New Books in Christian Studies

Ian H. Clary, who teaches historical theology at Colorado Christian University, has written Reformed Evangelicalism and the Search for a Usable Past: The Historiography of Arnold Dallimore, Pastor-Historian (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020)--an outstanding study of one of the most influential modern evangelical historians. Arnold Dallimore was a Baptist minister in Canada, who, with little formal historical training, spent 20 years writing the first volume of his magisterial biography of George Whitefield, the 18th-century revivalist. Clary shows how Dallimore was shaped by the subject of his biography, even as he prepared the work that has done more than any other book to call attention to his subject. Clary's work situates Dallimore in the context of the post-war revival of Reformed theology, and describes the institutions and relationships that did most to make that revival effective. Tune in to find out more! Crawford Gribben is a professor of 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

“My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future.” So writes Carl Trueman in the introduction to his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway Books, 2020)This is a book that progressives should read in order to better understand how social conservatives perceive the massive societal changes, particularly in the realm of sexual politics and identity, of the last 60 years or so.It is a book that social conservatives, particularly Christian ones, should read so as to understand the sexual revolution and, in particular, the normalization of transgenderism. Trueman argues that transgenderism cannot be properly understood without a grasp of a centuries-long transformation in how people in Western societies came to understand the nature of human selfhood.Trueman charts the rise of expressive individualism and how that worldview affects nearly every niche of our lives.He writes, “The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency.”Trueman elucidates in depth the ideas of three philosophers of the modern condition: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He traces as well the impact on our own times of a range of thinkers and movements including Rousseau, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, surrealism, Hugh Hefner, Anthony Kennedy, Peter Singer, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, and LGBTQ+ activists.Whatever your political or religious views, this book will endow you with an understanding of the origins of current and future debates about free speech and religious liberty and to judge the merits of the arguments of both sides with humanity.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Jane K. Wickersham (Associate Professor of History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Amanda L. Scott (Assistant Professor, Penn State University) about her new book The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020).Neither wives nor nuns, the seroras fulfilled an essential religious role in early modern Basque communities. Amanda L. Scott explores the lives of the devout laywomen who cared for and maintained churches and shrines in the Basque country, and in so doing reconceptualizes how to frame the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women.Seroras performed essential religious work in their communities; yet they only made simple promises (rather than holy vows), rendering their religious vocations more flexible and their lifestyle more autonomous. Using a wide variety of archival sources, in over seven chapters Scott analyzes the seroras’ relationships with diocesan officials and local communities. Despite the Tridentine-era efforts to more strictly regulate the lives of religious women, Scott finds that both episcopal authorities and communities had a vested interest in negotiating and maintaining the seroras in their religious roles. They were seen as essential to the maintenance of the church, physically and spiritually, and as collaborators in furthering some aspects of Tridentine reform. Scott sensitively explores these women’s work, and the complexities, ambiguities, and conflicts engendered by their autonomous religious status. Scott, in this important book, closely examines the lived experiences of seroras to reach a new understanding of the nature of religious reform in early modern Iberia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry (Rutgers UP, 2020), Mark Mulder and Gerardo Marti offer a compelling look at the rise and fall of one of the most popular and influential Christian evangelists of the twentieth century, Robert H. Schuller. From Midwestern beginnings in the Reformed Church of America, Schuller was sent to California where he started a "drive-in" church that immediately appealed to the car-crazy, white, middle class Protestant culture that dominated Orange County and the Los Angeles suburbs of the mid-twentieth century. Schuller soon built the "Crystal Cathedral," a landmark church building and, by the 1970s and 80s, was broadcast weekly into millions of homes through the "Hour of Power" television program. Schuller would directly influence some of the twenty-first centuries most successful megachurch pastors, including Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen.Using archival research and sociological insights, Mulder and Marti argue that Schuller's ministry was built upon a unique dynamic of constituency, charisma, and capital. Using the dynamics of late twentieth-century capitalism, Schuller's ministry continually expanded to meet the needs of its growing constituency until, by 2008, the growth outpaced the ability of Schuller's personal charisma. This fascinating story of growth and decline will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, from sociology, to American religious history, to scholars of Christian ministry and theology.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

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (University of Iowa Press, 2020) divulges the clandes­tine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today.Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli be­gan the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits.From there he ventured deeper into the seminary system seeking healing, hoping to help others, and striving not to live a double life. Trained to treat sexuality like an addiction, he and his brother seminarians lived in a world of cliques, competition, self-loathing, alcohol, hidden crushes, and closeted sex. Ultimately, the “for­mation” intended to make Rastrelli a compliant priest helped to liberate him.Tom Rastrelli is director of digital communications at Willamette University. He lives in Salem, Oregon.John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com. Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In the mid-1980s, Goa witnessed mass demonstrations, violent protests and political mobilising, following which Konkani was declared the official language of the Goan territory. However, Konkani was recognised only in the Devanagari script, one of two scripts used for the language in Goa, the other being the Roman script. Set against this historical background, Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa (Orient BlackSwan, 2020) studies the contestations around the demand that the Roman script also be officially recognised and given equal status.Based on meetings and interviews with individuals involved in this mobilisation, the author explores the interconnected themes of language, citizenship and identity, showing how, by deliberately excluding the Roman script, the largely lower-caste and lower-class Catholic users of this script were denoted as less-than-authentic members of civil society.As citizens of a former Portuguese territory, the Goan Catholics’ experience of Indian citizenship does not fall entirely within the framework of British Indian history. This allows for a construction of the post-colonial Indian experience from outside of the British Indian framework, and its focus on Catholics enables a more nuanced study of Indian secularism, while also studying a group that has remained largely underrepresented in research.The weaves together multiple disciplinary, conceptual, historical and empirical threads to give us an insight into how citizenship and political subjectivities are constructed, negotiated and experienced in Goa, especially when it comes to fixing and contesting identities around the Konkani Language, its dialects and scripts. Lucidly written and brilliantly argued, this book is a unique critical historical and ethnographic account of the politics of Konkani language, and will be valuable to scholars of History, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Citizenship Studies and Cultural Studies, and beyond that also to the policy makers working on state and citizenship policies.Ali Mohsin is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva. His research focuses on the politics of poverty, inequality and social protection in Pakistan. He can be reached at ali.mohsin@graduateinstitute.ch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

It’s hard to avoid conversations about ‘neoliberalism’ these days. The meaning of the term—indeed its very existence—is hotly contested. Adam Kotsko argues in Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford University Press, 2018) that self-denial is part of the mystifying agenda of neoliberalism itself. Not only is neoliberalism real, it’s the defining ethos of modernity.Neoliberalism’s Demons posits we can best understand neoliberalism through the lens of political theology. Kotsko challenges the dichotomy of economics and politics, suggesting that neoliberalism permeates and unites these two. It does so by importing the moral schema of Christianity which creates the conditions for failure for the express purpose of assigning blame to those who fail. Neoliberalism’s Demons is a concise and persuasive account of the political, economic, and moral universe we inhabit, and is therefore essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand their own condition. 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 new book, Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Newheiser argues that hope is the indispensable precondition of religious practice and secular politics. Against dogmatic complacency and despairing resignation, he argues that hope sustains commitments that remain vulnerable to disappointment. The line of thinking goes that, since the discipline of hope is shared by believers and unbelievers alike, its persistence indicates that faith has a future in a secular age.Drawing on premodern theology and postmodern theory, Newheiser shows that atheism and Christianity have more in common than they often acknowledge. Writing in a clear and engaging style, he develops a new reading of deconstruction and negative theology, arguing that (despite their differences) they share a self-critical hope. By retrieving texts and traditions that are rarely read together, this book offers a major intervention in debates over the place of religion in public life.David Newheiser is a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. His research draws on Christian thought and continental philosophy to address topics such as neoliberalism, sexuality, atheism, and the arts.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of Memphis, and Director of the Henry McNeal Turner digital humanities project, is a rhetorical history that details the public career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner with an emphasis on the trajectory of Turner’s thinking as a pessimistic prophetic persona “within the lament tradition of prophecy” (14). Turner’s role as a Bishop in the African American Episcopal Church and his political leadership in the African American community from 1896 to 1915 is the focus of Johnson’s narrative. This text is a follow up to the author’s previous work The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (Lexington Books, 2014). Johnson’s book begins with an “Introduction” section and includes six chapters with a “Conclusion.”In this rhetorical history, Johnson contextualizes and analyzes some of Turner’s key speeches and writings delivered between 1896 and 1915 amid the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the first Great Migration. Turner through his speeches, writings, and activism laid much of the intellectual groundwork for Black protest ideologies of the twentieth century from Black nationalism to Afro pessimism. Turner was a prominent figure throughout much of the nineteenth century. Born free in 1834 Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina, Turner, an autodidact, was self-taught who eventually joined the A.M.E. Church after becoming a licensed minister in 1853. He became pastor at Union Baptist Church in Washington D.C. in 1860 and served as a Chaplain with the Union Army during the American Civil War. Turner relocated to Georgia after the war and became involved in Reconstruction politics but he soon grew pessimistic about Black equality in America with the retreat from Reconstruction. In the 1880s, he became a supporter of Black emigration to Africa while expounding on the idea of a Black Christ. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 only compounded Turner’s pessimism.Turner’s skepticism about “the goodness of America” and its status as a “civilized nation” juxtaposed with his use of the invective, to criticize White institutions, and complacent Black leaders, is at the core of Johnson’s argument. For Johnson, Turner’s use of language “that was meant to shock and provoke” help to demonstrate his status as a prophetic persona who utilized prophetic rhetoric to guide, instruct, and lead on important questions about Black equality. Johnson situates Turner within the framework of a distinctive African American prophetic tradition “with origins not in freedom, but in slavery” that was both hopeful and pessimistic (11). Turner as a public intellectual contributed greatly to the development of Black Nationalism as a champion of Black emigration to Africa, Black theology with his ideas about a Black Christ, and Afro pessimism by “demining” America as a place that increasingly was a land that had no future for African Americans. No Future in this Country is a pivotal text in African American intellectual history.Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

For the sixty years in which he has made a distinguished contribution to the religious history of the nineteenth century, Timothy Stunt has been working on the life and times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, the New Testament textual critic. In his previous books, scholarly articles, and entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Stunt has developed the commitment to prosopography that makes his new book so important and so compelling. The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles: A Forgotten Scholar is an outstanding example of how intellectual biography can shed light on complex and sometimes misunderstood contexts. Stunt shows how Tregelles moved from humble origins, overcoming educational barriers through ambition and determination, to become a serious rival to textual critics like Constantin von Tischendorf, demonstrating the sense of duty to scholarly excellence that would almost certainly lead to the ill-health in which his life ended. Today, Stunt reminds us, Tregelles is no longer forgotten, and his critical text of the New Testament has formed the basis of the most recent edition to be published by Cambridge University Press. Tune in to find out more.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies