New Books in Christian Studies

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were engaged in a series of such projects in Asia in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This already difficult task was made more complex by the need to maintain unity and discipline among individual Jesuits when travel was dangerous and time consuming and letters might take years to reach their destinations. In his masterful book, The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2014), Liam Brockey explores these issues through a study of the life of Andre Palmeiro, who traveled throughout Asia settling disputes over complex questions of belief, practice, and ritual. This informative work is not only a biography, as Brockey skillfully uses the career of Palmeiro to complicate the story of the Jesuits in Asia, for instance, showing that national origin was not the main factor determining how much or how little individual Jesuits approved of an “accomodationist” approach. This book is highly recommended, and scholars, graduate students, and those interested in issues of both mission history and the problem of translation will find it well worth reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

I teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me with questions about the role of the Catholic church during the Holocaust. Some of these questions–about the church and antisemitism, about the role of the Pope–I was able to answer effectively. But when they started asking me about the behaviors and beliefs of the bishops and priests-the people in the church who interacted with ordinary people on an everyday basis–I was at a loss. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi’s new book Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), I can now give a much more informed and thoughtful answer to these questions. While Rossi spends some time looking at the macro level, she devotes most of her book to ‘ordinary’ priests who served in the German army. Some of these men were chaplains specifically entrusted with the pastoral care of the men in their units. Many others were priests who served in the army in other roles, who were specifically prohibited from offering such care to their fellow soldiers. Her book offers a nuanced, well-researched and convincing portrait of ordinary people trying to integrate their religious faith and their positions in the church with their service in a nazified army. It’s a compelling story, one that Rossi tells well. I will be recommending it to my students for a long time to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter Harrison,Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland, interrogates the modern assumptions behind this viewpoint and delineates the story of the categories science and religion. He shows that understanding these concepts divided as distinct realms of inquiry is a relatively recent history, politically shaped, and often accidental in its construction. In reality, what we conceptualize as these two separate spheres of life were intimately bound up with one another, often in concert in social life. Harrison also warns us about the consequences of projecting our contemporary conceptual spheres back through the past. In our conversation we discuss ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, natural theology and natural philosophers, conceptions of progress, forms of charity, the professionalization of science, and the creation of scientists. 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

In his expansive The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015), Daniel Jutte suggests new ways of understanding the scientific revolution of the early modern period through exploring the ways in which Christians and Jews engaged in the exchange of secret knowledge. As opposed to contemporary understandings of secrets as information needing to be exposed to the public or being withheld for potentially dangerous reasons, Jutte argues that early modern Christians and Jews often thought of arcane knowledge as positive and truthful. By looking at what he terms the economy of secrets, particularly Jewish participation in the keeping and transmittance of knowledge in areas as diverse as alchemy, cryptography, and espionage, Jutte argues for broader understanding of Jewish agency, economic opportunity, and sites of intellectual and cultural exchange during this era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

On this program, I spoke with Joseph Lam about his book, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford University Press, 2016). Joseph Lam is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in Vetus Testamentum and the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions. Sin, often defined as a violation of divine will, remains a crucial idea in contemporary moral and religious discourse. However, the apparent familiarity of the concept obscures its origins within the history of Western religious thought. Informed by a deep engagement with theoretical perspectives on metaphor coming out of linguistics and the philosophy of language, Lams book identifies four patterns that pervade the biblical texts: sin as burden, sin as an account, sin as path or direction, and sin as stain or impurity.In exploring the permutations of these metaphors and their development within the biblical corpus, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling account of how a religious and theological concept emerges out of the everyday thought-world of ancient Israel, while breaking new ground in its approach to metaphor in ancient texts. Far from being a timeless, stable concept, sin becomes intelligible only when situated in the matrix of ancient Israelite culture. In other words, sin is not as simple as it might seem. Garrett Brown is a book publisher and editor and the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. In addition to several other trade publishers, he worked for almost seven years at the National Geographic Society, where he acquired and developed books on religion and on science. He blogs intermittently at noteandquery.com and can be reached at noteandquery@gmail.com. Twitter: @newbooksbible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Bard Kartveit‘s Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians (Brill, 2014) is an outstanding book, which carefully describes the constraints faced by Palestinian Christians, particularly in the unique context of the Bethlehem area, painting a nuanced picture of the ways in which such realities are experienced and narrated in relation to questions of identity. The account is historically grounded and ethnographically rich, giving the reader a sense of the sometimes painful physical and symbolic changes in Bethlehem Christians’ environment. Tradition, modernity, kinship, patriarchy, sectarianism, nationalism, state power, migration and the decisive role of the Israeli Occupation are all given their due. The concepts of groupness and framing provide a theoretical architecture which supports Kartveit’s representation, thereby capturing the dynamism of self-narrative processes, and guaranteeing against the easy generalizations which sometimes characterize accounts of Palestinian Christians. Mark Calder is an honorary research fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He conducted his PhD fieldwork in Bethlehem focusing on Syriac Orthodox Christians. 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 Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University, explores the origin and development of the idea of “love of God.” From the Bible, to rabbinic interpreters in the ancient and medieval periods, to modern Jewish philosophers–Levenson traces strands of of covenantal love, sacrificial, and erotic love in the relationship between God and the people of Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Richard B. Hays is the George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. Internationally recognized for his work on the letters of Paul and on New Testament ethics, he has written many scholarly books that bridge the disciplines of biblical criticism and literary studies, exploring the innovative ways in which early Christian writers interpreted Israel’s Scripture. His book The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (HarperOne, 1996) was selected by Christianity Today as one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century. His other books include The Art of Reading Scripture (2003, co-edited with Ellen Davis), The Conversion of the Imagination (2005), and Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (2008, co-edited with Beverly Roberts Gaventa). Professor Hays has lectured widely in North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. An ordained United Methodist minister, he has preached in settings ranging from rural Oklahoma churches to London’s Westminster Abbey. Professor Hays has chaired the Pauline Epistles Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, as well as the Seminar on New Testament Ethics in the Society for New Testament Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of several leading scholarly journals. He served as dean of Duke Divinity School from 2010 to 2015. On this program, we talk about his two most recent books, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Baylor University Press, 2014) and The Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016). Garrett Brown is a book publisher and editor and the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. In addition to several other trade publishers, he worked for almost seven years at the National Geographic Society, where he acquired and developed books on religion and on science. He blogs intermittently at noteandquery.com and can be reached at noteandquery@gmail.com. Twitter: @newbooksbible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The relationship between religion, imperialism, and national identity can be quite complex. At the same time, nationalist readings of history, particularly when they are combined with other ideological perspectives, can easily provide reductionist narratives that do not due full justice to these complicated realities. The history of Catholicism in Vietnam is a case in point, as nationalist and Communist histories tend to present the Catholic Church as the friend of French colonialism with Catholic apologists defending their Church’s role in Vietnamese history in accordance with nationalist standards. In his book, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012), Dr. Charles Keith challenges such overly simple narratives by tracing the transformations in the Catholic Church in Vietnam from the pre-colonial, through the colonial, to the post-liberation periods (ending in approximately 1954). For instance, through his careful, rich, and detailed study, Keith shows how Vietnamese Catholics could remain Catholic while being at times pro-colonial, anti-colonial, pro-left, anti-Communist, and other places within and without these labels as their community transformed from a colonial to a national Church. Thus, Keith’s study is well worth a read for anyone interested in Vietnamese history or the history of Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Jonathon S. Kahn is an associate professor of religion at Vassar College. He is co-editor with Vincent W. Lloyd of a collection of essays entitled Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016). Eleven scholars forward the argument that secularism in America has been a project that manages, or excludes, difference by control over both religion and race. The introduction demonstrates how Martin Luther King Jr., both a religious and black leader, was stripped of both his race and his religion to represent a homogenous white secularism. Secularism is dependent on managing not just the intertwined racial and religious discourse but the practices and bodies of ordinary people. Secularism thus becomes white and springs from a managed Protestantism. The abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth are historical examples of resistance to a secularist white consensus. The volume explores the many ways religion and race are circumscribed, how they are entwined, and the ways their management has been refused. In the process, the authors recover the transformative potential of racial and religious discourse in imagining worlds of possibilities and justice. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies