New Books in Christian Studies

What happens to a trauma survivor who negatively internalizes the doctrines of Reformed theology? What are the paths forward toward psychological and spiritual healing? In a tour de force interdisciplinary study, The Trauma of Doctrine: New Calvinism, Religious Abuse, and the Experience of God (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020), Paul Maxwell combines insights from dogmatic theology, psychological modeling, and trauma theory to integrate current traumatology with Calvinist dogma. He presents a unique model to account for the disruptions trauma introduces to the human faculties, and integrates this anthropological model with a psychological mapping of faith on the human imagination. This study deserves the attention of anyone seeking increased clarity in the complex interplay of religion and psychology, and offers intelligent articulation of the struggle trauma survivors might have with maximalist doctrinal beliefs. Follow Paul on Twitter (@paulcmaxwell) or visit his website.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

The bible and Australian society! Meredith Lake's published a new 2020 edition of The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Books, 2020). It's history and sociology and reflections on religion's role on the 'Great Southern Land'. Meredith Lake gets under the skin of a text that’s been read, wrestled with, preached and tattooed, and believed to be everything from a resented imposition to the very Word of God.The Bible in Australia explores how in the hands of Bible-bashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists, writers, artists and Indigenous Australians, the Bible has played a contested but defining role in this country.Meredith Lake is an historian, broadcaster and award-winning writer interested in how Australians understand the big questions of faith and meaning. She currently hosts Soul Search on ABC Radio National - a weekly show about the lived experience of religion and spirituality. She has also guest presented ABC TV's Compass.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In his exciting and thorough book, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford, 2020), Michael Pregill explores the biblical and Qur'anic episode of the golden calf as understood by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. The incident refers, of course, to when the Israelites created a golden calf in the absence of the Prophet Musa. Pregill shows that the episode's various interpretations across time reflect the cultural, religious, ideological, social, textual, and other contexts in which the issue was being discussed. Each community sought to legitimate its own existence, theology, and tradition through its interpretation. So, for instance, the episode is central to Jewish and Christian arguments over the inheritance of the covenantal legacy of Israel. Each community also appropriates and subverts the apologetic renderings and tropes of the other communities, not passively accepting or rejecting but strategically negotiating with it to adapt to new contexts. The episode therefore becomes crucial for the community’s self-identification. More specific to Islam is a key component of his argument that while western academic scholars draw heavily from the tafsir tradition, they fail to situate the episode in its historical context in the late antique milieu.In our discussion today, Pregill describes the golden calf episode at length from biblical and Qur’anic perspectives. He summarizes some of the major arguments and contributions of the book, identifies scholars with whom he is in conversation, discusses the status of Qur’anic studies today, reflects on the identity of the mysterious Samiri in the Qur’anic version, emphasizes the recent diminished importance and the dire need of exploring tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) in the study of Islam, explains the relationship between western scholars of Islam (or the Qur’an specifically) and classical Muslim exegetes, and a lot more.Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The relationship between American Protestant Evangelicals and the candidacy, presidency, and legacy of Donald Trump arrests the attention of journalists and pundits alike. But few have probed the implication that the rally cry "Make America Great Again" contains within it a certain historiographical claim. Protestant Christian leaders in America have responded in polarized ways to this slogan. In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again (Routledge, 2021), Dr Matthew Rowley offers something of a study partisan historiography, exploring three different responses to the approach to history as suggested by Donald Trump. Some embrace the call to "Make America Great Again," others respond with a counter call to "Make America Lament," while still others prefer to "Make America Better." This accessible and timely study utilizes empathy as a means of understanding and critique, and contributes much needed perspective and balm for the current state of fracture within American religion and politics. 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

Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict any more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, and with particular attention to the 2007-08 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of inter-group conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India (Cornell UP, 2020) in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization, and in particular the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians. Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns, among some Hindus, about the Western socio-political order with which they associate global Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961 (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides the first full-length biography of a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista's remarkable life, the scope of his work, or the development of his vision. Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of the evangelization efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mexican nationalism, and religious improvisation in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.A successful proselytizer of Mexicans for years, from 1922 onward Bautista came to view the paternalism of the Euro-American leadership of the Church as a barrier to ecclesiastical self-governance by indigenous Latter-day Saints. In 1924, he began his journey away from mainstream Mormonism. By 1946, he had established a completely Mexican-led polygamist utopia in Mexico on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, twenty-two kilometers southeast of Mexico City. Here, he preached an alternative Mormonism rooted in Mesoamerican history and culture. Based on his indigenous hermeneutic of Mormon scripture, Bautista proclaimed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a chosen race, destined to wrest both political and spiritual authority from the descendants of Euro-American colonists. This book provides an in-depth look at a man still regarded with cultural pride by those Mexican and Mexican American Mormons who remember him as an iconic and revolutionary figure.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North (NYU Press, 2020), Richard J. Boles argues that, contrary to traditional American religious historiography, interracial worship was a common and accepted practice in many northern Protestant churches in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Northern states outlawed slavery, Christians hardened their stances on segregation and discrimination, leading to racially divided Protestantism in the nineteenth century. Using archival sources from over four hundred congregations, Boles illuminates the complex racial and religious dynamics of the early American north and adds significant understanding to our knowledge of race in American religious history.Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Since the turn of the millennium, American Evangelical Protestantism has seen a swell of interest in Calvinist theology. Variously described as the New Calvinism or Neo-Reformed Christianity, the latter half of the first decade saw a resurgence of Reformed theology, especially among younger Evangelicals. Brad Vermurlen presents an insightful sociological study of this resurgence of reformed Christianity, interpreted through the lens of strategic action field theory in his new book Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). Using a field theoretic model to analyze data collected through ethnographic observation, interviews with Christian leaders, and digital and print content analysis, Vermurlen explains how New Calvinist Christian leaders positioned themselves within the broader field of American Evangelicalism and solidified their movement within a variety of precipitating causes and game-like maneuvers. In the end, Reformed Resurgence offers a lucid account of how a conservative religious movement can survive, and even thrive, in a hyper-modern, secularizing society. To find out more about Brad Vermurlen, visit http://bradvermurlen.com/ 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

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop's famous phrase, "We shall be as a city upon a hill," has become political creed and rallying cry for American exceptionalism. But for over three centuries the text of Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" was largely forgotten in the American textual canon. In a charming book of textual history, the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Daniel T. Rodgers, tells a fascinating tale with surprising twists and turns about how an obscure Puritan treatise became indispensable political rhetoric for late-twentieth-century American politics and into the new millennium. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton University Press, 2018) traces Winthrop's model from its seventeenth-century context, through centuries of neglect and forgetfulness, to its unlikely and meteoric rise as a foundational text of the American idea.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

The Holy Spirit: Theology for the People of God (B&H Academic, 2020) analyzes the Holy Spirit through the lens of both biblical and systematic theology. Dr. Gregg Allison and Dr. Andreas Köstenberger provide a comprehensive look at the third person of the Trinity as revealed by Scripture, focusing on eight central themes and assumptions.Dr. Gregg Allison is a professor of Christian theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky; secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society; an elder of Sojourn Church East; and a theological strategist for Sojourn Network. Dr. Andreas Köstenberger is research professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology and the director of The Center for Biblical Studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and for 22 years served as the editor of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies