New Books in Christian Studies

Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakdown, reactions will likely be much more complex and awkward. In her fascinating book, Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Baylor University Press, 2015), Dr. Heather Vacek examines how American Protestants have struggled with the problem of mental illness, and how their relationship with it has changed over time. Vacek reveals in her well-organized and sensitive work the thought of five Protestants whose lives were deeply touched by mental illness: Cotton Mather, Benjamin Rush, Dorothea Dix, Anton Boisen, and Karl Menninger. Vacek then ends this well-researched book with a historically-informed theological reflection of how Christians can help those afflicted with mental illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), David A. Lambert, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that repentance, as a concept, was read into the Bible by later interpretive communities.  He explains, for example, how ancient Israelite rituals, like fasting, prayer, and confession, had a different meaning in the Bible before they later viewed through what he calls the the “Penitential Lens.”  Interested in authors as well as readers, Lambert’s approach to Biblical study integrates the critical use of biblical texts with that of post-biblical literature and interpretation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content, and reception, Priest offers readers a contextual analysis of this “secular” life of Jesus within Renan’s own biography and oeuvre. He also examines the controversy surrounding the book in France, and traces its continuing impact and legacies into the early twentieth century. One of the major contributions of this work is its analysis of the popular reception of Vie de Jesus by French citizens across the political and religious spectrum. In addition to contemporary press and pamphlet discussion of the text, Priest also consulted hundreds of letters addressed to its author from men and women throughout France. This previously unexamined archival material gives us a glimpse of how “everyday” readers responded to Renan’s work, its spiritual and political meanings. The Gospel According to Renan illuminates the history of reading and writing under the Second Empire. Its in-depth analysis of La Vie de Jesus also reveals a great deal about the intersections of religion and politics in the years leading up to the Third Republic.   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 female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the effects of mass media on the perception and proliferation of these phenomena, de la Cruz charts the emergence of voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. She traces a shift from local to national to transnational contexts, and from the representational to the virtual – in short, Mother Figured explores what Mary tells us about becoming modern. Deirdre de la Cruz is assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies and history at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Mark R. Stoll is associate professor of history and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. His book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a history of environmentalism emerging from a religious aesthetics and moral vision. Stoll argues that environmentalism began with Calvinists theological commitments regarding the divine relationship with nature and humanity. The Reformed branch of Christianity held that God spoke through scripture and “the book of nature.” Believers expressed this idea not only in literature but also through landscape paintings and a tradition of natural science and conservation. Preferring unpeopled landscapes, art was to capture both the truth of God’s creation and the sublime and the beautiful. Humanity had a moral responsibility to preserve the land for the common good and future generations. The book is filled with creative and colorful characters, well known and lesser known, whose commitment to preserving the earth was undergirded by religious ideals. The children of the Reformed tradition promoted biological holism, nature’s unity and diversity, and gave birth to ecology, conversation, and land improvement. National parks, American cities and their parks, and agriculture all bear their imprint. By 1870, the Reformed tradition faded and conservation and ecology were taken up by Transcendentalist, progressive Presbyterians, and denominations with an individualist ethic such as the Baptist to shape modern environmentalism. Stoll demonstrates how the children of these traditions challenge the often-assumed historical divide between religious ideas and environmentalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands, and bitter criticism for violating religious doctrine or political convention. As such, Whitefield remains someone who continues to stir debate and devotion even to this day. In her fascinating new book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (University Press of Mississippi, 2015), Dr. Jessica Parr explores the life and afterlife of George Whitfield, focusing particularly on how the conflict he spurred and the veneration he received have shaped memories of him. Parr’s work is fascinating and accessible, making it a good read for both the scholar of American religious history and for students in an undergraduate classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story, the English translation often felt like another book entirely from the one she had grown up with. Kushner’s interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. She began what became a ten-year project of reading different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world in the footsteps of the great biblical translators, trying to understand what compelled them to take on a lifetime project that was often considered heretical and in some cases resulted in their deaths. In The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel and Grau, 2015) Kushner illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture’s most important written work. A fascinating look at language and the beliefs we hold most dear, The Grammar of God is also a moving tale about leaving home and returning to it, both literally and through reading. Aviya Kushner has worked as a travel columnist for The International Jerusalem Post, and her poems and essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, and The Wilson Quarterly. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor for the National Yiddish Book Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and History at Harvard University. In Christian Human Rights University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Moyn provides a historical intervention in our understanding of how the idea of human rights in the mid-twentieth century came to be. He argues that contrary to current thought, that sees it as part of the long-legacy of Christianity, or the triumph of liberal democracy, it has a more complicated history. The notion of human rights was inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person. It first arose just prior to WW II as part of the reformulation of the liberal idea of human rights, deemed morally bankrupt, taken up by conservative religious thinkers. Moyn argues that the long-held Christian concept of moral equality of human beings did not translate into political rights. Rather the reformulation of human rights in the 1940s was a Catholic communitarian defense against totalitarian, capitalism and political secularism. The language of rights was extricated from the legacy of the French Revolution “rights of man” to become a religious value checking the political power of the state with religious freedom as a key concept. The philosophy of “personalism” articulated by Jacques Maritain recast democracy and human rights in a Catholic vein becoming enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the ascendancy of Christian democratic parties at mid-century. Secularized after the 1960s, human rights became an increasingly uninspiring concept unable to do the work it promised. Moyn suggests transcending this mid-twentieth Christian legacy and notes the need to find a new effective transformative creed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

At first glance, second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyon and Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints don’t seem to have much in common. After all, Irenaeus saw himself as defending orthodoxy against innovation, that is, the historical continuity of the church, while Joseph Smith understood himself as restoring that which had been lost. However, as Dr. Adam Powell shows in his fascinating study, Irenaeus, Joseph Smith God-Making Heresy (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015), they and their communities shared a great deal. Deftly combining theology and the social sciences, particularly ideas about heresy and the sociology of knowledge, Powell shows how Irenaeus and Smith managed the existential and physical threats to their communities by developing ideas of deification, which while different in that Irenaeus saw God as ontologically different from human beings and Smith did not, held out a similar present and future hope for their beleaguered communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence. The hundredth year anniversary of the Genocide of the Armenians has gotten somewhat lost amidst the outpouring of books about the war.  Still, we’ve seen a small number of excellent historical studies, mostly focused on the memory of the event. Ron Suny’s recent book ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’:  A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015) offers a different kind of contribution.  Suny offers a deep history of the Armenian genocide.  It is simultaneously a careful explication of how and why the Armenians were killed and a carefully-reasoned engagement with the prevailing attempts to explain the genocide. It’s a book everyone who cares about the genocide needs to read.  Suny writes well and has an eye for quotes both pithy and grim.  He fits well into the new imperial turn of historiography, seeing the emergence of the nation as a locus of identity that competed with and threatened more traditional, imperial states (for those of you interested in this, see my interview with Mark Levene).   And he masters the tricky task of balancing narration and analysis.  It’s a wonderful addition to our knowledge of the genocide, 100 years on.  It well deserves to reach a wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies