New Books in Christian Studies

On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions. Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations. Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Shortly after the introduction of Catholicism into Korea in the late 18th century, Korea’s Confucian government began to persecute Catholics. Why would a Confucian government torture and kill the people it was supposed to protect and nurture? Why would Koreans turn to a religion that differed fundamentally from the established norms of their country, particularly when following that religion could lead to their deaths? Dr. Don Baker, in his book Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea (University of Hawaiʼi Press, 2017, with Franklin Rausch) answers these questions, both through his own words and through translations of works by a leading Catholic who died a martyr and a Confucian scholar who criticized Catholicism. In this meticulously researched, annotated, and refreshingly clear work, Baker reveals the perspectives of both sides in an easy to understand fashion, making this book suitable both for scholars and for a text in undergraduate or graduate classes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The ascension of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, and yet Luke’s two-volume work contains the only narrative depictions of Jesus’ ascent into heaven in the New Testament–all the more reason to take a closer look at these ascension narratives recorded by Luke. Here to do just that in today’s show, David Bryan talks about the book he co-edited with David Pao, titled Ascent into Heaven in Luke-Acts: New Explorations of Luke’s Narrative Hinge (Fortress Press, 2016); in this collection of essays, leading scholars discuss the ancient, literary, and theological contexts of the ascent-into-heaven accounts found in Luke and in Acts. David K. Bryan is an adjunct instructor and doctoral candidate at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He has published on the parables of Jesus, and his other research interests include authority in the ancient world, apocalyptic literature, and the kingdom of God. 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

In recent years, several scholars of religion have moved away from the examination of discursive textual domains or the meaning of ritual practices towards analyzing the material worlds in which these practices and beliefs exists. S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, has been one of the forerunners of this turn and provides an accessible staring point for novices in Key Terms in Material Religion (Bloomsbury, 2015). The collected set of short essays explores new perspectives on a number of familiar themes that have been historically important within the study of religion, such as belief, magic, fetish, words, sacred, or ritual. The volume also reveals the dominant themes in the field of material religion, such as objects, senses, time and space, and new horizons like sound, smell, and taste. Overall, the authors begin from the perspective that material forms shape how we understand the world and solidify identities through physical performance. In our conversations we discussed the long history of the collection and its beginnings in the Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, the selection of terms, what we privilege when thinking about material aspects of religion, creative ways to use the text in the classroom, material aesthetics, urban space and religion in the city, prayer as a site of materiality, exhibiting religion in museums, and where young scholars might take new research in material religion. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Rhiannon Graybill‘s Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible, revealing the male body as a source of persistent difficulty for the Hebrew prophets. Drawing together key moments in prophetic embodiment, Graybill demonstrates that the prophetic body is a queer body, and its very instability makes possible new understandings of biblical masculinity. Prophecy disrupts the performance of masculinity and demands new ways of inhabiting the body and negotiating gender. Graybill explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies, including Isaiah, Moses, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts, this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and horror films: Isaiah meets the poetry of Anne Carson; Hosea is seen through the lens of possession films and feminist film theory; Jeremiah intersects with psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria; and Ezekiel encounters Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Graybill also offers a careful analysis of the body of Moses. Her methods highlight unexpected features of the biblical texts, and illuminate the peculiar intersections of masculinity, prophecy, and the body in and beyond the Hebrew Bible. This assembly of prophets, bodies, and readings makes clear that attending to prophecy and to prophetic masculinity is an important task for queer reading. Biblical prophecy engenders new forms of masculinity and embodiment; Are We Not Men? offers a valuable map of this still-uncharted terrain. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

500 years ago, a German monk and professor named Martin Luther started a well-intentioned movement to reform “the Church” (Jesus founded only one, after all). Luther’s object was not to split the Church, but to bring it into conformity with what he thought was the “true Christianity,” the one he discovered (and, he claimed, any believer could discover) in the Scriptures. Things didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, for the Church did split. And split, and split, and split. There are a lot of different kinds of Protestants. In alphabetical order (and not an exhaustive list by any means): Adventists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, Baptists, Calvinists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostalists, Pietists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Quakers. Each of these confessions can be further subdivided. For example, I was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), not the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. What happened? Why can’t the Protestants get along? Why do they keep founding new churches?Does anything unite them? And what role did they play in creating modern religious (and political) culture? In his wonderful and witty book Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Viking, 2017), Alec Ryrie offers answers. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

One scholar famously referred to the Gospels of the New Testament as passion narratives with long introductions. Such a view, however, tends to minimize the theological importance of Jesus’ life and ministry before his death. In today’s podcast, Dr. Brandon D. Crowe will balance the scales here to discuss his recent book, The Last Adam: A Theology of the Obedient Life of Jesus in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017). Brandon Crowe is associate professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia; he received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Brandon is the author of several books, including The Message of the General Epistles in the History of Redemption: Wisdom from James, Peter, John and Jude (P&R, 2015), and The Obedient Son: Deuteronomy and Christology in the Gospel of Matthew (de Gruyter, 2012). 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

The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Kismet Press, 2016), Stewart explores whether theological constructions of manhood as ascetic and pacifist changed the contours of manly Romanitas. From the martial metaphors of Synesius of Cyrene, to the third gender of Eunuchs, to the paganism of Emperor Julian to the piety of Theodosius I – The Soldier’s Life reminds us that gender has been constructed for centuries. The fluidity of boundaries and power in this ancient construct of masculinity makes a poignant case against restrictive binaries and static hegemony. Published by Kismet press, this book is available online as part of a larger project for making knowledge, history and scholarship accessible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

When people think of the Virgin Mary in terms of American religious history, there is a tendency to focus on opposition. For instance, Catholic devotion to Mary on the one side, and Protestant critique of that devotion on the other side. However, while recognizing the real differences in Catholic and Protestant belief about Mary, in her new book, The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Dr. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, shows that such simple binaries are problematic. Through a careful study of newspaper accounts, travelogues, literature, and art, Alvarez shows how Catholics and Protestants, while differing in what they believed about Mary and how they interacted with her, utilized her in very similar ways within popular culture. For instance, ideas of the purity of womanhood and domestic queenship resonated strongly with both audiences. This fascinating study would therefore be of interest to scholars of American religion and would be appropriate in a graduate or upper-level undergraduate class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Beginning with a network of reformed figures that orbited around Billy Graham, from J. Howard Pew’s money to Carl Henry’s passion for cultural esteem, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014) details the early history of institutions like the magazine Christianity Today, the Evangelical Theological Society, Fuller Theological Seminary and many other academic and cultural meeting grounds for white American protestants who wanted to rehabilitate the intellectual reputation of their traditions and win souls, and the culture, for Christ. With the close of World War II, the Cold War emerging, and battles over ideology commanding center stage in the American imaginary, Christian leaders in reformed protestant denominations set out to reverse the isolationist posture of fundamentalism and actively engaged the elements of western culture they opposed. Negotiating the idea of a “Christian Worldview” into a position of cultural power that laid the groundwork for the moral majority, these champions of a new protestant attitude toward the world outside church doors exerted their first influence on their nearest neighbors: fellow protestants in Mennonite, Methodist, and Pentecostal traditions. As the questions that troubled fundamentalist thinkers made inroads in these communities as well, thoughtful leaders from many American protestant communities came to be united by the struggles that were shared across the differences in history, doctrine, and practice that had previously held them apart. With rare attention to the ways in which the central ideas behind evangelicalism shifted as they were adopted by leaders across protestant faiths, Worthen creates a remarkably clear and nuanced view of the variety of white evangelicalisms. Closing with internal critiques from scholars like Mark Noll on the ways in which history, tradition, and authority are employed in intradenominational politicking and ongoing efforts to expand the borders of evangelicalism through church growth and culture war, Apostles of Reason presents a marvelously deft and cogent intellectual history of a powerful and dynamic force in American life through the twentieth century and to the present. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies