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
Andrew Walker, "Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George" (Crossway, 2023)
April 28, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesRobert P. George is the indispensable man of American social conservatism. The Princeton professor is a scholar of such intellectual power that he almost single-handedly rescued the anti-abortion movement from the fringes of the American sociopolitical and legal landscape in the 1990s when the secular left assumed that the reign of abortion on demand for any reason was a done deal. George (born 1955) reset the debate and provided the intellectual framework that enabled a generation of pro-lif...
Remember the Sabbath (with Senator Joe Lieberman)
April 27, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesToday I talked with Senator Joe Lieberman—who ran for Vice President in 2000 with Al Gore, and for President in 2004 in the Democratic primary—about his book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011). Senator Lieberman is a devout Jew and talks with me about the Sabbath tradition, a custom rooted in God’s day of rest at the end of creation (Genesis 2) and the Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). It is the shared practice of all Abrahamic m...
Andreas J. Köstenberger and Greg Goswell, "Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach" (Crossway, 2023)
April 26, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesPastors, thoughtful Christians, and students of Scripture must learn how to carefully read and understand the Bible, but it can be difficult to know where to start. In this clear, logical guide, Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell explain how to interpret Scripture from three effective viewpoints: canonical, thematic, and ethical. Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach (Crossway, 2023) is arranged book by book from the Old Testament (using the Hebrew order) thr...
Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America: A Conversation with Michael Breidenbach
April 25, 2023 19:59 - 50 minutesHow did American Catholics go from subjects to citizens? Who is the "godfather" of the First Amendment? How can spiritual and temporal duties be reconciled? Michael Breidenbach, Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University, joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://...
Ana Schwartz, "Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America" (UNC Press, 2022)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesNew England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised ...
Ninon Dubourg, "Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service?" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesToday I talked to Ninon Dubourg about her new book Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service? (Amsterdam UP, 2023). The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical m...
Deidre Nicole Green, "Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice" (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)
April 21, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesToday I talked to Deidre Nicole Green about her book Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). Drawing on the thought of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in order to illuminate and interrogate feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, Green relies on Kierkegaard's view of Christian love to offer a constructive theological framework for limiting self-sacrifice that resists an overly simplistic identification of self-sacrific...
Benjamin E. Park, "Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier" (Liveright, 2020)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesCompared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, treated as fringe cultists at best or marginalized as polygamists unworthy of serious examination at worst. In Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020), the historian Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mormons are, in fact, essential to understanding American history writ large. Drawing on newly avai...
Catholic Movies, Part 2 (with Jonathan Fessenden)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourJonathan Fessenden and I talk about two movies, Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986) and Fred Zinneman’s A Man for All Seasons (1966), both written by Robert Bolt, and both about men of Faith facing persecution and a sudden reversal of political fortune. These are themes that we began in our first discussion, Episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1. Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, and teacher of theology. He has written about movies and worked in the industry as a composer, and con...
Ângela Barreto Xavier, "Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa" (SUNY Press, 2022)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesHow did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India re...
Deidre Nicole Green, "Jacob: A Brief Theological Introduction" (Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2020)
April 19, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutes"What could I have done more for my vineyard?" In one of the Book of Mormons most magisterial passages, the lord of a vineyard looks over his beloved olive trees with great sorrow and strives to redeem them. This allegory represents Jesus Christ s labor to save not only individual souls but an entire world. Perhaps more than any other Book of Mormon prophet, Jacob manifests the same divine anxiety, having been born in a wild wilderness and inheriting the task of uniting a divided people. In ...
Donald Harman Akenson, "The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible" (Oxford UP. 2023)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesIn the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism, and later, a core text of America's white Christian nationalism. In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creati...
Elizabeth S. Hurd and Winnifred F. Sullivan, "At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion" (Columbia UP, 2021)
April 15, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesFrom right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious ca...
Revival (with Fr Norman Fischer): The Holy Spirit at Work in Kentucky . . . and Many Other Places
April 13, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesFor three weeks in February of 2023, a spontaneous ‘Outpouring’ at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, set the hearts of American Christians aflame, reviving their faith and our spiritual conversation. Fr Norman Fischer, pastor of nearby St. Peter Claver Catholic Church and the chaplain at Lexington Catholic High School, in Lexington Kentucky, went over to Asbury to check it out. He tells us about the glorious events he witnessed there, in Wilmore. He also explains how, for Catholics, to ...
Live Not by Lies: A Conversation with Rod Dreher
April 12, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesCould totalitarianism take root in America? What does it mean to "live not by lies"? Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of several books, including The Benedict Option. He joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Solzhenitsyn's 1974 essay is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetw...
Catherine Wanner, "Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesEveryday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2022) reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is “ground zero” in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be w...
Jacques Dalarun et al., "A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesA Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) centers on a fascinating woman, Clare of Rimini (c. 1260 to c. 1324–29), whose story is preserved in a fascinating text. Composed by an anonymous Franciscan, the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini is the earliest known saint’s life originally written in Italian, and one of the few such lives to be written while its subject was still living. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the...
This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France
April 08, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesCarla Cevasco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, discusses her recent article, "This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France." Her article was published in the December 2016 issue of The New England Quarterly. Abstract: Analyzing the material culture of English, French, and Native communion ceremonies, and debates over communion and cannibalism, this article argues that peoples in the borderlands betwee...
Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022)
April 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World. In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II (NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected ...
Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s book is: Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, 2018), by Jonathan Coley. Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Christian colleges and universities. Drawing on interviews with student activists at a range of Chr...
The Gospel According to Dorothy (with Kathryn Wehr)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1941, Dorothy Sayers, Christian apologist, author of The Mind of the Maker, and even more famous for her Peter Whimsey mystery novels, wrote a cycle of plays on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was produced by the BBC for the radio and was a great success, though Sayers got flak for it from all directions—from secular voices calling it religious propaganda, from conservative voices calling it blasphemy. She also broke an established prohibition against actors playing J...
David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesWhen Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this ne...
God, The Founders, and Natural Law: A Conversation with Phil Muñoz
April 05, 2023 14:21 - 33 minutesHow did the American Founders understand religious liberty? Why should students study the Founding? What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Dr. Vincent Phillip Muñoz, the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, joins Madison's Notes to discuss these questions and more! Dr. Muñoz's 2020 Test Lectures are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....
Philip Jenkins, "He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesJews and Christians alike have made Psalm 91 one of the most commonly used and cited parts of the Bible. For over two thousand years, the psalm has played a pivotal role in discussions of theology and politics, of medicine and mysticism. In He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford UP, 2022), acclaimed religion scholar Philip Jenkins illustrates how the evolving uses of Psalm 91 map developing ideas about religion and the supernatural. Depending on the er...
Gary Kulik: Conscientious Objector Who Served in Vietnam
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesGary Kulik was a Catholic Conscientious Objector (CO) during the Vietnam War, but when he was drafted he decided to go and serve as a medic. He tells me about this decision and how he arrived at it, about his journey to Vietnam, his experiences there, and his return. He also talks about how Americans often misrepresent the war in Hollywood and politics, which is the topic of his first book, War Stories: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers—What Really Happened in Vietnam. ...
Joshua D. Schendel, "The Necessity of Christ's Satisfaction: A Study of the Reformed Scholastic Theologians William Twisse (1578-1646) and John Owen (1616-1683)" (Brill, 2022)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesThe seventeenth century Reformed Orthodox discussions of the work of Christ and its various doctrinal constitutive elements were rich and multifaceted, ranging across biblical and exegetical, historical, philosophical, and theological fields of inquiry. Among the most contested questions in these discussions was the question of the necessity of Christ's satisfaction. Joshua D. Schendel's The Necessity of Christ's Satisfaction (Brill, 2022) sets that "great controverted point," as Richard Baxt...
John Soderberg, "Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise" (Lexington Books, 2021)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesClonmacnoise was among the busiest, most economically complex, and intensely sacred places in early medieval Ireland. In Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland: Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise (Lexington Books, 2021), John Soderberg argues that animals are the key to understanding Clonmacnoise’s development as a thriving settlement and a sacred space. At this sanctuary city on the River Shannon, animal bodies were an essential source of food and raw materials. They were als...
Margaret Chowning, "Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHistorians have long looked to networks of elite liberal and anti-clerical men as the driving forces in Mexican history over the course of the long nineteenth century. This traditional view, writes Margaret Chowning, cannot account for the continued power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, which has withstood extensive and sustained political opposition for over a century. How, then, must the scholarly consensus change to better reflect Mexico's history? In Catholic Women and Mexican Politics...
Education in the World not of the World
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesRich Meyer, president of JSerra High School—named for St. Junípero Serra, the ‘Apostle of California’—in Southern California, discusses what is working in Catholic education today. He and I are both fathers and teachers; and I ask him about his philosophy and his school’s approach about social media and some of the contentious cultural issues of our day. How do we help our children find sure footing on the right path and what is the correct balance of order and freedom, of justice and grace? ...
Tobias Tanton, "Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesAppropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of 'embodied cognition', Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition (Oxford UP, 2023) explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. The principle of divine accommodation provides a theological framework for considering the human cognitive capacities that are accommodated by theological concepts and ecclesial practices. A ri...
John P. Bequette, "Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality" (Catholic U of America Press, 2022)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesRevered by contemporaries and posterity for both his sanctity and his scholarship, Bede (672-735) is a pivotal figure in the history of the Church. Known primarily as an historian for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede was also an accomplished pedagogue, hagiographer, and biblical scholar. Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality (Catholic U of America Press, 2022) takes a fresh look at this classic Christian thinker, exploring the gamut of Bede's literary ...
Peter Heather, "Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300" (Knopf, 2023)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the fourth century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows ...
Valeriu Gafencu, "White Lilies: Letters, Conversations, and Poems from Prison" (STM Press, 2023)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesValeriu Gafencu was born in 1921 in the Bessarabia region of Romania. In 1941, he was arrested and imprisoned, remaining so until his death in 1952. Two years into his incarceration, Gafencu was seized by the conviction that he had squandered God’s love and felt a fervent wish to repent. Fr. George Calciu—who had likewise been a prisoner in Romania and had met Gafencu on several occasions—later witnessed to his conversion: “It was enough just to see him and to pass by him, to imme...
Ned Bustard, "Saint Patrick the Forgiver: The History and Legends of Ireland's Bishop" (InterVarsity, 2023)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesNed Bustard is the author of a new children’s book, Saint Patrick the Forgiver: The History and Legends of Ireland's Bishop (InterVarsity, 2023). We talked about the book, the life of St. Patrick, and the conversion of Ireland. The day after the interview, during his Ash Wednesday homily, Pope Francis said, “the Gospel is not an idea, the Gospel is not an ideology: the Gospel is a proclamation that touches your heart and makes you change your heart.” That’s exactly what St Patrick showed by r...
Tisa Wenger and Sylvester A. Johnson, "Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories" (NYU Press, 2022)
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022) examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the most comprehensive and definitive text on the relationship between US empire and American religion. Whereas other works describe religion as a force that ai...
Stephen Prothero, "God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time" (HarperOne, 2023)
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesNew York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. Th...
Joseph W. Peterson, "Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUpon the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, the territory quickly became a placeholder for French dreams, debates, and experiments in social engineering, economic development and even religious culture. Missionaries and Jesuit priests sent to minister to the new French colonial population there commented favorably on Arab Muslims’ religiosity, seeing in it both the possibility of effective missionization and an example of how religion and civil society might work together. After decades of f...
Illuminations Episode 1: Experimental Methods
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesHave faith and science always been enemies? The story of Robert Hooke, a revolutionary working in the Scientific Revolution, exemplifies the ways in which Christianity has actually provoked scientific inquiry. Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Patricia Fara, director of studies and affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosoph...
Razvan Porumb, "Orthodoxy and Ecumenism: Towards an Active Metanoia" (Peter Lang, 2019)
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourRazvan Porumb's Orthodoxy and Ecumenism: Towards an Active Metanoia (Peter Lang, 2019) explores the relationship between the Orthodox tradition and the ecumenical practice of engagement with other Christian traditions. This relationship has for a long time been compromised by an underlying tension, as the Orthodox have chosen to participate in ecumenical encounters while - often at the same time - denouncing the ecumenical movement as deficient and illegitimate. The author perceives this rela...
Robin L. Owens, "'My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole': Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scriptures" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
March 11, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesUS Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon's 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In "My Faith in the Constitution is Whole" Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture (Georgetown UP, 2022), Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerf...
The Exorcist: Angels, Demons, and the Cosmic Battle around Us
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesI asked an exorcist, Monsignor Rosetti, about the spiritual world around us, the demons he fights, and the mischief they cause. He talks about his life and work as an exorcist, how people stumble into demonic ensnarement, and how we, in our daily practice and through the Sacraments and sacramentals, can steer clear of it. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti is the head of St. Michael’s Center for Spiritual Renewal and teaches at the Catholic University of America. He has a PhD in psychology and is the...
Jamie Kreiner, "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction" (Liveright, 2023)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesThe Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright, 2023) by Dr. Jamie Kreiner presents a revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later. Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around ...
Constantin Iordachi, "The Fascist Faith of the Legion Archangel Michael in Romania, 1927-1941: From Martyrdom to Purification" (Routledge, 2022)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Fascist Faith of the Legion "Archangel Michael" in Romania, 1927–1941 (Routledge, 2022) engages critically with recent works on fascism, totalitarianism, and religion, and advances an original theoretical and methodological approach to fascism as a political faith. On this basis, the book constructs an innovative comparative research framework for reconceptualizing the history of the Legion "Archangel Michael" in Romania, 1927–1941. It contends that the Legion put forward a palingenetic p...
Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein, "The Middle Ages in 50 Objects" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe extraordinary array of images included in The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (Cambridge UP, 2018) reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each sect...
Caleb Friedeman, "The Revelation of the Messiah: The Christological Mystery of Luke 1-2 and Its Unveiling in Luke-Acts" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesIn the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, characters acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord. Such a high Christology, however, appears incongruous with the body of the Gospel where human characters seem ignorant of Jesus’ divinity, at least until his resurrection. Here to resolve a long-standing scholarly puzzle is Caleb Friedeman—we’ll be talking about his recent monograph, The Revelation of the Messiah: The Christological Mystery of Luke 1-2 and Its Unveiling in Luke-Acts (Cam...
Kyama M. Mugambi, "A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya" (Baylor UP, 2020)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPerhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commo...
Who Do You Think You Are?: Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourGarret Johnson works with Courage, the Catholic apostolate for people experience same-sex attractions. He describes his experience living the gay lifestyle and responds to my interview with Father Jim Martin, SJ, author of Building a Bridge, and several things Fr Jim said in that conversation that Garrett disagrees with. This is—please be warned—an honest, raw, and redeeming discussion about sex, gay culture, drugs, pornography, identity politics, Catholic doctrine, and the secular narrative....
Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesOn a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelical, but his Christian admirers anointed him as their political champion, believing he would lead America back to God. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a whit...
Jason Bruner, "How to Study Global Christianity: A Short Guide for Students" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
February 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourJason Bruner's How to Study Global Christianity: A Short Guide for Students (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) provides students with an accessible–yet critically oriented–introduction to the foundational methods and themes in Global Christianity scholarship over the past 40 years. While the field of Global Christianity is itself interdisciplinary, it largely has not reflected upon the various disciplines of which it is comprised. In addressing different methods that have constituted this field of sc...
Kenneth R. Stow, "Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2016)
February 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Kenneth R. Stow about his book Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2016). After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793...