New Books In Religion

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian poet, Tulsīdās. The first four volumes of the translation, entitled The Epic of Ram (Harvard University Press, 2016-), are currently available as part of the Murty Classical Library of India Series published by Harvard University Press and distributed in India by Penguin Books. Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) is the second of a projected three-book series of monographs that will explain how a new set of ideas about the church and the end of the world were developed among the Anglo-Irish elite in the 1820s, and how these ideas were transplanted in the very different social, political and religious cultures of North America to provide, in modified form, the architectonic structure of protestant fundamentalism as it developed at the end of the twentieth century. At the centre of this story is John Nelson Darby, a formidably energetic preacher, pastor, theologian and Bible translator, whose international travels and wide-ranging correspondence did most to consolidate the new religious movement k

Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims and narratives of the post-colonial state about religion and religious identity. Centered on the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, this book brings into view visions of sovereignty, ethics, hospitality, and inter-communal encounters that rescue Islam in modern South Asia from the suffocating pressures, anxieties, and amnesias of nationalist politics and historiographies. Conceptually bold, ethnographically vivacious, and historically grounded, this book masterfully carries a tragic sensibility while also offering provocative avenues of hope and optimism. Written with poetic eloquence and lyrical command, this book will not only be widely read and debated by scholars of South Asia, Islam, and religion, it also cries out for adoption as what will surely become

Exactly five centuries after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Christians continue to debate the best approach to the reading of their sacred book. The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor University Press, 2017) the latest book by Iain Provan, who is the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, advises readers on how to balance the competing claims of tradition and modernity. Provan’s work proposes a “seriously literal” reading of Scripture. But what does that mean, and how can it be defended? Provan is leading a study tour called “Walking Where Luther Walked” from 29 April to 8 May, 2019. For more information, click here. 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 you

Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were living in something called ‘the Enlightenment.’ Rather, they were still grappling with the fallout of the Reformation, and more specifically the results of two bloody seventeenth-century revolutions. Ingram’s excellent book analyzes the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the event caused them. Robert G. Ingram is a professor of History at Ohio University, where he teaches early Modern British and European religious, political, and intellectual history. He is also the founding director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her wo

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park, which opened in July 2016. Entertainment has long been understood as important aspect of Christianity in the US, but the theme park, which includes a re-creation of Noah’s ark, provides a striking setting through which to ask questions such as how creationists present their beliefs to the broader public. Ark Encounter is, in part, a workplace ethnography, which describes the entwined conceptual and aesthetic work through which the park’s design team imagine how to most effectively and playfully communicate a controversial religious perspective. Bielo’s findings are situated in discussion with other groundbreaking anthropological work on how categories such as ‘fundamentalist’ have been constructed over time, perhaps most notably Susan Harding’s scholarship. While the whole book

As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Clinical trials show that practicing Buddhist meditation has benefits regardless of whether or not one subscribes to the religion, raising fundamental questions about the nature of Buddhism itself. Today’s book, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World (Yale University Press, 2017) is a collected volume of Stephen Batchelor’s writings which explore the complex implications of Buddhism’s secularization. He explores questions such as, Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition? And, Is there an ethical framework that can underpin and co

In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota, offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas’ religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the “ontological turn,” particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota myt

I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,” or had some sort of mystical-though-divinely-inspired experience. Ditto with miracles: I just don’t know if I’d believe someone who claimed to have witnesses a miracle. Perhaps it’s the age we live in: most of us just have a hard time swallowing encounters with the “supernatural.” Yet “religions” (if that’s the right word, and I think it is) have appeared in modern times among people who (dare I say) think pretty much the way I do–and perhaps you do as well. How does this happen? Well, Ann Taves, has written a wonderful book that attempts to answer this question, and in a way that is very respectful of the new religions she studies. It’s called Revelatory Events: Three

Unlike many of the other early Christian texts, the Gospel of John emphasizes the name of the Father alongside the name of Jesus—why? One reason, says Joshua Coutts, is because of the significance of God’s name in the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Join us as we talk with Joshua Coutts about his recent publication, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John (Mohr Siebeck, 2017). Joshua Coutts is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Providence in Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Along with The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, he has published a number of articles in academic journals including Currents in Biblical Research and Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. Joshua has also taught at Regent College in Vancouver, Edinburgh Theological Seminary, Cornhill Training School in Glasgow, Prairie College in Alberta, and Evangelical Bible College in Zambia. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018). Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, and representing the expansion, assimilation and contraction of Christian religion in a global context, Stanley’s book offers a compelling account of how the Bible became a global book, and of how expectations for the global conquest of Christian missions in the 1910s gave way before the impact of World War One, the end of empire, secularisation, migration, religious pluralism, political change, persecution and genocide, and the constant proliferation of new religious movements. Christianity in the Twentieth Century is at its heart a story of survival – and of constant change. 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 recen

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) answers this question and others by chronicling how Black North Carolinians, through their robust Christian denominational culture, biblically interpreted the world made anew by the Civil War. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Helfont‘s Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) makes an invaluable contribution to an understanding of Iraqi strongman’s Saddam Hussein harnessing of Islam in support of his Baathist regime and ideology and to ensure that Islam as a social institution is incapable of turning against him. In doing so, Helfont also contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of religious legitimization of autocratic and illiberal regimes that is at the core of struggles in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Helfont’s well-written, easily accessible book benefits from access to documents of Saddam Hussein’s government and Baath Party that were captured by US and opposition forces in the wake of the 2003 US invasion and have been unavailable until recently. Helfont also positions religion as a social force that represents both an opportunity and an asset to autocratic leaders who on the one hand garner legitimacy by identificat

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both scholarly and journalistic communities. Among the central assumptions driving such compatibility talk relates to Islam’s allegedly inherent incapacity for critique, a virtue often heralded as a signature achievement and characteristic of liberal secularism. Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) represents a devastating indictment of this dominant liberal assumption that Islam is inimical to critique. Turning this assumption on its head, Ahmad combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to argue that critique is and has always been central to Muslim intellectual thought and lived practice. The distinctive feature of this book is the way it fluctuates the camer

Religious music can be a source of comfort and release, but also a remembrance of sadness and loss. In Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo (Oxford University Press, 2018), Tala Jarjour analyzes the Syriac chant sung in Aramaic used by the small Christian Suriyani community in Aleppo, Syria. The Suriyani are part of the Syrian Orthodox Church of the Antioch. Taking a multi-pronged approach, Jarjour undertakes a rigorous musical analysis of the Passion liturgy, while at the same time explaining the place of this music in the spiritual and emotional lives of the Suriyani people. She explores the music’s role in their community identity which she calls Suryaniness. Throughout its long history, the Syriac Church has always been in a marginal position and has endured many instances of discrimination and persecution. The community came to Aleppo after being forced to flee Turkey during World War One. Hanging over the book is the knowledge that since Jarjour conducted her field work the Suriyani have once more

Was the Hebrew Psalter purposefully shaped and arranged by editors to convey a particular theological message? Adam Hensley says yes. By examining the relationship between the Davidic covenant and the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, he suggests the editors understood these covenants as a theological unity, whose common fulfillment centers on an anticipated royal successor to David. Join us as we talk with Adam Hensley about his recent book: Covenant Relationships and the Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (T&T Clark, 2018). Adam D. Hensley is Old Testament Lecturer at Australian Lutheran College in Australia. His PhD was earned at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author ofThe 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 at mmorales@gpts.edu.Lear

How would Israelites have understood their nation’s covenant relationship with Yahweh? Dr. Robert Miller II offers a study of the Old Testament language of covenant within its ancient context, especially in light of Assyrian ideology. His study reveals that ‘covenant’ really meant ‘grace.’ Tune in as we talk with Robert Miller about this important theological concept Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (Gorgias Press, 2012). Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012), and The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations (2018). Robert teaches co

There are many who believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus came back from the dead. Others are certain that exorcisms occur, ghosts haunt attics, and the blessed can cure the terminally ill. Though miracles are immensely improbable, people have embraced them for millennia, seeing in them proof of a supernatural world that resists scientific explanation. In The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016), Professor Larry Shapiro helps us to think more critically about our belief in the improbable, casting a skeptical eye on attempts to justify belief in the supernatural and laying bare the fallacies that such attempts commit. Through arguments and accessible analysis, Larry Shapiro sharpens our critical faculties so we become less susceptible to tales of myths and miracles and learn how, ultimately, to evaluate claims regarding vastly improbable events on our own. Shapiro acknowledges that belief in miracles could be harmless, but cautio

Surprising to many, white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election at a higher rate than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. At the same time, the Evangelical community is changing, becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. How will this new diversity change Evangelical politics, if at all? Such is the focus of Janelle Wong’s new book, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018). Using a variety of survey data and original interviews, Wong shows that non-white Evangelicals are not nearly as conservative as their white Evangelical counterparts, yet they are more conservative on many issues than their racial and ethnic compatriots. The findings from the book contribute to studies of religion and politics as well as the study of immigrant and ethnic politics. Wong is professor of American Studies and Asian American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Ass

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339). In this book, Gamble gives an account of Rangjung Dorjé’s life based on his autobiographical liberation stories and songs, connecting him to the teaching and practice lineages with which he was involved, the communities that supported him, and the physical and sacred spaces that he inhabited. The book highlights the ways in which Rangjung Dorjé’s autobiographical writing and his later biographies worked to deliberately construct and solidify his authority and place within the Karmapa lineage. In our conversation, Gamble discusses the broader context of her book, as well as the relevance of Rangjung Dorjé’s life to contemporary issues in Tibetan Buddhist lineages. She also explains how snowboarding has influenced her scholarly work. Con