New Books in Christian Studies

In America's Pacific Northwest a group of conservative Protestants have been conducting a new experiment in cultural transformation. Dissatisfied with what they see as the clumsy political engagement and vapid literary and artistic culture of mainstream Evangelicals, these Christian Reconstructionists have deployed an altogether different set of strategies for the long game, fueled by their Calvinist theology and much-more-hopeful apocalypse. In Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021), Crawford Gribben presents a hybrid study of historical, theological, literary, and anthropological analysis of this variant of Evangelical counter-culture. Gribben paints a rich and detailed portrait of this loosely banded, sometimes coordinated migration to the "American redoubt." This migration has led, in part, to the establishment of a network of communities and institutions that include churches, a liberal arts college, a publishing house, and an ambitious media strategy that has already had an outsize impact. From their outpost in Idaho and prompted by their revised postmillennial eschatology, these Christian conservatives are preparing to survive the collapse American society and to reconstruct a godly society that will usher in the Kingdom of Christ. For this group of born-again Protestants, their apocalyptic strategy is precisely to be left behind.Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Brendan McNamara, who teaches religion at University College Cork, Ireland, has published an excellent new book on the expansion of the Bahá’í faith into western Europe. In the late nineteenth century, religious scholars and clergy in Britain became aware of a movement of reform in Persia that they framed as a revitalisation project within Islam, and which attracted converts including the former Oriel Professor for the Interpretation of Scripture at the University of Oxford. As the teachings of the Bahá’í faith came into better focus, in the early twentieth century, they attracted the attention of an extremely diverse group of spiritualists, Celticists, and liberal protestants, who, for various reasons, saw in the life and work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá an opportunity to advance the brotherhood of humanity and its religious possibilities. In The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West (Brill, 2020), McNamara describes the sometimes adulatory, sometimes rather colonial, appreciation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his two visits to Britain in the early 1910s. But McNamara also suggests reasons why this extraordinary wave of interest in the Bahá’í faith was not sustained – not least because the crisis to all religions that was represented by the First World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Eilish Gregory, Catholics During the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Boydell Press, 2021) is the first book to examine thoroughly the ways in which Catholics adapted to political and social change during the turbulent years of the English Revolution. The book examines several important aspects of the Catholic experience in this period. It explores the penal laws by which the estates of Catholics were sequestrated, discussing the extent to which politicians designed the new laws to target Catholics specifically, rather than Royalists more generally, and outlining how the sequestration legislation operated in practice. It considers how Catholic gentry utilised their networks with influential Protestants with wider political connections when applying to have their sequestrations discharged. More broadly the book reveals how Catholics demonstrated their loyalty and assimilated into society despite being viewed as the natural enemies of the English Republic and Protectorate. The book also compares Catholic experiences to those of other religious minorities and sets the situation in England in the wider European international context of Catholic-Protestant rivalry and warfare, which made Catholics a particularly vulnerable religious minority in Puritan England. Eilish Gregory is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Royal Historical Society. She has held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Durham University and Marsh's Library and teaches at the University of Reading.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Histories of seventeenth-century Quakerism have far too often emphasized social and political factors as the agents of development and change. While the Quakers were not in a vacuum and persecution was a real challenge, Madeleine Pennington draws attention to a more fundamental agent of change in Quaker belief and practice: theological pressure. In Quakers, Christ, and The Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2021), Pennington takes seriously Quaker's doctrinal and intellectual engagement with other Christian traditions in the turbulent revolutionary and restoration period of the seventeenth century. She explores the metaphysical implications of Christology in the broader landscape of Post-Reformation theological exchanges, and how early Quakers conformed and delineated their developing religious culture. Madeleine Pennington is head of research for Theos Think Tank and on Twitter (@mlmpennington).Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Motivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany's colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of missionaries, mission societies, mission intellectuals, and missionary supporters.Combining cases studies from East Africa with studies of the metropole, this book demonstrates that missionaries' ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans' experience of globalization and colonialism at the same time that the missionaries shaped colonial governance. By bringing together religious and colonial history, the book opens new avenues of inquiry into Christian participation in colonialism. During the Age of Empire, German missionaries promoted an internationalist vision of the modern world that aimed to create a multinational, multiracial "heavenly Fatherland" spread across the globe.Jeremy Best is an assistant professor of modern Europe at Iowa State University with a specific interest in the cultural history of Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policies. Religious leaders from Billy Graham to David Wilkerson found growing concerns around juvenile delinquency and general lawbreaking as strategic connection points for their evangelistic message and ministries. In God's Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America (Harvard UP, 2020), Aaron Griffith explores the rhetoric of crime and punishment in the postwar Evangelical movement. The rhetoric of law and order became deeply enmeshed with religious conservatism, but not without attending efforts at criminal justice reform as growing number of Americans, disproportionately from urban and minority populations, spent years in state incarceration. In this expertly researched volume, Griffith presents a complex and important investigation into a timely subject in the recent past of the history of religion in politics in American society. Find out more about Aaron on his website or follow him on Twitter (@AaronLGriffith).Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz have edited an outstanding volume that breaks important new ground in the history of early modern science and religion. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the long-standing discussion of natural theology gave way in the mid-seventeenth century to a new conversation about physico-theology, a distinctive genre of science and religion writing that emphasised the goodness and the predictability of the divine being. Emerging first in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of the English civil wars, this discourse emphasised order and causality, and subjected the being of God to the science of order that was emerging in the same period. But, constructed to explain the benevolence of the creator and creation, physico-theology struggled to make sense of creaturely suffering, and eventually was understood as undermining its own presuppositions. Just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 will be a landmark text in early modern intellectual history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Bryce Traister has edited a collection of 13 original essays exploring the shifting landscape in the historiography of American Puritanism in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies (Cambridge UP, 2017). These essays explore how studies in American literature(s) can benefit from the shifting trends in 21st-century scholarship under the broad themes of post-secular, post-national, and post-colonial literary readings. In this interview, Traister introduces the themes that led to the assembly of this new collection and describes the emerging trends in the long history of Puritan literature studies. Perhaps the postmortem calls for the end of Puritan literary studies in the academy were premature. New theoretical frameworks have opened entirely new vistas for re-engaging the Puritan archives with a new set of questions and interpretive opportunities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Dutch Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck, a significant voice in the development of Protestant theology, remains relevant many years after his death. His four-volume Reformed Dogmatics is one of the most important theological works of the twentieth century. James Eglinton is widely considered to be at the forefront of contemporary interest in Bavinck's life and thought. After spending considerable time in the Netherlands researching Bavinck, Eglinton brings to light a wealth of new insights and previously unpublished documents to offer a definitive biography of this renowned Reformed thinker. Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic, 2020) follows the course of Bavinck's life in a period of dramatic social change, identifying him as an orthodox Calvinist challenged with finding his feet in late modern culture. Based on extensive archival research, this critical biography presents numerous significant and previously ignored or unknown aspects of Bavinck's person and life story.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situate their ideas in relationship to each other and to their perceived audiences Pihlaja argues that people position themselves and others differently depending on conversational contexts and topic, generalizing about themselves in relationship to a range of already-existing storylines, whether they're talking about biblical inerrancy, the nature of Islam, to homosexuality and interracial dating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies