New Books In Biblical Studies

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians understood and adapted to the modern world. In particular, these articles focus on locating Christianity within East Asian political, economic, and social contexts and analyzing how Protestantism interacted with these different spheres of human activity. Articles in this anthology cover China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Americans who claim descent from these nations, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, covering such diverse topics as Korean megachurches, Christianity and nationalism in wartime Japan, and social networks in south China. As such, this volume offers a great deal not only those who study Christianity, but to anyone interested in learning more about E

Expressions of religious belief through popular media are a regular occurrence in our contemporary age. But the circulation and negotiation of religious identities in public contexts has a fairly long history in American culture. Matthew Hedstrom, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, looks beyond the church to determine how religious liberalism was popularized through mainstream book culture. In The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) he examines mid-century middlebrow society at the intersection of protestant liberalism, therapeutic culture, and American consumerism. Through an examination of resources such as book clubs, reading programs, key authors, bestsellers, and new publishing initiatives in religion, he argues that American spiritual life during the mid-twentieth century happens through religious commodities. In our conversation we discussed social practices of reading, William James, publis

In the current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more complicated picture. In Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brian A. Catlos, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, offers the first comprehensive overview of Muslim minorities in Latin Christian lands during the Middle Ages. The book provides a narrative history of regional Muslim subjects in the Latin west, including Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, expansion in the Near East, the Muslim communities of Medieval Hungary, and portraits of travelers, merchants, and slaves in Western Europe. Here we find that Muslims often had great deal of agency in structuring the subject/ruler relationship due to the material and economic contributions they made to local communities. The second hal

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology. Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuck

I’ve never been in a confessional box, but I’ve seen a lot of them in films. And if the depiction of them in films is in any way a reflection of popular attitudes toward confession, then I can say with some confidence that the act has a rather poor reputation. Confessional boxes are–in my imagination, at least–dark places where dark things are admitted and, sometimes, even darker things are done. Is it a surprise that fewer and fewer Catholics confess their sins in the box? John Cornwell doesn’t think so. In this provocative book–half history and half religious commentary–The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (Basic Books, 2014), Cornwell traces the history of confession and the confessional box. The origins of confession–or at least its scriptural basis–can be found, of course, in the New Testament. But the sacrament’s form has changed quite a bit over the centuries. Regular, weekly confessions were a medieval innovation. The box itself was a

Nathan Schneider‘s monograph, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet (University of California Press, 2013), explores the timeless challenge of how to explain God. Are such explanations rational? Why are some attempts more popular than others? Indeed, can one really “prove” God? Isn’t it called “faith” for a reason? And what does Star Trek have to do with all of this? In addressing these questions, and many more, Schneider guides the reader through a rich land of storytelling, autobiographical reflections, and clever drawings. As the author submits in the book from its onset, don’t expect to discover which proof is right or why atheists are wrong. It turns out, in any case, that “proof” doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. Although proof can mean unimpeachable evidence, a proof can also be a work in progress (e.g., the proof of a text); or it can mean to tackle a challenge (e.g., to prove oneself). As Schnei

In almost every prison movie you see, there is a group of fanatically religious inmates. They are almost always led by a charismatic leader, an outsized father-figure who is loved by his acolytes and feared by nearly everyone else. They’re usually black Muslims, but you also see the occasional born-again Christian gang. They promise salvation and, of course, protection. And they are scary. But what’s religious life in prison really like? In order to find out, the intrepid and brave religious scholar Joshua Dubler actually moved into a prison. He lived among the inmates and those clerics who had devoted their lives to bringing them spiritual comfort. The picture he paints in his wonderful new book Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013) is nothing like the one you see on TV or in the movies. In fact, it’s so irreducibly complex that it almost defies description. The spirituality he finds behind bars is adapted to the harsh realities of pri

I have a colleague at Newman who takes students to Guatemala every summer.  Since I arrived she’s encouraged me to join her.  I would stay with the order of sisters who sponsor our university. I’d learn at least a few words of rudimentary Spanish.  And, she says, if I’m really interested in genocide, I must visit this complicated, conflicted country. I’ve always declined (granted, I’m usually taking students to Europe, so I have a good excuse).  However, after reading Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s excellent description of Guatemala in the early 1980s, I may have to say yes the next time. Burnett does an extraordinary job of making the complex politics of Guatemala understandable. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt 1982-1983 (Oxford University Press, 2011) is at least partly a biography of Rios Montt, and an excellent one.  Burnett’s explanation of Rios Montt’s complicated personality and the influence religion played on

A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is the narrative of His providence tells us that when kingdoms are divided against themselves they cannot stand. Those nations homogenous in race were the most prosperous and were entrusted by the Almighty with the highest tasks.” Strange as it appears today, such a racial theology was commonplace among Christians prior to 1945. Where did the notion that races had providential roles come from? One origin was a theory that the world had been inhabited by humans before Adam. The history of this theory, which formed at the intersections of science, religion and colonial geography, is taken up in Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). In this interview with its author, David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University Belfast, we

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christi

Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy years.  Worthen argues that attentive observers of American evangelical history must contend with the imagination as much as the mind when considering how evangelicals have “navigated the upheavals in modern American culture and global Christianity.”  Expertly weaving the intellectual and religious histories of institutions and movements with the biographies of specific people, Worthen provides a rigorous and fluid analysis of a much maligned and often misunderstood category of American religion.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical violence of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Spain in the early twentieth century appears to confirm his verdict. Yet, not everyone in interwar Europe accepted the incompatibility of religion and socialism, as we learn in this interview with political theorist and Professor at Queen’s University Belfast Vincent Geoghegan. The dynamism of Stalinist Russia in the early 1930s sent shockwaves through Depression-era Britain, leading a group of intellectuals to rethink their Christianity. In his new book Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (Routledge, 2011) Geoghegan explores the efforts of four intellectuals to fuse the two in theory and in the form of a short-lived political party called Common Wealth. Our conversation begins with the pivotal theorist in Common Wealth, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Macmurray saw in communism a c

What is the nature of secularization? How distant are we from the magical world of the past? Perhaps, we are not as far as many people think. In the fascinating new book, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012), we witness some of the discursive practices formulating the Christian myth of disenchantment. Robert Yelle, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis, aims to pull up some of the religious roots of secularism by highlighting the Christian dimensions of colonialism. He achieves this through an examination of colonial British attitudes toward Hinduism and delineates several Protestant projects that assert an ideal monotheism. British colonial discourse in India was integrally tied to religious reform and located false belief in linguistic diversity. Verbal idolatry was specifically addressed through efforts of codification and transliteration. Overall, Yelle’s work on British critiques of South

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of Chinese history. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013) explores the modern history of a single Catholic town in Shanxi called Cave Gully by weaving together some of the most important tales and memories of its inhabitants. Through this very local story of lived religious practice, Harrison challenges dominant global histories of Christianity. In contrast to narratives that tell a story of a Christian religion that was alien to Chinese contexts and acculturated or adapted in order t o compensate for this incommensurability, Harrison’s book instead shows the significant commonalities between Christianity and Chinese reli

Christians in the United States and around the world have varying images of Jesus, from one who turns the other cheek to one who brings the sword. Reza Aslan, in his highly popular and beautifully written new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013), approaches Jesus by first taking the context in which he lived – first-century Palestine – quite seriously. Aslan argues that Jesus’ time was one awash in a fervent nationalism that is important for understanding the man as well as his message. It is not a book about the Jesus of the Gospels. Indeed it is not even a book about Christianity. Rather, Aslan’s book attempts to grapple with how Jesus understood himself and his role during a volatile period in history. Zealot has shot to the best seller lists in recent weeks, partly due to a controversial interview Reza Aslan gave to Fox News during which he was questioned about why a Muslim would be interested in writing a book about the founder of Christianity.

Deservedly or not, the members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) are often portrayed as one of history’s Good Guys. The Society was the first organized religious group to condemn slavery on moral and religious grounds. In Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865 (University Press of Florida, 2012), Glenn Crothers probes below that simple idea to study how Quakers in a slave society–a lion’s mouth –coped with the inevitable tensions.  How did they deal with their slaveholding neighbors?  How did those neighbors cope with Quakers who–while very nice, hardworking, and honest folk–also condemned slavery as a sin against God?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that the “victors” generally write history. The “losers,” then, often get a bum rap. Such was the case with King James II. He’s got a pretty poor reputation, largely due to the purveyors of the “Whig Interpretation of History.” They claimed that James II was a tyrant who tried to impose Catholicism on the United Kingdom. But, as Scott Sowerby shows in his new book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013), James II was really no such thing. Actually, he was the head of a movement to repeal many of religious restrictions (the “Test Act”) put in place after the Civil War. He favored toleration, at least of a limited sort. Listen to Scott tell his story and that of the “repealers.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Superstitions flourish in our world–think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happiness (or relief) we might experience from finding a lucky (heads up only!) penny. Yet it is part of the mythology of modernity that ours is a “disenchanted” age (or at least so said German sociologist Max Weber in a famous 1918 lecture). Since the Enlightenment, there has been a tradition of invoking a superstitious Middle Ages as a supposed counterpoint to “our” own rationalized and intellectualized times (to paraphrase Weber). The Middle Ages was one of the historical entities against which European modernity in many senses constituted itself, and it continues popularly to be imagined as uniformly saturated with superstition. Yet as Michael D. Bailey‘s latest book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2013) shows, that age had its own, highly deve

Jesus has inspired millions of people to both strive for social justice and commit horrific acts of violence. In the United States, Jesus has remained central in the construction of American identities and debates about Jesus have frequently revolved around his skin color and bodily appearance. In The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), we get a history of Americans’ encounters with images of Jesus and the creation of them. Edward J. Blum, professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have carefully mined a plethora of sources, including paintings, drawings, music, poetry, sermons, visions, and other historical documents, to reveal the rich conversation Americans have had around religion and race. The Color of Christ offers a chronological history from the colonial period to the present that weaves through the construction of Jesus’ image

As one of Time Magazine‘s “100 Most Influential People in the World” Rob Bell is a name that is now known well beyond the confines of his megachurch in Grandville, Michigan or within evangelical circles. Bell has been at the forefront of contemporary Christian movements in America and is situated in a unique liminal space where he refuses to be defined. In a new book, Rob Bell and A New American Christianity (Abingdon Press, 2012), James Wellman, Jr.,  Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Washington, probes Bell’s life and examines how he can serve as a lens for understanding the shifting boundaries of the American religious landscape. For Wellman, the enthusiasm and success of congregations like Bell’s Mars Hill Church is indicative of the failure of fundamentalism in American Christianity. The refusal to be labeled by a particular interpretive framework reflects the growing American population’s self-identity as “nones.” This might be why many