he finds that “fit” is important to the activists and that only about a third of his participants fall into traditional definitions of activists. Coley also finds that denomi

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relationship between the ‘Global North’—China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America—and the Muslim world from Southeast Asia to West Africa. With more than a half a century of experience as a historian, policy maker, diplomat, peace negotiator, and businessman, William R. Polk endeavors to explain the deep hostilities between the Muslim world and the Global North and show how they grew over the centuries. Polk demonstrates how Islam, from its origins in the Arabian Peninsula, spread across North Africa into Europe, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia. But following the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic civilization entered a decline while Europe began its overseas expansion. Defeated at every turn, Muslims tried adopting Western dress, orga

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

The use and function of the Old Testament in the book of Hebrews has been a neglected area of study. Jared Compton’s new book Psalm 110 and the Logic of Hebrews (T and T Clark, 2018) addresses this scholarly gap, and concludes that the theological argument of Hebrews turns in large part on successive inferences drawn from Psalm 110. Join us as we talk with Jared Compton about the foundational role of Psalm 110 in the message of Hebrews. Jared Compton earned his Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He has served as a New Testament professor at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, and is now a pastor at CrossWay Community Church in Bristol, Wisconsin. 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), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Svechina (1782-1857) was the hostess of an illustrious and distinctively religious salon frequented both by the French and by her fellow Russian expatriates. First a salonniere in St. Petersburg, Svechina relocated to Paris after the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment in Russia following the French Revolution. Svechina played a pivotal role in Liberal Catholic movement, acting as a mentor, spiritual counselor, and intimate friend to some of its leading figures, her influence extending into the world of political ideas beyond the salon. In this interview, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva discusses the intellectual and spiritual formation and influence of Sop

In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of modernity. How did this happen? How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel traces answers to these questions in his recent book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). It tells the story of how radical ideas emerged in the 1930s and exercised enormous influence after World War II in Catholicism and in European politics more broadly. James Chappel is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew’s gospel employs more than half of its Old Testament citations within the gospel’s prologue (Matt. 1-4). Although these texts lead Matthew’s story, many scholars have long assumed that the scriptural citations have nothing to do with their original OT context. Was Matthew a bumbling hermeneutist? Not so, says Nicholas Piotrowski. In his book, Matthew’s New David at the End of Exile (Brill, 2016), Nicholas investigates Matthew’s OT quotations and finds that they provide reading and worldview orientation for the gospel’s audience. The seven prologue quotations all emerge from OT contexts concerned with David or the end of the exile, or both—a dual theme that provides an interpretative guide for the entire narrative of Matthew’s gospel. Nicholas G. Piotrowski, received his Ph.D. from Wheaton College in 2013. He is professor of biblical and theological studies at Crossroads Bible College and academic dean at Indianapolis Theological Seminary. Nicholas is co-

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive controversies that exploded over the church’s relationship to National Socialism during the early decades of the Federal Republic in West Germany. Ruff questions why so many early controversies ensnared German Catholics after World War II when there was a much higher rate of collaboration between the Protestant majority and the regime. He argues that public acrimony over the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican in 1933 and the legacy of Pius XII emerged mainly as a proxy war between secular elites, le

Suffering and death are two topics that are frequently referred to in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but have rarely been examined within scholarship on this New Testament book. Join us as we talk with Bryan Dyer about his own study of these themes, and then discover how he connects them to the social situation addressed in Hebrews. In his book, Suffering in the Face of Death: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Its Context of Situation (Bloomsbury, 2017), Bryan reveals how the author of Hebrews is responding to the reality of suffering in the lives of his audience. With this awareness, it becomes clear how the Epistle also responds to the audiences pain by creating models of endurance in suffering and death. These serve to motivate the author’s audience toward similar endurance within their own social context. Bryan R. Dyer earned his Ph.D. at McMaster Divinity College. He is Acquisitions Editor at Baker Press, USA, and Adjunct Professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. In addition to his book Suffering

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018), makes the surprising case that the Depression-era Mississippi Delta provided the necessary conditions for the flowering of such an endeavor. New Deal policies inspired socialist optimism while their racial exclusions left displaced tenant farmers looking for work and attracted to enterprises like Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, which promised to break them from the cycle of debt and offer them equal access to the schooling, medical care, and opportunity enjoyed by the white middle class. These cooperative farms drew inspiration from the transnational communitarian movement and advanced the radical

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the quite recent emergence and rather rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the Hmong in the upland areas of Vietnam, on the border of China. Her The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) is the first ethnography of Christian conversion in the borderlands of one of the only two formally communist states remaining in Southeast Asia today. Not only is the book remarkable for its collection and use of hard-to-get data from a wide array of sources in Vietnam and abroad, including extended periods of fieldwork in a Hmong village, but also for the story it recounts

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Wilcox is professor of government at Georgetown University. For decades, Rozell and Wilcox have connected the study of religion and politics to elections. The latest iteration of this series, God at the Grassroots 2016, again brings together a distinguished group of political scientists to examine the 2016 elections. The chapter authors focus on changes in the religious right movement since the 1980s. They begin with the national context, then turn to state-specific chapters. They conclude with lessons learned from the studies of the religious right in the elections from 1994 through 2016 and address directions for continued

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616, Owen grew up in an Anglican faith increasingly influenced by Arminian doctrine. Though Owen sided with Parliament during the English Civil War, it was hearing a sermon in London that had a far more profound impact on Owen’s life by triggering a born again experience. Thanks to a succession of wealthy patrons, Owen rose to prominence during the war, preaching before Parliament and serving as a chaplain in Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland. For his support Cromwell appointed him vice chancellor of Oxford University, a post that Owen held until the Restoration led to his removal. Thoug

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. With its careful attention to the historiography of the rebellion, its consideration of the veracity of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (the primary source that serves as the center of studies on the rising), and its treatment of how churches reacted to the rising, this work is not only of interest to scholars, but could easily be adopted into a college-level survey of American history or a course introducing the historian’s craft.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When teaching the first half of world history, I always do a little section on Augustine. My focus is on how he was an important theologian who shaped Christian understandings of war and even influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as seen in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. The fact though is that I could have an entire course on Augustine, such was the breadth and depth of his thought. James K. Lee, in his new book Augustine and the Mystery of the Church (Fortress Press, 2017), explores one aspect of Augustine’s thought—his ecclesiology. In this carefully written and researched book, James shows how Augustine’s understanding of the church was Christ-centered, and as such, it was not simply an invisible communion of believers isolated from each other, but has a visible, communal aspect and is active in this world. This book is therefore highly suited to anyone interested in Augustine’s thought and ecclesiology, and would work well in a graduate seminar.Learn more about your ad choices.

There is no such thing as religious freedom, or at least just one understanding of what that means. That’s the crux of the argument in Finbarr Curtis’ (Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University), The Production of American Religious Freedom (NYU Press, 2016). Americans are fixated on freedom and saturated in religion but define the concepts in various ways. The production of religious freedom is only possible within this context of malleability, contestation, and disagreement. Curtis demonstrates this process through a number of related examples, including conflicting visions of Christianity, tensions between social dependence and independence, economic issues, questions of racial inclusion, and corporate rights. Through these cases we see how people respond when freedom makes them uncomfortable. Inequality was at the center of American history and the regular rearticulation of individual liberation from social constraints begins to plot the historical boundaries of religious freedom. In