New Books in Christian Studies
1,275 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Christianity about their New Books
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Episodes
Jacob Abell, "Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de L...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Vincent W. Lloyd, "Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination" (Yale UP, 2022)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Black writing and action. Previously in the West, dignity has been seen in two ways: as something inherent in one’s station in life, whether acquired or conferred by birth; or more recently as an essential condition and right common to all of humanity. In what might be called a work of observational philosophy—an effort to describe the philosophy un...
L. M. Ratnapalan, "Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesHow does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity? L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural environment of the Pacific. The book argues that Stevenson was religiously literate within a Scott...
Jared Secord, "Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen" (Penn State UP, 2020)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesEarly in the third century, a small group of Greek Christians began to gain prominence and legitimacy as intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Examining the relationship that these thinkers had with the broader Roman intelligentsia, Jared Secord contends that the success of Christian intellectualism during this period had very little to do with Christianity itself. With the recognition that Christian authors were deeply engaged with the norms and realities of Roman intellectual culture, Secord e...
Oliver Crisp and Daniel J. Hill, eds., "Reason in the Service of Faith: Collected Essays of Paul Helm" (Routledge, 2023)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesPaul Helm is a distinguished philosopher, with particular interests in the philosophy of religion. His work covers some of the most important aspects of the field as it has developed in the last thirty years with particular contributions to metaphysics, religious epistemology, and philosophical theology. In celebration of Helm's life's work, Reason in the Service of Faith: Collected Essays of Paul Helm (Routledge, 2023), edited by Oliver Crisp and Daniel J. Hill, brings together a range of hi...
Kerry P. C. San Chirico. "Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras" (Oxford UP, 2022)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesOn the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and sing; they offer testimonials of healing, and receive the blessings of encounter from an unlikely deity. Facing this ocean of humanity is a 12-foot billboard Christ, arms outstretched, urging in Hindi: "Come to me all ...
Matthew W. Knotts, "On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
September 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor Augustine, the world is replete with meaning; it represents not merely a collection of facts to be catalogued but a repository of truths to be discovered and discerned, a view which contrasts with the one we have inherited as a result of the thought of figures such as Descartes, Newton, and Kant. What difference would it make to see the world as created? In On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2019), Matthew W. Knotts explores this quest...
Davide Rodogno, "Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourNight on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a broad-ranging account of international humanitarian programs in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near East from 1918 to 1930. Davide Rodogno shows that international 'relief' and 'development' were intertwined long before the birth of the United Nations with humanitarians operating in a region devastated by war and famine and in which state sovereignty was deficient...
Jaime M. Pensado, "Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico" (U California Press, 2023)
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLove and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (U California Press, 2023) explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution--w...
Annie Rachel Royson, "Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness: Cultural Translation in Kristapurana" (Routledge, 2023)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesAnnie Rachel Royson's book Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness: Cultural Translation in Kristapurana (Routledge, 2023) presents a critical reading of Kristapurāṇa, the first South Asian retelling of the Bible. In 1579, Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), a young Jesuit priest, arrived in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity to the local subjects of the Portuguese colony. Kristapurāṇa (1616), a sweeping narrative with 10,962 verses, is his epic poetic retelling of the Christian Bible in the Marat...
Who’s Afraid of the Catholic Integralists? (with Kevin Vallier)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesKevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patienc...
Joshua Daniel Schachterle, "John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity" (Equinox Publishing, 2022)
August 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity (Equinox Books, 2023), a revision of his 2019 dissertation, Joshua Schachterle evaluates the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian with a keen eye toward the possibility that he envisioned monasticism as a version of Christian piety distinct from that of the institutional church. Schachterle elaborates on comments from a variety of monastic writings indicating that monks should “flee” from bishops, who characteristically sought to...
How Should Protestants Engage With Natural Law Theory?
August 29, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesNatural law theory is known to be more emphasized among Catholics than Protestants. Why is that the case, and should it be? Do Protestants need to focus more on philosophy? Today's guest, Andrew T. Walker of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, discusses why Protestants need natural law too, and specifically the work of the Madison Program’s founder and Director, Professor Robert P. George. We discuss Dr. Walker's book, Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with R...
The Seven Deadly Sins (with Fr Chris Pietraszko)
August 24, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesFather Chris Pietraszko has been thinking about sin and redemption for the last year and a half as he has been writing a series of articles that will become a book. Relying on the Gospel, Catholic Doctrine, Thomas Aquinas, and his experience in the confessional, Father Chris explains the mechanism of sin, how it works in our lives, and how it is to be defeated. He reflects on his experience as a confessor and explains the relationship between the deadly and venial sins. Articles by Father Ch...
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, "Noah's Arkive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
August 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAt a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and bring aboard animals, who will spend an indefinite amount of time living, sleeping, and eating alongside Noah and his family. The rain begins to fall, and these survivors take refuge on the ark. After forty days, the survivors disembark and then have to figure out how to create a new settlement as the waters recede. This crypt...
Erin Raffety, "From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership" (Baylor UP, 2022)
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesAmerican Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism―not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship―is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Min...
Janiece Johnson, "Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesOn September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atlantic. In the years prior to the massacre, Americans dubbed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the "Mormon problem" as it garnered nati...
Adam Jasienski, "Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World" (Penn State UP, 2023)
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesPraying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn State University Press, 2023), art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of ...
Andrew Johnson, "If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro" (Oxford UP, 2017)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesPentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He began by spending two weeks living in a Brazilian prison as if he were an inmate: sleeping in the same cells as the inmates, eating the same food, and participating in the men's daily routines as if he were incarcerated. And he returned many times afterward to observe prison churches' worship services, which were led by inmates who had been vot...
Simon Mills, "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760" (Oxford UP, 2020)
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesSimon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and Englis...
Sophie Bjork-James, "The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explai...
Stanley E. Porter and Alan E. Kurschner eds., "The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism" (Pickwick, 2023)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesIn The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism (Pickwick, 2023)., a wide range of scholars write on the question of the promises of God to Israel. These essays put forward the position that unconditional promises were given to Israel, which have not been fulfilled in the church or any other entity. At the consummation, there will be a continuing role for the Jewish people, realized through their national and territorial hope of a restored-redeemed Israel. Join us as we sp...
Maria Falina, "Religion and Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia: Serbian Nationalism and East Orthodox Christianity" (Bloombury, 2023)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe persistence of religion in modern Europe and the challenges of transitioning from a religious to a secular state has all too often been overlooked in the history of the Balkans. Indeed, the link between religion and nationalism in this region has long been considered natural, even historically inevitable. Religion and Politics in Interwar Yugoslavia: Serbian Nationalism and East Orthodox Christianity (Bloombury, 2023) challenges this assumption and shows that, in actuality, the region's p...
Michèle Miller Sigg, "Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France" (Baylor UP, 2022)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil. Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agen...
Daniel G. Hummel, "The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation" (William B. Eerdmans, 2023)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (William B. Eerdmans, 2023), Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe end-times theory, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination. Hummel locates dispensationalism’s origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the movement,...
The Fourth Wise Man (with Jonathon Fessenden)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesJonathon Fessenden, theologian and editor of Missio Dei, invited me to talk about The Fourth Wise Man, the 1985 film based on the 1895 Henry van Dyke novella, The Other Wise Man. It was a tale I had known as a children’s story, but it was a delight to learn more about it, to watch this movie (a few times), and to share this discussion with Jonathon. Martin Sheen plays Artaban, a Persian astrologer, a magus (one of the magi), who is following the star to the birth of Christ. But he arrives too...
Matthew Pawlak, "Sarcasm in Paul's Letters" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesIn this recent monograph Sarcasm in Paul's Letters (Cambridge University Press 2023, Matthew Pawlak offers the first treatment of sarcasm in New Testament studies. He provides an extensive analysis of sarcastic passages across the undisputed letters of Paul, showing where Paul is sarcastic, and how his sarcasm affects our understanding of his rhetoric and relationships with the Early Christian congregations in Galatia, Rome, and Corinth. Pawlak's identification of sarcasm is supported by a da...
James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, "Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict" (Zero Books, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlongside their collective acumen in traditional historical-critical and social-scientific approaches to the New Testament, James Crossley and Robert J. Myles bring a worthwhile dose of historical materialist criticism to historical Jesus scholarship in Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Zero Books/John Hunt Publishing, 2023). And while the Jesus they reconstruct from the various sources available for analysis may not evolve him into a Marxist or a modern socialist, Crossley and Myles regard th...
Timothy J. Christian, "Paul and the Rhetoric of Resurrection: 1 Corinthians 15 as Insinuatio" (Brill, 2022)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesHave you ever wondered why Paul leaves the resurrection discussion in 1 Corinthians 15 for the end of the letter? Have you pondered how 1 Corinthians 15 functions as the climax to 1 Corinthians? What precisely is Paul's rhetorical strategy in 1 Corinthians? Tune in as we speak with Timothy Christian whose recent book answers those questions by exploring insinuatio, the Greco-Roman rhetorical convention used to address prejudiced or controversial topics—like resurrection—at the end of a discou...
Mark Giacobbe, "Luke the Chronicler: The Narrative Arc of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles in Luke-Acts" (Brill, 2023)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesDid the author of the two-part narrative of Luke-Acts have a literary and historical paradigm in mind? Mark Giacobbe says, yes, that in certain key respects, Luke-Acts, using literary mimesis, was modeled on the two-part narrative of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, with part one concerning a Davidic king and part two the acts of those who inherit the kingdom. Join us as we speak with Mark Giacobbe about his recent book, Luke the Chronicler: The Narrative Arc of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles in Luk...
Stephen C. Taysom, "Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith" (U of Utah Press, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesJoseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the LDS Church, including the post of president from 1901 until his death in 1918. Joseph F. Smith l...
Lucy Moffat Kaufman, "A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2023)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lucy Moffat Kaufman presents the lived experience of the Reformation in Tudor England. The Elizabethan settlement, and the Church of England that emerged from it, made way for a theological reformation, an institutional reformation, and a high political reformation. It was a reformation that changed history, birthed an Anglican communion, and would eventually launch ...
Joel D. Anderson, "Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesWith its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a sur...
Kyle A. Thomas and Carol Symes, "The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A New Verse Translation, Edition, and Commentary" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesThe Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose d...
Owen Stanwood, "The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2019)
July 22, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesOwen Stanwood's newest book, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford UP, 2019), places the history of Huguenot refugees in a global context, the first truly international history of the diaspora. In the early modern world these French Protestant exiles scattered around the world, fleeing persecution following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The story begins with dreams of Eden, as religious migrants sought to build perfect societies far from the political storm...
Paul Hanebrink, "In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944" (Cornell UP, 2018)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary--a liberal society in the nineteenth century--as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion shou...
What Jesus Intended (with Bishop Todd Hunter)
July 20, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesBishop Todd Hunter is an Anglican Bishop in Tennessee and author of What Jesus Intended: Finding Faith in the Rubble of Bad Religion (IVP, 2023). He argues that, despite the troubles of the world and the messes we make, we should embrace Jesus’s invitation to follow him and live in his friendship and in his Kingdom right now. The goal is “being the cooperative friend of Jesus, seeking to live a life of constant creative goodness, for the sake of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit.” ...
Sara Moslener, "Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence" (Oxford UP, 2015)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFirst taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ...
Master Craftsman, Broken Tools (with Fr. Chris Alar, MIC)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFather Chris talks about his devotion to Our Lady, and what he has learned from St. Maria Faustyna Kowalska, the poor Polish country girl, whose visions of and friendship with Jesus gave us Divine Mercy Sunday. Father Chris calls it the “Extra Credit of Grace.” We also talk about suicide and intercessory prayer and why God choses to work with broken tools. Fr. Chris is Provincial Superior of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception in the United States and Argentina. Father Chris’s pa...
Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesA veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall...
The Future of the Sacred Nation: A Discussion with Anna M. Grzymała-Busse
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesWhen it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writ...
Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
July 09, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesSeeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of s...
Daniel J. Soars and Nadya Pohran, "Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging" (Routledge, 2022)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesDaniel J. Soars and Nadya Pohran's book Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) focuses on dual belonging within Hindu-Christian contexts. Written by experts in a variety of fields, the chapters explore the theological, philosophical, and cultural anthropological debates relating to religious pluralism, religious language, and social identity while addressing the fact that both Hindu and Christian forms of self-understandings have been significantly moulded through their interactions...
David Tavárez, "Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2022)
July 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourProfessor David Tavárez, historian and linguistic anthropologist, is Professor of Anthropology and at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. This Dr. Tavárez’s third time on the New Books Network. He spoken twice in 2020 about his earlier work: his...
Eric Vanden Eykel, "The Magi: Who They Were, How They've Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate" (Fortress Press, 2022)
July 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate (Fortress Press, 2022) is Eric Vanden Eykel’s second monograph overall and his first geared at a popular, non-scholarly audience. However, even scholars will find much to appreciate and more than a few narrative surprises from this thorough account of the Magi (often translated in English Bibles as “wise men” or “astrologers”), for it succeeds as an excellent recent example of uncompromising, but accessible, pu...
John H. Walton, "Wisdom for Faithful Reading: Principles and Practices for Old Testament Interpretation" (InterVarsity Press, 2023)
July 02, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesThe church has too often lost its way in reading the Old Testament for lack of sound principles of interpretation. When careless habits get us off track, we can lose sight of what the Bible is really saying, derailing our own spiritual growth and even risking discredit to God’s word. We need a consistent approach to give us confidence as faithful interpreters. In Wisdom for Faithful Reading: Principles and Practices for Old Testament Interpretation (InterVarsity Press, 2023), the trusted Old ...
Greg A. Salazar, "Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley" (Oxford UP, 2022)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesCalvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first modern full-scale examination of the theology and life of the distinguished English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645). It explores Featley's career and thought through a comprehensive treatment of his two dozen published works and manuscripts and situates these works within their original historical context. A fascinating figure, Featley was the youngest of t...
Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, "Stereotyping Religion II: Critiquing Clichés" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesBuilding on the success of Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés, this follow up volume dismantles a further 10 widespread stereotypes and clichés about religion, focusing on clichés that a new generation of students are most familiar with. Each chapter includes: A description of a particular cliché; Discussion of where it appears in popular culture or popular media; Discussion of where it appears in scholarly literature; A historical contextualization of its use in the past; An analysis ...
Barry G. Webb, "Job: Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary" (Lexham Academic, 2023)
June 30, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesThe Book of Job confronts the troubling issues that life throws at us as we try to live in trusting obedience to God. How do we live in relation to God when we don't have answers for all of life's problems? Join us as we speak with Barry Webb about his recent commentary on Job, a book that reveals a God we can trust, even in our darkest moments. With detailed exegesis and biblical-theological synthesis, Webb explores Job's unique theology of creation, evil, wisdom, justice, redemption, and Go...