New Books in Christian Studies

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? The book is open access at Cambridge Core.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew ReviewMark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) should appear in 2025.Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world.The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World  (Penn State University Press, 2019) presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construct alternative frameworks and establish novel solidarities for the sake of our planetary home.The selections in this volume explore ecologies of interdependence as a frame for religious, theological, and philosophical analysis and practice. Contributors examine questions of justice, climate change, race, class, gender, and coloniality and discuss alternative ways of engaging the world in all its biodiversity. Each essay, poem, reflection, and piece of art contributes to and reflects upon how to live out entangled differences toward positive global change.Constructive and practical, global and local, communal and personal, Ecological Solidarities is an innovative contribution to the discourses on relational and liberative thought and practice in religion, philosophy, and theology. It will be welcomed by scholars of World Christianity and theology as well as seminary students, activists, and laity interested in issues of justice and ecology. Krista E. Hughes is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Muller Center at Newberry College. Dhawn B. Martin is Executive Director of the Source of Light Center in San Antonio, Texas. Elaine Padilla is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Latinx/Latin American Studies at the University of La Verne. She is the author of Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance and coeditor of three volumes in the series Christianities of the World. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Why did José de León Toral kill Álvaro Obregón, leader of the Mexican Revolution? So far, historians have characterized the motivations of the young Catholic militant as the fruit of fanaticism. Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

The development of Christian scriptures did not terminate once, for example, following Irenaeus and other influential patristic figures, the four gospels that would later be located at the front of the church’s New Testament were accepted by most churches and transmitted together in the same codex. Instead, erudite Christian readers employed new and innovative technologies to transform reading practices, calling attention to both narrative and other thematic similarities present across the gospels, and enabling cross-referential access from one gospel’s narrative sequence to another without amending the individual texts themselves. Such practices were facilitated by the sections and canon tables of Eusebius (ca. 260–339 CE), bishop of Caesarea Maritima in Roman Palestine.In Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2023), Jeremiah Coogan discusses the editorial intervention of Eusebius within gospel manuscripts, including paratextual sectioning, tables of contents, and other prefatory material, at both a technical and conceptual level, locating the overall apparatus of this “evangelist” alongside broader late ancient transformations in reading and knowledge. Dr. Coogan joined the New Books Network to discuss examples of gospel reading that Eusebius permitted via his novel contributions to the gospels, related book technologies in his contemporary readerly environment, and the overall success of Eusebius’s sections and canons during the millennium that followed him—starting with Greek and Latin gospel manuscripts of late antiquity but also appearing alongside most biblical translations into the late Middle Ages, when modern chapter divisions and versification began to assume the dominant roles for sectioning texts that they have maintained into the present day.Jeremiah Coogan (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2020) is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. His research and teaching interests span the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient Judaism, with a particular focus on Gospels and on the social history of early Christianity. His scholarship has been published in Early Christianity, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, the Journal of Late Antiquity, the Journal of Theological Studies, and in several other journals and edited volumes, and he is currently working on a new project that investigates how early Christians deployed literary and bibliographic categories to understand similarities and differences between Gospel texts. His first monograph, Eusebius the Evangelist, received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise in 2022.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Joel, Obadiah, and Micah all prophesied not after a calamity struck but right before a potential crisis or during the crisis itself. Facing immanent catastrophe, the Jewish people had to decide where their loyalties lay.Join us as we speak with Rav Yaakov Beasley about his book Joel, Obadiah, and Micah: Facing the Storm (Maggid, 2024). Hedraws from the best of traditional and contemporary scholarship to guide us through the prophets’ trials and tribulations, providing historical overviews of the period, and revealing the messages and meanings of these crucial prophetic works.Rabbi Yaakov Beasley is the Tanakh Coordinator at Yeshivat Hesder Lev HaTorah and the host of the TanachTalks podcast.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), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020), and a recent 2 volume commentary on Numbers. 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

Contemporary thought typically places a strong emphasis on the exclusive and competitive nature of Abrahamic monotheisms. This instinct is certainly borne out by the histories of religious wars, theological polemic, and social exclusion involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But there is also another side to the Abrahamic coin. Even in the midst of communal rivalry, Jews, Christians, and Muslim practitioners have frequently turned to each other to think through religious concepts, elucidate sacred history, and enrich their ritual practices.Scholarship often describes these interactions between the Abrahamic monotheisms using metaphors of exchange between individuals-as if one tradition might borrow a theological idea from another in the same way that a neighbour might borrow a recipe. The Abrahamic Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Rebecca Wollenberg proposes that there are deeper forms of entanglement at work in these historical moments.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Watching the footage of the January 6 insurrection, Professor Bradley Onishi wondered: If I hadn't left evangelicalism, would I have been there?Today’s book is: Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books, 2023), by Dr. Bradley Onishi, which unpacks recent U.S. history to show how the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's preparation for war. Religion scholar and former insider Bradley Onishi maps the origins of White Christian nationalism and traces its offshoots. Combining his own experiences in the youth groups and prayer meetings of the 1990s with an immersive look at the steady blending of White grievance politics with evangelicalism, Dr. Onishi crafts an engrossing account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism that led to January 6. How did the rise of what Onishi calls the New Religious Right, between 1960 and 2015, give birth to violent White Christian nationalism during the Trump presidency and beyond? What propelled some of the most conservative religious communities in the country—communities of which Dr. Onishi was once a part—to ignite a cold civil war? Through chapters on White supremacy and segregationist theologies, conspiracy theories, the Christian-school movement, purity culture, and the right-wing media ecosystem, Professor Onishi pulls back the curtain on a subculture.Our guest is: Dr. Brad Onishi, who is a scholar of religion and cohost of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His writing has been published in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and Religion & Politics, among other outlets. He holds degrees from Azusa Pacific University, Oxford University, and L'institut catholique de Paris, and received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. A TEDx speaker and the author, editor, or translator of four previous books, Dr. Onishi teaches at the University of San Francisco. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

What if the original teachings of Jesus were different from the Bible's sanitized 'orthodox' version? What covert motivations might inspire those who decide what the text of the Bible 'says' or what it 'means'? For some who ask conspiratorial questions like these, the Bible is the vulnerable victim of secular forces seeking to divest the USA of its founding identity. For others, the biblical canon suppresses religious truths that could upend the status quo. Such suspicions surrounding the Bible find full expression in Gospel Thrillers: a 1960s fictional genre that endures and still commands a substantial following. These novels imagine a freshly discovered first-century gospel and a race against time to unlock its buried secrets. They also reflect the fears and desires that the Bible continues to generate. In Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge UP, 2023), Andrew Jacobs reveals, in his authoritative examination, how this remarkable fictional archive opens a window onto disturbing biblical anxieties.New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew ReviewFind more information on the Gospel Thrillers here.Andrew Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and the Editor of Cambridge University Press’s book series Element of Religion in Late Antiquity. His Epiphanius of Cyprus: a cultural biography of Late Antiquity (UC Press, 2016), won the Philip Schaff Best Book prize from the American Society of Church History. Andrew has also just finished a stint as President of the North American Patristics Society. Find him at @drewjackeprof.bsky.social, or on X: @drewjackeprofMichael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. @mikemotia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies