New Books in Christian Studies

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, intellectual, and ecclesial history. Matthew Gabriele is co-editor of and contributor to this volume; he joins the podcast today to talk about everything from medieval apocalyptic thought—theology and teleology—to zombie movies, to present-day race politics and how history is pressed into the service of polemics. Professor Gabriele also talks about how much—and how little—has changed in a thousand years in the way we think about history and human agency.Matthew Gabriele is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He has written The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, and An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages (which won the best first book award from the Southeastern Medieval Association) and edited a half-dozen volumes and many articles on medieval history, especially cultural, intellectual, and imperial, including prophecy and apocalypse.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

I had the opportunity to catch up with Harry O. Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vancouver School of Theology, to discuss his new book, New Testament Christianity in the Roman World(Oxford University Press, 2018) which is one of the first titles to appear in Oxford University Press’s new series, Essentials of Biblical Studies. Maier’s study steps away from debates about the formation of early Christian belief to reconstruct the social world in which the new religious movement emerged and began to take shape. Drawing on some recent interventions in cultural geographical theory, he moves in six chapters to consider contexts from Roman cosmology to the individual person. Who were the first followers of Jesus? How did they relate to the social worlds of the empire in which they lived? And how is that experience reflected in the writings that became the New Testament?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

Most studies on the theme of Passover in the Gospel of Luke have been confined to the story of the Last Supper (Luke 22:1-20). Dany Christopher, on the contrary, seeks to show where, how, and why Luke uses the theme of Passover throughout his two writings (Luke-Acts). Join us we talk with Dany Christopher about his recent book, The Appropriation of Passover in Luke-Acts(Mohr Siebeck, 2018).Dany Christopher earned his PhD from Durham University in 2016. He is assistant pastor at Gepembri Church in Jakarta, Indonesia, and lecturer at Great Commission Theological Seminary (STT Amanat Agung), also in Jakarta.L. 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

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Despite ranking among the most influential people in English history, Thomas Cromwell has long eluded biographers and historians. In Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, 2018), though, Diarmaid MacCulloch provides readers with the definitive study of this key figure in the English Reformation. Drawing upon the full range of the available archival material and his own deep understanding of the era, MacCulloch shows how Cromwell’s views and achievements often belie the historical reputation that has formed around him. The son of a yeoman, Cromwell emerged by dint of his abilities and language skills to become a trusted servant of the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, in the 1520s. When Wolsey lost favor because of his failure to obtain for Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Cromwell survived and established himself as a trusted adviser to the king. By 1534 he cemented his position as Henry’s chief minister, becoming the political architect of England’s break with the Catholic Church and the English Reformation that followed. As MacCulloch demonstrates, Cromwell’s skills as a Parliamentary manager and his experience with Church affairs were key to his role in the events of the 1530s, though in the end his formidable skills proved insufficient when Cromwell fell out of Henry’s favor by the end of the decade and was executed without trial in 1540. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British. Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Cornell University, 2017) zooms in on the 1716 arrest and conviction of a Tamil commercial agent and employee of the French East India Company, a legal case that resonated throughout the empire for decades, even centuries, afterward. The “Nayiniyappa Affair” at the heart of this microhistory is Agmon’s way into a complex web of interests and fractures: the aims and actions of French traders, missionaries, and administrators, as well as the roles and agency of indigenous subjects and intermediaries. Moving from colonial Pondicherry to metropolitan France and back again, A Colonial Affair focuses on a local story and context with much broader implications for how we think about the workings of imperial power, authority, and sovereignty.In chapters that revisit the narrative of Nayiniyappa’s case from different angles, Agmon treats the affair as a prism illuminating aspects of the history of French colonialism. Examining the scandal from various perspectives, A Colonial Affair considers the myriad ways in which the origins and outcomes of the Nayiniyappa scandal were and might be understood. Throughout the book, Agmon weaves together the richness of the abundant archival material on the affair with careful analysis of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of the case and context, including the meanings and effects of language, religious belief, local and kinship networks. A Colonial Affair will be of wide appeal to readers interested in the histories of France, India, Early modern capitalism, law, and empire in its multiple forms.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the cultural politics of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shaped Holiday and her music. Fessenden takes the reader through Holiday’s short but full life by placing it within the contexts of Catholicism, black vernacular music, Jazz compositions, and the culture of American celebrity. She shows how race, gender, and religious conditions guided her sound and formed the prism through which her genius shone. In our conversation we discussed Holiday’s early Catholic formation, the Jewishness of the American songbook, Afro-Protestant notions of redemption, confessional performance, the eclectic religious orbits of her jazz contemporaries, Strange Fruit and the vigilante faith of some Southerners, the cinematic representation of a musician’s life, and the mytho-poetic nature of Holiday’s iconicity. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). 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

Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh‘s Pentecostals in America (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers a critical look at the history, key figures, and ideas that make Pentecostalism unique and challenges the narrative gloss offered by its adherents and church historians. She surveys the often contentious history of the movement, including its innovators at odds with founding figures, practices of speaking in tongues, faith healing and prophesy, and attitudes toward race, sex, and gender. The significant participation of African Americans and the adoption of their religious expression did not heal racial divisions. Walsh explores the innovative theologies and ministries of founders such as Aimee Semple McPherson and John Alexander Dowie. Seeing itself as the last great move of God, Pentecostals rejected mainstream culture yet found ways to accommodate modern media and produced stars such as Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, Joel Osteen, and Joyce Meyer. In process of continual reinvention, Pentecostals built churches, institutions, and missionary efforts marked by its unique religiosity and continued to struggle with race, gender and sexuality. Pentecostalism can be best understood as a multifarious religious movement that has spread among diverse ethnic groups, made inroads into other Christian denominations, traveled to the far reaches of the globe, and its stories of divine interventions fire the religious imagination of many. While other religious groups are in decline, it continues to grow at home and abroad. Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Azusa Pacific University Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, Oxford University Press, 2018.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the work of thinkers who understood that theology must must have something to offer to people suffering under oppressive systems. By offering sharp readings of the ideas of Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, Rosemary Ruether and many others, Lilian Calles Barger traces the parallels between the liberation theologies of Latin America, black thinkers, and feminists in the 1960s and 70s in response to extreme poverty, entrenched white supremacy, and the constrictions of patriarchal power. Theology from the perspective of elite white men reinforced ideas of freedom “defined by the individualism of capitalist economics,” and upheld the rifts in post-Enlightenment theology: “a sacred/secular split, a universal humanity, a private religious self, and ideological autonomy.” In response, Liberationists across traditions turned to a theological poetics that would express a “theology from below.” Trained and educated in traditional western theology, but drawing on theological resources outside the seminaries, liberation theologians worked to address the real conditions of subordinated peoples. Turning to social science, they found a discipline still working to think society along the grooves carved by theological thought, absorbing questions authority and community formation though scrubbed them of their religious aspects. Returning the church to concern over social and political life, liberationists recovered the resources of sociology and put them to theological use, in the process continuing to smash the wall between what we perceive as a secular thought, and what we understand as a theological thought, reconfiguring the theo-political ground and making “a singular American contribution” to our understanding of where politics and theology meet. Rather than taking a biographical or institutional lens to view the history of these theologies, Barger emphasizes “a web of interconnected and circulating ideas.” Lines of descent from “antecedent thinkers, social networks,” and snippets of “personal biography” all appear over the course of the book, but World Come of Age advances a cultural history that places religious ideas within the “overall frame of social thought,” where “one can see a persistent religious liberatory sensibility and examine how this sensibility converged with numerous intellectual and social movements.” The result is a study wide in scope and full of surprising connections, stark realities, and a compelling statement about “the import and ubiquity of religious ideas in modernity.” This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. A researcher and writer, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed podcasts Lore and Unobscured. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In 2016, despite only mixed support from evangelical leaders, Donald Trump won an enormous share of the white evangelical vote. How did Trump manage to overcome the seeming mix-match between his record on social and moral issues and the longstanding views of evangelical voters? The authors and editors of The Evangelical Crackup?: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition (Temple University Press, 2018) offer a variety of answer. The book is edited by Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University, and Ryan L. Claassen, a professor of political science at Kent State University. Paul joined the podcast to discuss the evolution of this interesting volume and what it says about the state of research on religion and politics, the Trump victory in 2016, and what the future holds for the relationship between religion, partisanship, and elections. Other contributors to the book include: Contributors include: Daniel Bennett, Mark Brockway, Ryan P. Burge, Brian R. Calfano, Jeremy Castle, Kimberly Conger, Daniel A. Cox, Kevin den Dulk, Sarah Allen Gershon, Tobin Grant, Robert P. Jones, Geoffrey Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Ronald J. McGauvran, Joshua Mitchell, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Jacob R. Neiheisel, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Adrian D. Pantoja, David Searcy, Anand Edward Sokhey, J. Benjamin Taylor, Robert Wuthnow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies