New Books in Christian Studies

Matthew’s gospel employs more than half of its Old Testament citations within the gospel’s prologue (Matt. 1-4). Although these texts lead Matthew’s story, many scholars have long assumed that the scriptural citations have nothing to do with their original OT context. Was Matthew a bumbling hermeneutist? Not so, says Nicholas Piotrowski. In his book, Matthew’s New David at the End of Exile (Brill, 2016), Nicholas investigates Matthew’s OT quotations and finds that they provide reading and worldview orientation for the gospel’s audience. The seven prologue quotations all emerge from OT contexts concerned with David or the end of the exile, or both—a dual theme that provides an interpretative guide for the entire narrative of Matthew’s gospel. Nicholas G. Piotrowski, received his Ph.D. from Wheaton College in 2013. He is professor of biblical and theological studies at Crossroads Bible College and academic dean at Indianapolis Theological Seminary. Nicholas is co-founder and main speaker for the Fox Valley Theological Society and has also published with Tyndale Bulletin and Bulletin for Biblical Research. 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

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive controversies that exploded over the church’s relationship to National Socialism during the early decades of the Federal Republic in West Germany. Ruff questions why so many early controversies ensnared German Catholics after World War II when there was a much higher rate of collaboration between the Protestant majority and the regime. He argues that public acrimony over the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican in 1933 and the legacy of Pius XII emerged mainly as a proxy war between secular elites, leftwing Catholics, and the church establishment over the political dominance of the Christian Democratic Union in the 1950s and 1960s and the place of religion in modern democracies. Despite so much argumentation, empirical research, and open hostility, it seems that nobody ever changed their mind once their opinions formed on these matters. Combining rigorous research with accessible writing, Ruff authored a book that many listeners will enjoy. Michael E. OSullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Suffering and death are two topics that are frequently referred to in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but have rarely been examined within scholarship on this New Testament book. Join us as we talk with Bryan Dyer about his own study of these themes, and then discover how he connects them to the social situation addressed in Hebrews. In his book, Suffering in the Face of Death: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Its Context of Situation (Bloomsbury, 2017), Bryan reveals how the author of Hebrews is responding to the reality of suffering in the lives of his audience. With this awareness, it becomes clear how the Epistle also responds to the audiences pain by creating models of endurance in suffering and death. These serve to motivate the author’s audience toward similar endurance within their own social context. Bryan R. Dyer earned his Ph.D. at McMaster Divinity College. He is Acquisitions Editor at Baker Press, USA, and Adjunct Professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. In addition to his book Suffering in the Face of Death, Bryan is also co-editor of The Synoptic Problem, The Bible and Social Justice, and Paul and Ancient Rhetoric. 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 an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018), makes the surprising case that the Depression-era Mississippi Delta provided the necessary conditions for the flowering of such an endeavor. New Deal policies inspired socialist optimism while their racial exclusions left displaced tenant farmers looking for work and attracted to enterprises like Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, which promised to break them from the cycle of debt and offer them equal access to the schooling, medical care, and opportunity enjoyed by the white middle class. These cooperative farms drew inspiration from the transnational communitarian movement and advanced the radical visions of the American Socialist Party and the religious left, including celebrated theological Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as president of their board of trustees. While the experiment struggled with agro-ecological obstacles and internecine power struggles, and ultimately could not withstand the postwar attacks of white supremacist movement, Delta and Providence stand as models of how those trapped within withering hegemonies imagine a most just and free society and set out to do the daily labor of bringing it into being. Robert Hunt Ferguson is an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his publications include “Mothers Against Jesse in Congress: Grassroots Maternalism and Cultural Politics of the AIDS Crisis in North Carolina” (Journal of Southern History, Feb 2017). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the quite recent emergence and rather rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the Hmong in the upland areas of Vietnam, on the border of China. Her The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) is the first ethnography of Christian conversion in the borderlands of one of the only two formally communist states remaining in Southeast Asia today. Not only is the book remarkable for its collection and use of hard-to-get data from a wide array of sources in Vietnam and abroad, including extended periods of fieldwork in a Hmong village, but also for the story it recounts of conversion not by mission on the ground but via broadcast from the air. Tam Ngo joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Hmong converts and de-converts, family and neighborhood religious conflicts and their consequences, Pastor John Lee and the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company, the remittance of faith, ethnic relations and religious regulation in Vietnam, officials attempts through violence and persuasion to stop or reverse conversions, and the power of ethnography. You may also be interested in: * Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands * Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim, A History of Korean Christianity Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au 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 wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Wilcox is professor of government at Georgetown University. For decades, Rozell and Wilcox have connected the study of religion and politics to elections. The latest iteration of this series, God at the Grassroots 2016, again brings together a distinguished group of political scientists to examine the 2016 elections. The chapter authors focus on changes in the religious right movement since the 1980s. They begin with the national context, then turn to state-specific chapters. They conclude with lessons learned from the studies of the religious right in the elections from 1994 through 2016 and address directions for continued research on the subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616, Owen grew up in an Anglican faith increasingly influenced by Arminian doctrine. Though Owen sided with Parliament during the English Civil War, it was hearing a sermon in London that had a far more profound impact on Owen’s life by triggering a born again experience. Thanks to a succession of wealthy patrons, Owen rose to prominence during the war, preaching before Parliament and serving as a chaplain in Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland. For his support Cromwell appointed him vice chancellor of Oxford University, a post that Owen held until the Restoration led to his removal. Though offered opportunities in Massachusetts colony, Owen elected to remain in England, where he wrote and preached until his death in 1683. 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 African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. With its careful attention to the historiography of the rebellion, its consideration of the veracity of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (the primary source that serves as the center of studies on the rising), and its treatment of how churches reacted to the rising, this work is not only of interest to scholars, but could easily be adopted into a college-level survey of American history or a course introducing the historian’s craft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

When teaching the first half of world history, I always do a little section on Augustine. My focus is on how he was an important theologian who shaped Christian understandings of war and even influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as seen in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. The fact though is that I could have an entire course on Augustine, such was the breadth and depth of his thought. James K. Lee, in his new book Augustine and the Mystery of the Church (Fortress Press, 2017), explores one aspect of Augustine’s thought—his ecclesiology. In this carefully written and researched book, James shows how Augustine’s understanding of the church was Christ-centered, and as such, it was not simply an invisible communion of believers isolated from each other, but has a visible, communal aspect and is active in this world. This book is therefore highly suited to anyone interested in Augustine’s thought and ecclesiology, and would work well in a graduate seminar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

There is no such thing as religious freedom, or at least just one understanding of what that means. That’s the crux of the argument in Finbarr Curtis’ (Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University), The Production of American Religious Freedom (NYU Press, 2016). Americans are fixated on freedom and saturated in religion but define the concepts in various ways. The production of religious freedom is only possible within this context of malleability, contestation, and disagreement. Curtis demonstrates this process through a number of related examples, including conflicting visions of Christianity, tensions between social dependence and independence, economic issues, questions of racial inclusion, and corporate rights. Through these cases we see how people respond when freedom makes them uncomfortable. Inequality was at the center of American history and the regular rearticulation of individual liberation from social constraints begins to plot the historical boundaries of religious freedom. In our conversation we discuss minister Charles Grandison Finney, author Louisa May Alcott, politician William Jennings Bryan, filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Catholic Governor of New York Al Smith, Malcolm X, arguments for Intelligent Design, and the exercise of religious liberty in the case of Hobby Lobby. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. 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 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