New Books in Christian Studies

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture? Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analyzes the founders’ diverse use of scripture, ranging from the literary to the theological. He shows that they looked to the Bible for insights on human nature, civic virtue, political authority, and the rights and duties of citizens, as well as for political and legal models to emulate. They quoted Scripture to authorize civil resistance, to invoke divine blessings for righteous nations, and to provide the language of liberty that would be appropriated by patriotic Americans. Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2016) broaches the perennial question of whether the American founding was, to some extent, informed by religious–specifically Christian–ideas. In the sense that the founding generation were members of a biblically literate society that placed the Bible at the center of culture and discourse, the answer to that question is clearly yes. Ignoring the Bible’s influence on the founders, Dreisbach warns, produces a distorted image of the American political experiment, and of the concept of self-government on which America is built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The daughter of the emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia successfully navigated the tumultuous politics of the late Roman Empire to rule as regent for her son Valentinian III. In Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Joyce Salisbury details the extent of this accomplishment by situating it within the context of her time. Orphaned at an early age, Placidia grew up in the household of Stilicho, a Vandal general who had established himself as the most powerful figure in the western Empire. The sacking of Rome in 410 made her the captive of the victorious Goths, eventually marrying their leader Ataulf. After the tragic death of their son and Ataulf’s subsequent assassination brought her hopes of establishing a Romano-Gothic dynasty to an end, she was forced by her ruling half-brother Honorius to marry his general Constantius III. With Constantinus and Honorius’s deaths leaving her son Valentinian as emperor, Placidia became regent for the boy, in which capacity she dealt with the problems of barbarian invasions, rebellious commanders, and the many other challenges of an empire in decline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Were the sacrifices of the Old Testament effectual? The book of Hebrews offers a critique of the Levitical cult and the sacrifices of the old covenant, even while explaining Christ’s new covenant sacrifice by comparison to them. Yet, if the Levitical sacrifices were ineffectual, then why use them as a paradigm for the work of Christ? Here to tackle that question is Benjamin J. Ribbens in his recent work, Levitical Sacrifice and Heavenly Cult in Hebrews (De Gruyter, 2016). Dr. Benjamin J. Ribbens is Assistant Professor of Theology at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. He earned MDiv and ThM degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI, and received his PhD at Wheaton College Graduate School in Wheaton, IL in 2013. In addition to his monograph on Hebrews, he has articles published in Westminster Theological Journal, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and Journal of Theological Interpretation. 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 the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.” That is, until around 840 CE, when one Gottschalk of Orbais began preaching what he called twin predestination. Gottschalk was heavily influenced by Augustine, who had argued that long before time began, God already ordained who would be among the elect and who among the damned. Gottschalk’s twin predestination theology made him into a figure Professor Gillis refers to as a “religious outlaw,” a “heretic in the flesh,” the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter. Heresy & Dissent in the Carolingian Empire is a fascinating study of a figure whose meaning has been debated for centuries, but whose own moment in the 840s reveals a world beset with fears of sin and pollution. Matthew Gillis is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Mainstream readings of Numbers have tended to see the book as a haphazard junkyard of material that connects Genesis—Leviticus with Deuteronomy and Joshua, composed at a late stage in the history of ancient Israel. By contrast, Pekka Pitkanen reads Numbers as part of a wider work of Genesis—Joshua, a carefully crafted programmatic settler colonial document for a new society in Canaanite highlands in the late second millennium BCE—a document that seeks to replace pre-existing indigenous societies. On this show, we speak with Pekka Pitkanen about his new approach to Numbers in his recent book, A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual and Colonialism (Routledge, 2017). Dr Pekka Pitkanen is a senior lecturer in the School of Liberal and Performing Arts at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He also has an MDiv in theology from Chongshin University, Seoul, Korea, and a PhD on Old Testament studies from University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of Central Sanctuary and Centralization of Worship in Ancient Israel (2003) and Joshua (2010). His main area of specialization is the study of the sacred texts of Christianity (OT/HB) in the context of the ancient world and from a number of perspectives including archaeology, sociology, and anthropology. 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 the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, the role that personality (particularly that of Martin Luther) played in events, and the interaction between faith and politics. What they reveal is the complex matrix of factors involved in events, which included the technology of the printing press, the political makeup of the German empire, and the appeal of Luther’s evolving message all of which combined to take the Reformation in directions which the participants involved never intended. Peter Marshall is professor of history at the University of Warwick, and the author and editor of numerous works, including Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation(Yale University Press, 2017) and 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2017). Alec Ryrie is professor in the department of theology and religion at the University of Durham. Among his many works are The Age of Reformation: The Tudors and Stewart Realms, 1485-1603 (Routledge, 2009) and Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World (Viking, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction with nonwhite, non-Christian peoples, and that their experiences have had a profound impact on the development of religious and philosophical thinking in Europe itself, while Christianity has left an indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Albert Wu has written a book of great interest to scholars of Christian missionary work as well as those who study modern Germany and China. From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950 (Yale University Press, 2016) explores the way that relationships between German missionaries and Chinese Christians spawned new missionary impulses among the Chinese, affected the course of Chinese modernization, and prompted German reconsideration of the very character of Christianity itself. Most fascinatingly to me was the way that Wu reveals that though German missionary efforts grew in part out of nationalist sentiment, the missionaries themselves were surprisingly receptive to, accommodating of, even interested in Chinese cultural differences, and understood that their own embrace of Confucian influence facilitated the spread of Christian belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

It’s A Love Story. Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Although a slave, Bo is educated. When he gets his freedom, he becomes a property owner of a farm. He purchases slaves only to grant them their freedom. As a man of God and widower, his life changes when the proud and hard-hearted slave girl, Ruth, appears. Ruth has never known a man like Bo. She wants freedom from slavery, from men and from her past. She is drawn to Bo but not to his Godly devotion. Bo is unwillingly attracted to Ruth. Can their relationship and love push through the personal and cultural hardships? Does love really heal all wounds? A gripping novel, Ruth’s Redemption is a story of love, forgiveness, and redemption. Surrounding the events of the Nat Turner Rebellion the light of God’s unconditional love shines into the darkness of a woman’s heart, a mans violent mission and a cultures cruel and socially accepted inhumanity. Banks creates a love story between, woman and self, woman and God as well as man and woman. Marlene considers herself a Kingdom Writer/Word Warrior with a style of storytelling that does not box comfortably in the usual categories. She blends engaging plots, stand out characters with memorable historical events through a Christian lens. Although known for her historical storytelling with a romantic edge, she writes multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. Storytelling is a gift from God, a passion she uses for His glory and Kingdom purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Israel Studies, at Northwestern University, plumbs the worldview and theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Jewish Pietists, who flourished in the Rhine Valley and in Regensburg in the 12th and 13th centuries. Professor Shyovitz marshals compelling evidence to show that the Pietists submitted both the natural world and the human body to close and disciplined empirical study. While they were fascinated by inexplicable phenomena, bodily transformation, spells and incantations, and even bodily and effluvia and excrement, the Pietists’ fascination was driven by their effort to forge links between the natural world and their theological worldview. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies