New Books in Christian Studies

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call “secularism”–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn’t whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Yet, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there were those who did not want to belong to one of the “established” (as in “establishment clause”) religions. They–“dissenters”–were seeking their own path to God and they petitioned the state to allow them to do so. Sometimes the lords of the land (and often heads of the church) granted this wish; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they did, reversed themselves, and then reversed themselves again. Given the novelty of “free religion” and “free thinking,” it was hard to know what to do. In any case, the back and forth between officials and religious dissenters opened a space–narrow at first and then gradually widening–in which the faithful could be not only different but, well, not very faithful at all. 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

Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, wants to change that. Her recent book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011), charts a transition in liberal Protestant self-understanding over the course of the twentieth century whereby “supernatural liberalism,” as Klassen calls it, enabled imaginative shifts between Christianity, science, and secularism. In the process, she explores how Protestants went from seeing themselves as Christians who combined medicine and evangelism to effect ‘conversions to modernity’ among others, including Native Americans and colonized people, to understanding themselves as complicit in an oftentimes racist imperialism. At the same time, they have recombined forms of healing in new ways, drawing on practices such as yoga and reiki in order to continue the search for a universalized type of wholeness – both spiritual and physical. Focusing on Canadian Protestants in the Anglican and United churches, Spirits of Protestantism combines rich historical examples and four years of ethnographic study to show how liberal Protestants have exerted a major influence in public life and even on anthropology itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr. Anthony Santoro does an amazing job of objectively presenting opposition to and support of the death penalty and explaining his own opposition to it. At the same time, Dr. Santoro explores, primarily through a focus on Virginia, a broad range of perspectives on the death penalty, such as official church statements, Bible studies, a gubernatorial election, and death-row chaplains. Through this religious, political, and profoundly humanistic exploration of the death penalty, Santoro argues that the death penalty is not primarily about the victim or the perpetrator, but about us. As such, this volume is both factually informative and thought provoking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians understood and adapted to the modern world. In particular, these articles focus on locating Christianity within East Asian political, economic, and social contexts and analyzing how Protestantism interacted with these different spheres of human activity. Articles in this anthology cover China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Americans who claim descent from these nations, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, covering such diverse topics as Korean megachurches, Christianity and nationalism in wartime Japan, and social networks in south China. As such, this volume offers a great deal not only those who study Christianity, but to anyone interested in learning more about East Asian history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Expressions of religious belief through popular media are a regular occurrence in our contemporary age. But the circulation and negotiation of religious identities in public contexts has a fairly long history in American culture. Matthew Hedstrom, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, looks beyond the church to determine how religious liberalism was popularized through mainstream book culture. In The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) he examines mid-century middlebrow society at the intersection of protestant liberalism, therapeutic culture, and American consumerism. Through an examination of resources such as book clubs, reading programs, key authors, bestsellers, and new publishing initiatives in religion, he argues that American spiritual life during the mid-twentieth century happens through religious commodities. In our conversation we discussed social practices of reading, William James, publishing companies, effects of the World Wars, mysticism, psychology, consumerism, Jewish and Catholic voices, a turn to the East, and the intersecting religious trajectories of the early twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century. Noah Shusterman‘s new book, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics (Routledge, 2013) is an accessible book that provides readers with an overview of the major events and historical actors who shaped the Revolution from the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789 to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. It is a book that offers a compelling narrative and draws on the vast field of scholarship that has analyzed and interpreted these events for over two centuries. This new study of the French Revolution emphasizes the central roles that religion and gender played as events unfolded, from the “liberal revolution” of 1789 through the emergence of the republic, from the Terror to Napoleon’s ascent. Readers familiar with the history of the French Revolution will especially appreciate chapters that pay close attention to the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the revolt in the Vendee, issues and events that do not often get the play they may deserve in other surveys. Those who have always wanted to learn about the Revolution will find this book a highly informative and fascinating introduction to historical events and actors that help us understand so much that followed, in France and well beyond its borders. In our interview, Noah and I talk about teaching , the plethora of historical and political interpretations of the French Revolution, and the continuing relevance of that history to a contemporary French republic still struggling with issues of faith, desire, and politics. 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 a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo. We know when and where the notion of “Blood Libel,” as this myth is conventionally called, appeared (12th-century England), but we don’t know why. Indeed, given the utter absurdity of the charge (Jews, of course, are forbidden to eat, drink, or consume blood in any way, shape, or form), it may be impossible for a rational mind to grasp. Even the Christian Church was vexed and, therefore, repeatedly condemned Blood Libels over the centuries that followed its appearance. Official religious disapproval–together with what might generically called “Enlightenment”–had some effect. By the late nineteenth century at the latest, clerical and civil authorities–not to mention “right-thinking people” everywhere–understood Blood Libel to be nothing but a sick fantasy. For reasons that are not entirely clear, however, Blood Libel enjoyed a kind of renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in the Russian Empire. And it was here that the most infamous and egregious Blood Libel of modern times occurred, the “Beilis case.” In his fascinating (and terrifying) book A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (Schocken, 2014), Edmund Levin takes us into the complicated, contradictory world of late imperial Russia. He introduces us to radical anti-semites, Russian nationalists, inveterate criminals, well-meaning investigators, corrupt police officers, unscrupulous reporters, sycophantic courtiers, underhanded politicians, drunk ‘witnesses,’ pseudo-scientists, delusional quacks, and, of course, poor Mendel Beilis and his family. As Levin shows, the Beilis case was a farce from the beginning and everyone involved knew it. But it went on nonetheless. How, one wonders, could this have happened in a putatively “modern” state? Listen in to our fascinating discussion. 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 current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more complicated picture. In Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brian A. Catlos, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, offers the first comprehensive overview of Muslim minorities in Latin Christian lands during the Middle Ages. The book provides a narrative history of regional Muslim subjects in the Latin west, including Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, expansion in the Near East, the Muslim communities of Medieval Hungary, and portraits of travelers, merchants, and slaves in Western Europe. Here we find that Muslims often had great deal of agency in structuring the subject/ruler relationship due to the material and economic contributions they made to local communities. The second half of the book explores thematic issues that were shared across Muslims communities of the Mediterranean world. Catlos surveys ideological, administrative, and practical matters, including Muslim concern about legitimacy and assimilation, legal culture, and everyday social life in these multi-confessional communities. In our conversation we discussed the reign of Christian Spains, Norman rule, the adoption of Arabo-Islamic culture, Morisco hybridity, Islam in Christian imagination, the role of Muslim women, and everyday public religious life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology. Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuckians joined Union ranks, profoundly shaping how their emancipation unfolded. Former gradualists, in response, fled to the pro-slavery side. While white Kentuckians had not overwhelmingly embraced the Confederate cause in the war, after it ended, they did so – fully and vigorously. The result, as Harlow shows, was that Kentucky arguably became the least reconstructed former slave state, and that development held profound implications for the shape of the society the Civil War made. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies