New Books In Religion

In The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana University Press, 2013), Mel Scult, professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, explores the ways in which Mordecai Kaplan, the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America, was a radical. Using Kaplan’s 27-volume diary, Scult places Kaplan’s thought in conversation with other thinkers like Spinoza, Emerson, Ahad Ha-Am, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lynn Davidman, Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas, utilizes interviews with more than forty individuals who have left their Hasidic communities to vividly document the ways in which these men and women grapple with questions of faith, ritual, and communal authority. In addition to sharing her subjects’ journeys to find themselves and a place within the broader world, Davidman recounts her own experience in leaving Orthodoxy behind as a young adult, and highlights the challenges of testing the boundaries of individuality, community, and gendered expectations of behavior.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflections on hot-button topics in the modern world. The monograph offers a provocative balance of historical contextualization, close reading of texts, review of key scholars, and political analysis. Given its treatment of topics such as Islamic law, gender, international relations, and interfaith dialogue, the book should prove useful in a graduate or undergraduate context–either as a whole or as individual chapters–particularly as a conversation starter, given the depths to which each chapter points. Although the scope of the book may appear ambitious, Professor Afsaruddin is well-equipped to manage the breadth of her study into a concise, lucid, and well written text. Given her research background in jihad and violence as well as Quranic hermeneutics, moreover, Contemporary Issues in Islam is a mature wor

In Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2013), Gary A. Anderson, Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, explores the theological underpinnings of alms-giving, or charity. Anderson looks back to the Bible and post-biblical texts to show how, contrary to our modern view, a belief in a heavenly treasury was not just about self-interest, but is an expression of faith in god.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Pentecostal Christianity on the other. More specifically, Sensational Movies shows the affinity between cinematic and Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this in depth account, more than two decades in the making, Meyer takes us into the nexus of imagination, imaginaries, and images in contemporary Ghana. Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and mysteries of the world’s religions. In Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World (Columbia University Press), Eric Dietrich argues that the human thirst for mystery would still be slated even if we explain away the mysteries of religion in scientific, specifically evolutionary, terms. Among the strange “excellent beauties”, he claims, are consciousness and infinity. Dietrich, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, describes the structure of spiritual journeys, the social-bonding role of religious belief and our ineliminably “Janus-faced” nature as creatures who dislike open-ended mysteries but love magical thinking.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite remaining neutral on his personal religious beliefs, Freud’s commitment to empiricism and his determination in relegating psychoanalysis to a scientifically valid position has had a lasting impact. In some sense, its created a taboo against theological considerations. This taboo, Earl Bland and Brad Strawn, the editors of Christianity and Psychoanalysis: A New Conversation (IntraVarsity Press, 2014) argue, has been to the detriment of psychoanalysis as a clinical form of treatment and a philosophical system of meaning. Like religion, psychoanalysis attempts to ask what it means to live in the face of death. Psychoanalysis, in its traditions as vast and nuanced as those within the Christian faith, like religion, has moral imperatives about how subjectivity ought to be structured. Bland and Strawn observe that the culture is ripe for a new conversation, in that the turn toward rationalitywithin Christianity can be understood as a philosophical parallel to the turn in psychoanalytic theory toward u

Ever wonder what Kabbalah is really about? Or how you might have a close relationship with God? Is cleaving to God an expectation that might have been medieval but no longer is sought? Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Horwitz ‘s new book A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016) answers these questions and many more in an easily readable, even entertaining, highly authentic and scholarly manner. Divided into seven parts and twenty-eight concise chapters, with each chapter an ideal length to readily understand the topic, this book is perfect for the student of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as well as the casual reader eager to transform his/her spiritual options. Praised by critics as “a gateway into the world of Jewish spirituality . . . An important resource, very well done” and “carefully thought out and well researched, making a very complicated subject quite accessible,” Daniel Horwitz’s new book describes five major types of Jewish mysticism and

In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and assimilation, Kimmel demonstrates that such discussions were intimately tied to not only questions of religious reform but also to the demarcation of varied scholarly disciplines within Christianity. It is this nexus of knowledge, religious reform, and conversion that this book brilliantly explores and uncovers. Questioning binaries such as tolerance/intolerance and religious/secular, Kimmel highlights the complex material, intellectual, and political conditions and considerations that informed scholarly engagements with t

In Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), Marc B. Shapiro, the Weinberg Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, explores how segments of the Orthodox Jewish world rewrite the past by editing or erasing that which does not fit in with their contemporary world-view.  He surveys a variety of types of censorship, including the censoring of Jewish thought, Halakhah (Jewish law), and sexual matter.  The book asks us to reconsider the value of the concept of “truth” in Orthodox Judaism.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of Taíno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expression. By comparing these interactions in both New England and Bermuda, she demonstrates how divergent attitudes toward race could be, even among like-minded colonists. Her book demonstrates the centrality of religious attitudes in Puritans’ changing conceptions of colonized bodies, and therefore how racial ideologies developed in two radically different imperial outposts.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modern Biblical Studies usually begins from an assumption that there is an established original text and clear exegetical genres that extend from the original. Reception History is structured around the premise that they are investigating how individuals and communities have interpreted and deployed the original in later contexts. But what if there is no original text? What if the border between origins and receptions are unable to be clearly drawn? If this is the case, isn’t all of biblical studies reception history? Brennan W. Breed, Assistant Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, asks these provocative questions in Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Indiana University Press, 2014). After wrestling with questions of origins, borders, contexts, authors, and audiences, he offers a new general theory of reception history. He argues that instead of trying to contain texts and return them to their original context, we should understand them as mobile or nomadic. That would mean tex

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. His book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers the origins of the pro-life movement not as reactionary and anti-feminist, but rather as a New Deal-inspired crusade for human rights and part of a progressive Catholic social agenda. Pro-lifers saw themselves as crusaders for the “right to life” appealing to natural law and the constitution of the United States. In the 1930s they stood against the utilitarian views of abortion liberalization promoted by secular doctors. After World War II Catholic doctors and lawyers were equating abortion with the holocaust and arguing for the fetus as protected by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In the early 1960s, the debate over abortion moved to legislative and constitutional battles. Restrictive state laws began to crumble and post-Vatican Catholic opposition to abortion continued to erode

Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs devoted to the topic in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements (Columbia University Press, 2015) grounds its analysis in writings that appeared in the Buddhist periodical press between 1923-1932, tracing the development of ideas about the relationship between science and Buddhism that had their genealogy in the 1890s. Hammerstrom takes readers into some of the landmark moments and places that shaped the discourse of this period, from debates over the material basis of life itself and anti-superstition campaigns, to seminaries, to the places where Buddhist canon and subatomic particles meet. Here you will find a careful and measured analysis that places the histories of Buddhism, psychology, social evolutionism, physics, and logic into dialogue

Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakdown, reactions will likely be much more complex and awkward. In her fascinating book, Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Baylor University Press, 2015), Dr. Heather Vacek examines how American Protestants have struggled with the problem of mental illness, and how their relationship with it has changed over time. Vacek reveals in her well-organized and sensitive work the thought of five Protestants whose lives were deeply touched by mental illness: Cotton Mather, Benjamin Rush, Dorothea Dix, Anton Boisen, and Karl Menninger. Vacek then ends this well-researched book with a historically-informed theological reflection of how Christians can help those afflicted with mental illness.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores these major Japanese Buddhist figures artistic and textual productions in order to answer these questions. Bringing together her expertise in the fields of art history and Buddhist studies, Winfield guides the reader to more nuanced understandings of Kukai as a promoter of icons and Dogen’s seemingly iconoclastic stance. In addition, she offers a model for bridging textual studies and studies of material cultures that opens paths for further explorations of the relationship of practice, text, and image.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega

In That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014), Caroline E. Light, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots. Light provides us with a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideas of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. This book highlights the importance of writing particularly regional histories of American Jewry.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative experience of journeying, which lead to his subsequent life as a pious recluse. From this experience al-Ghazali wrote his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, filled with mystical knowledge. At least that is how it has generally been read in the Euro-American tradition. Kenneth Garden, Associate Professor at Tufts University, reexamines al-Ghazali’s work from an historical hermeneutical in The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2014). Garden outlines the social and political contexts al-Ghazali’s life demonstrating he was an active participant in Seljuk empire. A close reading of The Revival of the Religious Sciences reveals al-Ghazali’s promotion of a revivalist vision of the tradition, which he called “S

In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France.  She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John D. Wilsey, assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. His book American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (IVP Academic, 2015) is a work of historical political theology and examination of the idea of American exceptionalism that many have held as true and compatible with the evangelical faith. Exceptionalism, as part of civil religion, has its roots in several theological ideas including the Puritan concept of covenant, providence and millennialism. These theological ideas were extracted from the bible and applied to the American nation, married to republicanism, and championed by nineteenth century historians. Through its history exceptionalism was reinforced by western expansion, slavery, and the rise of the U.S as a global power. National leaders have espoused notions of choosenness, divine commission, innocence, sacred land and glory. All these ideas that have been challenged by critics and charge with ex