New Books In Christian Studies

For generations, Pauline scholars have responded in different ways to the Apostle’s “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7), our clearest indication that Paul was disabled—some with clinical diagnoses along biomedical lines, more with reticence and agnosticism as to the specifics of Paul’s disability, and others with doubts that Paul could have accomplished his apostolic work had he been physically impaired.  On this episode, Isaac T. Soon joined the New Books Network to discuss his paradigm-pushing study A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul (Oxford UP, 2023), a revision of his recent Durham Ph.D. dissertation with the same title, which employs the insights of disability studies and “biographical criticism” not simply to exegete Paul’s enigmatic “thorn in the flesh” but to reflect more broadly on the Apostle’s rhetoric of disability and impairment in its ancient context. Simultaneously, Soon contends that by an awareness of embodied language in Paul’s letters and concepts of bodily

One of the eight national dances of India, bharatanatyam, partly originates from the area around Tranquebar. During the time that Tranquebar was a Danish colony, devadasis, women who did service at temples through dance, were patronized by the Thanjavur royal court. In 1623, a Danish–Icelandic soldier routinely observed the devadasis dancing outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansborg, which he was guarding. His accounts of the dancers are interesting at two levels; first, they provide us with unique data on the role of the devadasis at the village level in seventeenth century Tamil Nadu. Secondly, they shed light on a certain imagination and perspective on Indian religion grounded in European Christian thought at the time. Since the seventeenth century the dance of the devadasis has undergone a dramatic transformation, as it has been taken from its original setting to a national middle class arena in which females of very different socio-cultural backgrounds learn the dance now called bharatan

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides.  In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated i

A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture. "What's wrong with you?" Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What's wrong isn't her wheelchair, though--it's exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God's call. Jacob's encounter with an angel leaves him changed not just spiritually but physically: he gains a limp. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold in ways that treat disability as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity or as a challenge to be overcome. Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023) instead paints a lumino

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense – but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice.   Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor, Honors College, Villanova University Featured Scholars:  Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish, Yale University María Cristina Ríos Espinosa, Professor of Arts, Humanities, and Culture, University of Sor Juana’s Cloister, Mexico City David Orique, Professor of History, Providence College Special thanks: Chiyuma Eliott, Michael

It turns out that our familiar narrative of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Mary appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 and left her image on his tilma, resembles an indigenous Mexican myth. And this myth of the Flower World in “Cuicapeuhcayotl” (“Origin of Songs”) has led some secular historians and anthropologists to conclude that the Catholic version must therefore be an imitation, a fabrication.  Yet Joseph Julián and Monique González concluded that the opposite was true. They argue “that God had prepared the Mesoamerican people to receive Christianity” that this Nahua myth had been inserted into history to make Our Lady comprehensible to the Nahua people—leading to ten million conversions—at a time when Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos were making a mess of the New World with their slavery and greed, polluting the evangelical work of the humble friars preaching Gospel. Misa Azteca on Soundcloud, composed by Joseph Julián González The book, Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy (Sophia Institute Press,

The Tabernacle Narrative comprises passages in Exodus and Leviticus that detail the construction, furnishing, and liturgical use of the tabernacle. Given its genre and style, the narrative is often passed over by those reading Scripture for theological insight. What does Israel’s tabernacle mean for Christians today? Join us as Gary Anderson shows how these passages shed light on incarnation and atonement both in ancient Israel’s theology and in Christian theology. Anderson is the author of That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative (Eerdmans, 2023) Gary A. Anderson is Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought at the University of Notre Dame. His previous books include Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition; Sin: A History; and Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured:

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived?  In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period. Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipa

In Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023), political scientist Anna Grzymała-Busse corrects a long-standing distortion in the study of state formation in Europe, writing religion back into the story and examining, at once pithily and methodically, the multiple contributions of the Roman Church to the emergence of modern practices of secular statehood. Sacred Foundations expands the conventional geography of medieval European state practice and brings to bear a range of innovative data analysis, showing that not only the papacy, but also a host of individuals and institutions subsumed under the Church contributed to medieval Europe’s territorial fragmentation (especially in Germanic and Italian lands), to the genesis of state institutions and civil law, and to the emergence of a culture of taxation by consent. Sometimes through rivalry, sometimes through emulation, kings across medieval Europe acquired the necessary tools to multiply human

In his book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press, 2023), J. Christopher Edwards explores the early Christian teachings regarding who actually killed Jesus. Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter play and remember Roman soldiers hammering the nails. However, for early Christians, the detail that Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers under the direction of a Roman governor threatened their desire for a stable existence in the Roman world. Beginning with the writings found in the New Testament, early Christians sought to rewrite their history and shift the blame for Jesus's crucifixion away from Pilate and his soldiers and onto Jews. During the second century, a narrative of the crucifixion with Jewish executioners predominated. During the fourth century, this narrative functioned to encourage anti-Judaism wit

The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems, The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by headlong change. Honored as a "mother" by subsequent Frankish kings and as a holy woman by her nuns and devotees, Radegund enjoyed a reputation for righteousness that spread throughout the whole of medieval Europe, with later queens emulating her pious achievements. For generations, she defined medieval queenship, female monastic practice, and the expectations associated with holy women. Today, she is often envisioned as a pan-European saint. Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Pres

This episode, which is co-hosted with Michael Nishimura, features a conversation with Dr. Diane C. Fujino, the author of Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Reverend Michael Yasutake (University of Washington Press, 2020).  The book traces the activism of two siblings who charted their own paths for what it meant to be Nisei. Reverend Mike was an Episcopal minister whose politics changed with the historical contexts and circumstances surrounding his life, whereas Mitsuye is one of the most widely known Nisei feminists and writers and was among the first writers to discuss the experience of incarceration. Through detailing their half-century of dedication to global movements, including multicultural feminism, Puerto Rican independence, Japanese American redress, and Indigenous sovereignty, Reverend Mike and Mitsuye’s lives complicate the dominant narrative that depicts Japanese Americans moving toward conservatism in the later part of the 20th century. Their l

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book further sheds light on issues such as compliance, enforcement, deterrence, authority and jurisdiction, challenging traditional ideas over their role and function in the history of international law. International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflic

Jay Richards PhD, OP discusses the new book to which he contributed a chapter, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), edited by Ann Gauger. We take on the insufficient explanations of Darwinian orthodoxy which insists that our world—from the vast cosmos to the also vast (in its complexity) genetic code in our cells. At the end of this episode (at 55 minutes), we hear an update from Father Piotr Żelazko in Israel as we enter the second month of the Gaza War. Here’s the book, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, edited by Ann Gauger (Sophia Institute Press, 2023) Here’s Jay Richard’s webpage at the Heritage Foundation. Here’s the debate between Jay Richards and Christopher Hitchens from 2008 at Stanford. Father Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 71: Live from Israel: Catholics in the Holy Land Today. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics'

In her book Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale University Press, 2021), Meghan Henning illuminates how the bodies that populate hell in early Christian literature are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, effectually criminalizing those bodies on Earth. Contextualizing the apocalypses alongside ancient medical texts, inscriptions, philosophy, and patristic writings, this book demonstrates the ways that Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity that continue to inform Christian identity. Meghan R. Henning is associate professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online

Exegetes have long relied on the framework of the Acts of the Apostles to understand the behavior and organization of Paul’s various ekklēsiai (assemblies), or church communities, from which Christ-groups have often been conceptualized as extensions from practices of diasporic Jewish synagogues. However, Richard S. Ascough’s work has been at the forefront of a scholarly movement emphasizing the relevance of data from Greco-Roman associations—occupational, cultic, ethnic, and otherwise—not only as a preferable model for understanding the constitution of early Christ-following communities, but also as fruitful comparanda for interpreting Paul’s letters, such as 1 Thessalonians and Philippians.  On this episode, Dr. Ascough joined the New Books Network to discuss Early Christ Groups and Greco-Roman Associations: Organizational Models and Social Practices (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his articles and essays on associations from the last 25 years detailing the road to the acceptance of association data w

When one thinks of your typical horror movie and it’s usual imagery, a number of tropes may come forward. Graveyards behind old cathedrals, crucifixes and holy water, possessions and exorcisms. The uniting thread of all of these is that they are all tied to the religious. One might then wonder if there is some underlying thread of meaning beneath the facade. Addressing this topic directly is Jonathan Greenaway in his book Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2022). Surveying a number of well known works from this period, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bronte sisters all the way up to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Greenaway finds works filled with various references and discussions of religious scripture, imagery and themes. What’s more, he’s able to follow these various occasions down into deeper territory, finding a subterranean conversation in much of this literature on themes of embodiment, createdness, epistemolo

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their testimonials to the Christian faith helped them to make sense of and find purpose in their trauma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodian communities in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, and Phnom Penh, Wong examines questions of religious identity and the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism. While the community has grown in recent decades, Christians nevertheless make up a small minority of the predominantly Buddhist diaspora. Wong explores what it is about Christianity that makes these converts willing to risk their social standing, familial

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport (Routledge, 2021) examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include: the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson; the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; religious expressions of athletes in the NFL; treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams; Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice. This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport. Jeffrey Scholes is associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosoph