New Books in Christian Studies

It is often said that bioethics emerged from theology in the 1960s, and that since then it has grown into a secular enterprise, yielding to other disciplines and professions such as philosophy and law. During the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of secularism in biomedicine and related areas was encouraged by the need for a neutral language that could provide common ground for guiding clinical practice and research protocols. Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, in their pivotal The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, achieved this neutrality through an approach that came to be known as "principlist bioethics."In Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nathan Carlin critically engages Beauchamp and Childress by revisiting the role of religion in bioethics and argues that pastoral theologians can enrich moral imagination in bioethics by cultivating an aesthetic sensibility that is theologically-informed, psychologically-sophisticated, therapeutically-oriented, and experientially-grounded. To achieve these ends, Carlin employs Paul Tillich's method of correlation by positioning four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care, drawing on a range of sources, including painting, fiction, memoir, poetry, journalism, cultural studies, clinical journals, classic cases in bioethics, and original pastoral care conversations. What emerges is a form of interdisciplinary inquiry that will be of special interest to bioethicists, theologians, and chaplains.Nathan Carlin is Associate Professor and the Samuel Karff Chair in the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Popular culture helps shape how audiences imagine Biblical personalities in our contemporary moment. For many, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus fixes him as white, others envision Moses as Charlton Heston because of Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments, and the Jezebel stereotype is more well known than the Biblical figure. This merging of cultural productions and scripture clearly intersect in the modern understanding of Hagar as a Black woman.In Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nyasha Junior, Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Religion, sought to understand how Hagar become Black and what purposes that served. Junior lays out the primary sources and the divergent interpretive terrain where this identity makes sense to its readers. In our conversation we discuss Hagar in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Muslim sources, categories of color, ethnicity, and race in ancient contexts, Biblical interpretation in nineteenth-century US debates about enslavement, Hagar in the visual arts, music, and literature, womanist theology, and being a Black scholar in the academy.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Christian theology has a long and at times contradictory history, riddled with tensions that make it difficult (if not impossible) to develop a single systematic account of what Christianity is. However, rather than see this as a shortcoming, one can instead try and see this as a productive philosophical and spiritual starting point.This is the animating idea of ​A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019), which argues that failure should be welcomed as a core element of Christian identity. To make sense of this, her book works its way through the Neo-Platonic philosophy of the mystical theologian Dionysius the Areopagite, the Radical Orthodoxy movement, postmodern theology, and finally finds its way to the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, who has put failure at the center of his own theoretical work. The result is a book that takes a number of twists and turns, wrestling with the shortcomings of various thinkers while still maintaining fidelity in spite of, and perhaps at times because of, failure.Marika Rose completed her PhD at Durham University, and is now a senior lecturer in philosophical theology at the University of Winchester and has authored numerous book chapters and articles covering the intersections of philosophy and theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Amanda L. Scott’s book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020), focuses on the Basque seroras, a category of uncloistered religious women that were employed by parishes to perform a wide variety of functions. Somewhat like other religious laywomen like Belgian beguines, Italian tertiaries, or Castilian beatas, they occupied an intermediate zone of honorable possibility for women between marriage and the convent. Unlike women in those other categories, however, the serora enjoyed financial security and respectability in her community in part because of her protection by local communities and church authorities.By situating the seroras within these social dynamics, The Basque Seroras broadens the way we conceive of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also crucially revises our understanding of reform and consumption of legal resources at the local level. Following the Council of Trent, uncloistered religious women were broadly condemned and forced to join established religious orders; these directives notwithstanding, the seroras managed to survive well into the eighteenth century. Scott contends that even though the Counter Reformation program of centralization and standardization is often characterized as an immediate – and repressive – success, the seroras demonstrate the variability of local enforcement and the ways parishes could successfully press for leniency or reach tacit compromise with authorities. These devout laywomen, who straddled secular and religious spheres, were instrumental in this process of negotiated reform.Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Sex scandals are ubiquitous in American politics. In Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Leslie Dorrough Smith examines the dynamics of political sex scandals and the rhetorical strategies employed by politicians that enable them to successfully withstand a public sex scandal.Through an examination of some of the most sensational sex scandals throughout the last several decades, Leslie Dorrough Smith demonstrates that sex scandals are about much more than sex.Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Avila University.Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In Revelation 21–22, John offered a resplendent portrayal of a new Jerusalem without a temple, in which he seemed to reference the final chapters of Ezekiel. The puzzling issue for interpreters is why John chose to utilize Ezekiel’s temple vision if he wanted to dispense with the temple.In Temple of Presence: The Christological Fulfillment of Ezekiel 40-48 in Revelation 21:1-22:5 (Wipf & Stock, 2019) Andrea Robinson delves into the complex relationship between these two visions of heaven and earth, examining parallels between Revelation 21–22 and Ezekiel 40–48. In the process, Robinson also explores a variety of apocalyptic works from the Second Temple period to determine the tenor of thought in regard to the concepts of the temple and the messiah in John’s day. Ultimately, she helps readers understand how John utilizes Ezekiel’s imagery to portray Jesus Christ as the eschatological temple—the place where heaven and earth unite. By uncovering how original hearers would have understood John’s visions, Robinson’s insightful study helps modern readers appropriate the same hope of a glorious future with the Messiah.Andrea L. Robinson is an adjunct professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans, where she completed her PhD in 2018. She is also associate pastor at Building Church in Madison, Alabama.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist theological seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Sandie Holguín speaks with Jennifer L. Holland about her book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020).In addition to her book, Dr. Holland has recently published an article in Feminist Studies, “‘Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust’: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Dr. Holland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and Book Review Editor for the Journal of Women’s History.In Tiny You, Holland tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century in the United States: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion.The interview covers the origins, spread, and success of this conservative movement in the Mountain West during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although she discusses the many leaders of the movement, her focus is on how women at the local level championed the rights of fetuses in domestic spaces, churches, and schools, therefore changing the tenor of local, state, and national politics in enduring ways.After reading this book, one can never look at American conservatism or anti-abortion politics in the same way again. Please join us for an enlightening interview.Jennifer L. Holland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.Sandie Holguín, Professor of History, Co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History, and author of Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity can be reached at jwh@ou.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Youthful arrogance. Hipster alienation. A lot of reading. A lot of drinking. Struggles to adjust to a land radically different from the one that one has left in youth. Intense wrestling with nearly every major intellectual trend of the last few decades (from hardcore Marxism to intersectionality) to a searing admission of one’s own seeming worthlessness, and, finally, redemption in the Catholic faith via fateful encounters in London and New York with the aesthetic and spiritual power of the Catholic Mass.That is the outline of the story told by the noted journalist and public intellectual, Sohrab Ahmari in his 2019 memoir, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Ignatius Press).You don’t have to be a Catholic to be moved by this book. The unrest in our streets and even politically-motivated violence by young people who find the very notions of Western Civilization and American ideals and institutions irredeemably oppressive and ripe for toppling render this book invaluable for wannabe-revolutionaries and for those who know and care about such lost souls.Ahmari is deeply versed in nearly every school of political and sociocultural thought. His book will save troubled young people hours of reading in dead-end, left-leaning social theory. Be it Foucault, political Islam, pop culture from Pink Floyd to Star Wars—Ahmari’s got it covered.In this instant classic of the memoir genre, we learn what it’s like to be raised by bohemian parents in the Islamic Republic of Iran and then to be whisked off to Mormon-dominated, small-town Utah and what it’s like to be a deracinated, angry young man assumed by his now fellow Americans to be a devout Muslim but who is actually, in turn, a fervent Nietzschean, a randy, hook-up-seeking, boozy young leftist and, by his own account, an obnoxious, self-centered, louche young professional in careerist global cities.We encounter along the way well-meaning, earnest but vapid evangelical Christians and Jesus of Nazareth mediated for us by Pope Benedict XVI and diversity trainers who urge Ahmari to rail against discrimination he has not experienced.For those of us who are not Catholics, the book provides fascinating insights into the process of conversion to the faith and shows how demanding that process is intellectually and in terms of spiritual self-examination.The book also introduces us to Ahmari, the man. And given his increasing prominence on the public policy stage and his key role in the current intellectual renaissance among conservative Catholic intellectuals and the fierce debate between social conservatives (Catholic and non-Catholic) and others on the right—(not to mention their critiques of the left) about the path forward, this is must reading.It is also beautifully written.Give a listen.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In this episode, we focus on one of Eisler’s most controversial works, a reconstruction of the 1st-century Roman Jewish historian Josephus’ account of the events surrounding the death of Jesus and the ministry of John the Baptist, including a new physical description of Jesus that apparently prompted the Christ to appear to followers in America to prove he did not look like Eisler said he did. Also, Eisler gets into a bitter back-and-forth with Solomon Zeitlin in the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review and one Christian scholar dedicates an entire book to discrediting the methods of Eisler and other “learned Jews."Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb CrawfordAdditional voices: Brian EvansMusic: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.Special thanks to the Warburg Institute.Bibliography and Further Reading--Eisler, Robert. The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources. London: Methuen & Co., 1931.--Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Sandler. On Freud's “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” London: Karnac, 2013.--Goodman, Martin. Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.--Hoenig, Sidney B. 1971. Solomon Zeitlin: Scholar Laureate: An Annotated Bibliography, 1915-1970, with Appreciations of His Writings. New York: Bitzaron, 1971.--Jacks, J. W. The Historic Christ: An Examination of Dr. Robert Eisler’s Theory According to the Slavonic Version of Josephus and Other Sources. Clarke, 1933.--Josephus, Flavius, Henry Leeming, Katherine Leeming, and Nikita Aleksandrovič Meščerskij, Josephus' Jewish War and Its Slavonic Version: A Synoptic Comparison of the English Translation by H. St. J. Thackeray with the Critical Edition by N. A. Meščerskij of the Slavonic Version in the Vilna Manuscript Translated into English by H. Leeming and L. Osinkina. Leiden: Brill, 2003.--Ruderman, David B. “Three Reviewers and the Academic Style of the Jewish Quarterly Reviewat Midcentury.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 4 (2010): 556-71. Accessed July 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/25781004.Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepegAssociate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies