New Books in Christian Studies

We often credit the Transcendentalists with introducing a revolutionary new appreciation for nature into American spirituality when they claimed that God could be found in the forests, mountains, and fields. In Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Harvard University Press, 2019), Brett Grainger reconsiders the history of the years leading up to the Civil War. He argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment.Brett Grainger is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Villanova University.Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion 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

The diaries of the ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are a collaboration between David O. McKay and his long-time secretary Clare Middlemiss. During the day Middlemiss would take dictation, attend meetings, handle correspondence, and listen to telephone conversations, making recordings and transcripts and taking detailed notes. In the evening, according to her nephew, she would summarize all of this, adding excerpts from meetings of the First Presidency or Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or details provided by one of McKay’s travel companions.With his secretary’s coaxing over the course of nineteen years, McKay documented how he charted a steady course through institutional storms. He demonstrates how the LDS Church and its members emerged from one century and the insular nature of the Intermountain west into the greater world, forging an uneasy accommodation with modernity.Join Dr. Harvard S. Heath as he talks about his new book, Confidence Amid Change: The Presidential Diaries of David O. McKay, 1951-1970(Signature Books, 2019).Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Kirsteen M. MacKenzie, an historian who has taught for many years at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, has published a definitive account of the relationships between England, Scotland and Ireland during the Cromwellian republic of the 1650s. The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union 1643-1663(Routledge, 2018) re-examines the political and constitutional bonds that were implied by the covenant to which the English and Scottish parliaments had subscribed at the beginning of the first civil war, and considers why so many Presbyterians understood the Cromwellian occupation to represent a breach of the covenant’s obligations. But far from retreating into their own world, this book shows that Presbyterians in Ireland and England set about an ambitious attempt to export their system of church government, with the effect that the Presbyterian movement actually grew under conditions that were designed to frustrate it. This important new book argues for a new account of Presbyterian growth in the British Republic, and demonstrates the resilience and tenacity of a religious group that refused to accept defeat.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 John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Though commonly used today to identify a polity that lasted for over a millennium, the label “Byzantine empire” is an anachronism imposed by more recent generations. As Anthony Kaldellis explains in Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Harvard University Press, 2019), this has contributed to the denial of the ethnic identity that most denizens of the empire had of themselves as Romans. Kaldellis traces the origins of this process of denial to the 8th century CE, with the papacy’s turn to the Franks as their protectors. The efforts by the Catholic Church to de-legitimize the Eastern Empire as the legatee of ancient Rome denied the self-identification of its residents as Romans, one that is reflected in much of the surviving literature from this era. This identity was so widely embraced by the residents of the empire as to make it a largely homogenous state ethnically throughout much of its existence, one that absorbed many of the bands of people from other ethnic groups who migrated to the empire over the centuries of its existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime. But, as this important new book demonstrates, Dryden never entirely left behind the ideas – and worries – about inspiration that shaped his early political and creative experiences. John West, who is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick, has written a brilliant new book, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford University Press, 2018), which opens up the sustained ambiguities of his subject’s interest in inspiration. With an agenda that promises to re-shape the literary history of the later seventeenth century, Dryden and enthusiasm is a defining study of a complex and contradictory literary figure.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 John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

For some two hundred years now, Pentateuchal scholarship has been dominated by the Documentary Hypothesis, a paradigm made popular by Julius Wellhausen. Recent decades, however, have seen mounting critiques of the old paradigm, from a variety of specializations, not only in Biblical Studies, but also in the fields of Assyriology, Legal History, and Linguistics. In a recent international meeting, scholars across these fields came together and presented papers, each one calling for a paradigm change in Pentateuchal research. Join us as we speak with one of those scholars, Richard Averbeck, about his contribution to Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research, edited by M. Armgardt, B. Kilchör, M. Zehnder (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019)—his chapter is titled ‘Reading the Torah in a Better Way.’Richard Averbeck teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His areas of expertise include Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch, ancient Near Eastern history and languages, Old Testament criticism, Hebrew, and biblical counseling. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, the American Oriental Society, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.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 history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasion, world war, and revolution, The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church (Palgrave, 2016) reveals the ways in which very significant cultural changes in Chinese society were reflected in an indigenous congregation as it gradually discovered its own identity.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 John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE. Though there is no record of her life beyond the details contained in a single text, in her book Perpetua: Athlete of God(Oxford University Press, 2018), Barbara K. Gold analyzes the account of her sacrifice and draws upon the dual contexts of the Christian and Roman worlds of that time to provide a framework for understanding her. Central to this effort is the "Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis," one of the earliest Christian texts and one which presents an incomplete and often confusing picture of Perpetua as a woman. As Gold explains, the gendering of her depiction reveals much about the complexities of her portrayal in the work, which posed a number of challenges for subsequent generations of male authors and Christian leaders in terms of the example she set with the martyrdom described within it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Is the New Testament text reliable? What do we do with textual variants? How do I use the Greek New Testament? This short book, An Introduction to the Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge (Crossway, 2019) provides crucial information about the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament in particular and the Greek New Testament in general. Dirk Jongkind, one of the principal scholars behind this groundbreaking project, answers critical questions for understanding the biblical text so that you can have clarity and confidence as you engage with the New Testament in the original Greek.Dirk Jongkind is the academic vice principal and senior research fellow in New Testament text and language at Tyndale House, Cambridge. He is one of the principal scholars behind The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge and serves on the editorial board of The Journal for the Study of the New Testament.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, twitter.com/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

Guy Beiner, who is professor of modern history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has written one of the longest and certainly one of the most extraordinary recent contributions to the historiography of Ireland and of memory studies. His new book, Forgetful Remembering: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster(Oxford University Press, 2018), argues for the complexities and ambiguities of communal recollection by focusing on the contested memories of one of the shortest and certainly the bloodiest of politically driven Irish insurrections. In 1798, Catholics, protestants and dissenters joined together in armed uprisings against British state forces. Their defeat was followed by prolonged and traumatic reprisals, and by the union of the British and Irish parliaments to create a new “United Kingdom.” Within a decade of their participation in the rebellion, protestants and dissenters had swung to support the new state, beginning a long process of forgetting and remembering that continues to the present day. How and why do communities forget and remember these moments of collective trauma? Beiner’s ground-breaking argument offers new insights, new lines of inquiry, and some startling new conclusions.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 John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies