New Books In Religion

Birth and suffering are deeply linked concepts in Buddhism, and their connection has shaped how the bodies and status of women were understood. Join us for a conversation with Amy Paris Langenberg about her book Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom, published by Routledge in their series Critical Studies in Buddhism. Amy takes as her focus an early first millennium work, the Garbhavakranti-sutra, or Descent of the Embryo Scripture. Using this text as her point of departure, and reading across a wide range of genres, Amy explores birth metaphors, the journey of the fetus, and the concepts of purity, auspiciousness, and disgust, showing how the Buddhist depiction of female bodies operated against a backdrop of earlier South Asian ideas. The Descent of the Embryo Scripture speaks to the human condition, but especially to the status of women, fertility, the female body, and mothers. Amy argues that this Buddhist depiction of women’s bodies as disgusting and impure opened the way for a d

Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us, or the latest episode of HBO’s High Maintenance, in addition to many popular memoirs, online forums, there is a new fascination with Hasidism. In a sense, this discourse centers around questions of religion and state, community and family, and “traditional life” in a modern context—larger themes that touch some of our most pressing problems. Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018) is the result of a monumental collaborative effort by seven scholars over the course of four years to compose the first total history of Hasidism. The team included David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodzinski. It shows the ways in which this movement, in its many distinct flavors, was fluid

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

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. In the book we are looking at today, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia (Henry Holt, 2018), Dr. Michael Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. From radical life extension, to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective and concludes with an uplifting tribute to purpose and progress and a word on how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter. Dr. Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine,

Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marriage dividing American Christians both politically and religiously. Moral Combat features pivotal figures including, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the fundamentalist radio preacher Billy James Hargis and the first gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. She demonstrates how pro and con positions were not always clearly defined and adherents could change sides in a matter of a decade, finding surprising allies. In the new millennium two distinct religious visions for society and human sexuality had taken root

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

Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing, it stands as a monument to both The Guide and to a career spent studying it. The book begins with an introduction that outlines its main arguments and method, and with chapters on Maimonides biography and intellectual context. It then divides the Guide into eight thematic sub-sections and provides a paraphrase and analysis of each in turn; it tackles the way Maimonides read the bible, synthesized physics and metaphysics, and espoused a new understanding of the Jewish tradition. The sections cover Maimonides’ philosophy of language and anti-anthropomorphic reading of the bible, his opposition to Kalām (Islamic theology) and theory of creation, and his theories of prophecy, metaphysics, providence and theodicy. The work ends with chapte

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing t

Leon Wiener Dow’s most recent work The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers readers intimate, informative, and at times provocative reflections on halakha, or Jewish law. The author makes nuanced philosophical and theological observations on the ideas and actions that define a halakhic life, and grounds his ideas with rich personal anecdotes that are woven throughout. Wiener Dow’s lively, captivating style of writing draws the reader into his powerful discussion of the roles that community, language, tradition, and evolution play in the halakhic journey. Leon Wiener Dow received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University and rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Professor David Hartman. He is currently a research fellow and faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. Robin Buller is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), Anna Andreeva focuses on a complex network of religious sites, figures, and texts to help us better understand the way in which Japanese deities were worshipped in medieval Japan. In so doing, she illuminates the medieval stages of a process that led to what was later called Shinto, and adds to the growing body of scholarship that challenges the relatively recent idea that Shinto is simply the native religion of Japan, unchanged since ancient times. To tackle such a grand undertaking, Andreeva focuses on a mountain in central Japan called Mt. Miwa as well as on Ise, the location of the Ise shrines and the abode of the most important imperial deity. Beginning with the significance of Mt. Miwa as a religious site for pre-ninth-century Japanese rulers, Andreeva charts the decline of this mountain’s importance during the eighth-to-twelfth centuries and the subsequent revi

In a meticulously researched study The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (SUNY Press, 2017), Kathryn Troy investigates the many examples of Indian ghosts appearing to Spiritualists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book explores non-judgmentally the ways in which these ghosts motivated their mediums and other Spiritualists to engage with the rights of living Native Americans. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’ve made in the study of Islamic mysticism. Knysh walks us through how to define Sufism, the origins of Sufism (including the influence of the Hellenic world), how texts fit into our consideration of Sufism, contemporary developments in Sufism, and more. He places this within the framework of outsiders and insiders (to Sufism), challenging us to understand better how the study of Sufism itself came into being. The entire book itself is in conversation, not simply with theoretical debates in Islamic studies and the study of religion, but also the greater field of history. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism. M.

In his marvelous new book Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2017), Joel Blecher, Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University, engages with tremendous lucidity and brilliance the topic of Hadith commentaries in Muslim intellectual and social history across time and space. Traversing the pre-modern and modern periods in sites ranging from the Middle East to South Asia, this book presents in remarkable detail and with considerable nuance the intellectual, social, and material stakes of the discipline and performance of the Hadith commentarial tradition. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Muslim intellectual history, material religion, South Asian Islam, textuality and orality, and the Hadith tradition. SherAli Tareen is Assistant 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 a

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation of first-generation Maghrebi women in France in documentaries, short films, feature films, and telefilms. Her analysis revolves around filmic textual analysis and the production, audience reception, and distribution of these art forms in contemporary French society. Kemp is attuned to filmic genre conventions, narrative structures, and formal techniques that media producers and artists use to both appeal to large mainstream audiences while challenging dominant stereotypes about Muslims. In our conversation we discussed vie

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue that social action and Jewish action go hand-in-hand. The book offers both inspiration and guidance, weaving together passages from Torah and Talmud, insights from contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish civic leaders, and practical advice drawn from the authors many years of advocacy, activism, and civic collaboration in their home community of Charlotte, North Carolina. In this episode, we discuss how the idea of minyan can work as a model for social movements; we discuss the stages congregations can follow to embark on a civic project; and, we discuss how to avoid community division while still encouraging healthy debate — which, along with supporting the needy, is as authentic and ancient a Jewish tradition as one can find. Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University