New Books In Religion

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of understanding the ourselves and the world around us. Todays interview seeks to uncover when, and how this began. In his ambitious new book, Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (Academic Studies Press, 2017), Luis Cortest finds in Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic philosopher who lived in first century Alexandria, the origins of a philosophic curriculum and method that would frame many of the concerns of medieval philosophy. Though a long millennium separates them, after opening with Philo, the heart of the book is dedicated to a comparison of Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides in which Cortest uncovers a subtle genealogy that begins with Philo: how to read the Bible allegorically and do so through the lenses of Plato and Aristotle. All three thinkers a

In 1971, a Sri Lankan Sufi arrived in Philadelphia to address a group of spiritual seekers. This trip initiated the career of one of the most influential teachers in the history of North American Sufism. In Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Merin Shobhana Xavier, Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University, provides a rich ethnographic account of his American followers, the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), but also introduces us to his devotees in Sri Lanka, the Serendib Sufi Study Circle. The book tells us the story of Bawa’s early life and career in South Asia, his travels to the United States, and the development of his spiritual communities. Xavier narrates this history from oral accounts of followers she gathered during extensive multisited fieldwork. Much of the book reveals the spaces and ritual activities of his contemporary followers in all their diversity. Participants come from Mu

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, explores the theological dimensions of invisibility within the intersection of race, religion, and secularism through the life and literary career of Ralph Ellison. Harris places Invisible Man and its reception within its contemporary context of literary and theological inquiry. Pairing this with a genealogy of Ellison’s proximity to religious scholars and writers reveals how his secular accounts are steeped in theological appeal. In our conversation we discussed the life of Ralph Ellison, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison’s second novel, Ellison’s relationship with scholar of religion and literature, Nathan A. Scott Jr., Ellison’s love of nineteenth century American lite

In her book Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), Dr. Jessica Johnson chronicles the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church, an evangelical megachurch that started in Seattle in the 1990’s and spread to multiple locations across five states before collapsing in the mid-2010’s amidst testimonies of abuse, manipulation, and exploitation. Johnson skillfully weaves together multiple strands of theoretical analysis – affect theory, embodiment, biopower, and a critical interrogation of masculinity – as she explains how church members were affectively recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power, particularly through the preaching of Pastor Mark Driscoll. The evocative phrase “biblical porn” refers to “the affective labor of mediating, branding, and embodying Driscoll’s teaching on ‘biblical’ masculinity, femininity, and sexuality as a social imaginary, marketing strategy, and biopolitical instrument” (p. 7). This deeply thought-provoking

A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet, village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth century—were also hailed for their gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing a necessary secularist challenge to majoritarian entanglements of church and state. In Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton University Press, 2016),  Professor Leigh Eric Schmidt explores the complex cultural terrain that unbelievers have long had to navigate in their fight to secure equal rights and liberties in American public life. Examining the multilayered world of social exclusion, legal jeopardy, yet also civic acceptance in which American atheists and secularists lived, Schmidt shows how it was only in the middle decades of the twentieth cen

Christopher Grasso is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. His book Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the tensions and ongoing dialogue between religious faith and skepticism and fear over how it would shape the character of the nation. Religious promoters and detractors both appealed to enlightened reason and the need for social reform. Shop owners, ministers, freethinkers, mystics, and soldiers had to deal with enlightened challenges to faith and God intellectually and personally. Grasso moves beyond public debates to demonstrate how many ordinary people wrestled with doubt at a time when legions of others participated in revivals, mission work, moral reform and establishing churches. Personal and political struggles ultimately led to a religious nationalism on the part of some and a civic religion on the part of others. The book adds needed detail and texture to the history of how religion and politics converge

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that God does not exist anymore?  What do you hope to gain by persuading Man…that his soul is nothing but a puff of wind, blown away at the gates of the tomb?” He then proceeded to lay out his vision for a national moral code rooted in a belief in the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.  To introduce this civic religion to the people, Robespierre, with the help of Jacques-Louis David, created the Festival of the Supreme Being which would be celebrated across the whole of France. In his book, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester University Press, 2016), Dr. Jonathan Smyth examines Robespierre’s desire to establish a national morality as the foundation for his utopian Republic of Virtue.  Drawing

Today I talked with D. G. Hart, an historian at Hillsdale College, MI, and the author of many books, including Calvinism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013). Listed on the front cover of Time (2009) as one of the ten “ideas changing the world right now,” Calvinism has a formidable history as a global theological movement. Hart’s book offers an expansive account of how one set of protestant ideas evolved from Geneva, Zurich and Basle to become one of the most important intellectual traditions in western Christianity. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harold Morales, an associate professor of Religion at Morgan State University, is the author of the momentous new book, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (Oxford University Press, 2018). Morales’ monograph provides a rich ethnographic analysis of various Latino Muslim communities, groups, and individuals in America. Situated in the context of hyper-racialization of post 9/11, Morales carefully lays out his interlocutors’ powerful journeys of reversion (instead of conversion) to Islam and how they form historical and cultural continuities but also transformations, such as through evoking Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) or food cultures. With its intersection of race, ethnicity, religion, and media studies, Morales’ has made a formidable contribution to the study of Islam in America, but also broadly on American religious experiences. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in Nor

In her new book, The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Meredith Lake explores the various, often surprising ways Australians throughout history have read, utilized, and fought over the Bible. In ways both religious and deeply secular, the Bible has played a contested but defining role in the country’s political, social, and cultural debates.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians and other writers often portray the Ghost Dance religious movement and massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as endings, the final gasps of armed Native resistance and their older ways of life. This interpretation is backwards for several reasons, argues Dr. Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Professor of U.S. Western History at U.C. Davis. In his Bancroft Prize winning new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017), Warren dramatically reorients our understanding of what the Ghost Dance religion was all about. Rather than a backwards looking movement focused on returning to a pre-conquest past, the prophet Wovoka and his disciples attempted to teach and prepare Indigenous people for life on reservations within an industrializing, wage-based economic and social system. Nor did the Ghost Dance die with the bloodshed in South Dakota in 1890, but instead it carried on and continues to be practiced to this day. God’s Red Son is a sweeping reinterpretation of

With rates of interfaith marriage steadily increasing since the middle of the twentieth century, interfaith families have become a permanent and significant feature of the religious landscape in the United States. In her recent book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Samira Mehta analyzes the depiction of interfaith families across a wide array of popular media and examines how interfaith families negotiate and blend their religious traditions within a single family unit. Mehta also examines how cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity interact and impact the religious praxis of interfaith families. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does Kant have to tell us about International Relations? In Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Sean Molloy, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Kent, offers a close reading of key works by Kant to reframe our understanding of the modern world. Written in dialogue with theories of cosmopolitanism and democratic peace theory, the book radically challenges how we understand Kant by focusing in detail on his work and his words. The book works through the breadth of Kant’s ideas, as well as dealing with specific texts in depth. As a result it will be of interest beyond International Relations, for scholars interested in any element of Kant’s philosophy including theological questions, his ideas on judgement, and ultimately what it is to be human.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. Andy and I had the real pleasure to talk with Michele Margolis about her new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. The central argument of From Politics to the Pews is that a solid partisan identity forms before a solid religious identity, thus partisanship can inform religious behavior in ways that we may not have fully understood in the past. Margolis argues that many Americans step away from religion in early adulthood, returning later at the point of decisions ab

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than scholars have previously thought. Borovaya makes her argument by focusing on the 16th-century vernacular literature of Moses Almosnino, a writer who was famous not only among Ottoman Sephardim, but also Jews and Christians throughout Europe. According to Borovaya, most scholars of Ladino literature of have placed the birth of genre in the 18th century, largely due to a false belief that works of high-culture were not composed in Ladino. She works against the assumption that Ladino was only used in popular, “folksy” writing, and the flawed categorization of high register Sephardi literature—like that of Moses Almosnino—as “Spanish” or “Castilian.” This tendency, Borovaya argues, wrongly implies that texts aimed at an educated audience were never written in the Ladi

Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass the modern evangelical movement in the U.S. as it looks at the rest of the world. McAlister begins by examining the impact of the civil rights movement in the United States and the decolonization of much of the Global South to show how evangelical Christians tried to respond to a changing world. In discussions of international events ranging from evangelical perceptions of the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa to contemporary views of the Islamic world, McAlister deconstructs the paradigms that inform evangelical opinions: concerns with persecution of fellow Christians, proselytization, and an eagerness to work with and around members of the Global South. The book turns much of the conventional wisdom about evangelicals in the United States on its head. While the popular stereotype of evangelical Christia

Cyrus Ali Zargar, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, is the author of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oneworld, 2017). Zargar explores how the study of good character and the pursuit of perfection, or virtue ethics, was part of a broader discursive network that included Islamic jurisprudence, theology, philosophy and mysticism. Using the metaphor of the polished mirror and the tradition of storytelling shared by Islamic philosophers and Sufis, Zargar frames virtue ethics not as a fixed notion, but as part of a network that broadly engages ideal positive character traits. Each chapter of the book focuses on various philosophers or Sufis from the years 900 to 1300. Each of these figures variously framed ethics through sacred revelation (Qur’an) and prophetic tradition (hadith) all the while incorporating rationality or traditions of exemplary saintly figures. Despite their differing modes and methodologies, at times, their conc

In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. His analysis offers an innovative stance on the very study of Hinduism, and tensions between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administration that provides the reader with a broad and expansive understanding of different aspects of presidential politics, political rhetoric, communication between elected officials and constituents, and the shifting perceptions of the role of the executive in the American political system. This snapshot in time, in this case, 1935, provides a much bigger picture of power, political change, and the sense of the country as a whole. Stuckey integrates aspects of these letters into her analysis as she explores rhetorical authority and differing political vocabularies as seen while the power and structural dynamics in the United States shifted during this period. She also examines how these letters between clergy members and the president provide readers with an understa

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), historian of religion Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay in how they rejected conventional American racial classifications and offered alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and a collective future. 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