Robert P. George is the indispensable man of American social conservatism. The Princeton professor is a scholar of such intellectual power that he almost single-handedly rescued the anti-abortion movement from the fringes of the American sociopolitical and legal landscape in the 1990s when the secular left assumed that the reign of abortion on demand for any reason was a done deal. George (born 1955) reset the debate and provided the intellectual framework that enabled a generation of pro-life advocates to craft tactics and policies that led ultimately to the Dobbs decision of 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade. Conservatives are not often regarded as innovators. But George changed the paradigm. The book we will discuss today shows how he has done that.And that momentous accomplishment is only one milestone in the career of this multi-faceted scholar. George is one of the few scholars to wield influence in multiple fields of study. A lover of the humanities and liberal learning, he has made major contributions in his primary fields of analytic philosophy and its subbranch, the philosophy of law. He has also done important work both in academic writing and through public service in the form of membership and chairmanship of federal government bodies in such fields as bioethics, religious freedom and civil rights.All of these accomplishments and more are discussed by leading Protestant scholars and thinkers in Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement With Robert P. George (Crossway, 2023), edited by the evangelical scholar, Andrew Walker. Walker contributes an introduction and an interview with George himself, both of which make clear why the latter is so admired in evangelical circles and what qualms some of them have about some aspects of his activism. Carl Trueman, for example, suggests that as wokeness has corroded and coarsened public discourse, George’s gentlemanly approach is no longer effective.Let’s hear from the editor of this study, Andrew Walker.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Today I talked with Senator Joe Lieberman—who ran for Vice President in 2000 with Al Gore, and for President in 2004 in the Democratic primary—about his book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011). Senator Lieberman is a devout Jew and talks with me about the Sabbath tradition, a custom rooted in God’s day of rest at the end of creation (Genesis 2) and the Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). It is the shared practice of all Abrahamic monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Senator Lieberman’s book, The Gift of Rest Senator Lieberman’s Wikipedia page Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Pastors, thoughtful Christians, and students of Scripture must learn how to carefully read and understand the Bible, but it can be difficult to know where to start. In this clear, logical guide, Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell explain how to interpret Scripture from three effective viewpoints: canonical, thematic, and ethical.Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach (Crossway, 2023) is arranged book by book from the Old Testament (using the Hebrew order) through the New Testament. For each text, Kostenberger and Goswell analyze key biblical-theological themes, discussing the book’s place in the overall storyline of Scripture. Next, they focus on the ethical component, showing how God seeks to transform the lives of his people through the inspired text. Following this technique, readers will better understand the theology of each book and its author.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

How did American Catholics go from subjects to citizens? Who is the "godfather" of the First Amendment? How can spiritual and temporal duties be reconciled? Michael Breidenbach, Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University, joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty.But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates in Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2022), if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America and of several peer reviewed essays that have appeared in Early American Literature, New Literary History, J19, and, most recently, in American Literature, for which she is the 2022 winner of the Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year. She is currently at work on a second monograph, Ordinary Unhappiness: A Social History of the Soul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Today I talked to Ninon Dubourg about her new book Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service? (Amsterdam UP, 2023).The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability. In these cases, the Papal Chancery bore the responsibility for determining if disabled people were suitable to serve as clerics, with all the rights and duties of divine services. Whilst some petitioners were allowed to enter the clergy, or - in the case of currently serving churchmen - to stay more or less active in their work, others were compelled to resign their position and leave the clergy entirely. Petitions and papal letters lie at intersection of authorized, institutional policy and practical sources chronicling the lived experiences of disabled people in the Middle Ages. As such, they constitute an excellent analytical laboratory in which to study medieval disability in its relation to the papacy as an institution, alongside the impact of official ecclesiastical judgments on disabled lives.A transcript of this interview is available here.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Today I talked to Deidre Nicole Green about her book Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice (Mohr Siebeck, 2016).Drawing on the thought of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in order to illuminate and interrogate feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, Green relies on Kierkegaard's view of Christian love to offer a constructive theological framework for limiting self-sacrifice that resists an overly simplistic identification of self-sacrifice with love. Although Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, his view of love also circumscribes the role of self-sacrifice within human life. Particularly, it offers the potential for a rigorous and empowering model of forgiveness that challenges traditional ideals of the submissive, permissive woman while keeping love central to the dialogue. Rather than passively accept unjust relationships, works of love must seek to ameliorate a world of violence.Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Jonathan Fessenden and I talk about two movies, Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986) and Fred Zinneman’s A Man for All Seasons (1966), both written by Robert Bolt, and both about men of Faith facing persecution and a sudden reversal of political fortune. These are themes that we began in our first discussion, Episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1.Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, and teacher of theology. He has written about movies and worked in the industry as a composer, and continues to write music for film. Jonathan Fessenden’s articles at Missio Dei. The Mission (1986): Trailer, Wikipedia page, and IMDB page. A Man for All Seasons (1966): Trailer, Wikipedia page, and IMDB page. Jonathan Fessenden’s album, Upon the Water, is here. Jonathan Fessenden’s, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1: Silence and The Scarlet and the Black. Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 17: Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges--in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, treated as fringe cultists at best or marginalized as polygamists unworthy of serious examination at worst. In Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020), the historian Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mormons are, in fact, essential to understanding American history writ large.Drawing on newly available sources from the LDS Church--sources that had been kept unseen in Church archives for 150 years--Park recreates one of the most dramatic episodes of the 19th century frontier. Founded in Western Illinois in 1839 by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his followers, Nauvoo initially served as a haven from mob attacks the Mormons had endured in neighboring Missouri, where, in one incident, seventeen men, women, and children were massacred, and where the governor declared that all Mormons should be exterminated. In the relative safety of Nauvoo, situated on a hill and protected on three sides by the Mississippi River, the industrious Mormons quickly built a religious empire; at its peak, the city surpassed Chicago in population, with more than 12,000 inhabitants. The Mormons founded their own army, with Smith as its general; established their own courts; and went so far as to write their own constitution, in which they declared that there could be no separation of church and state, and that the world was to be ruled by Mormon priests.This experiment in religious utopia, however, began to unravel when gentiles in the countryside around Nauvoo heard rumors of a new Mormon marital practice. More than any previous work, Kingdom of Nauvoo pieces together the haphazard and surprising emergence of Mormon polygamy, and reveals that most Mormons were not participants themselves, though they too heard the rumors, which said that Joseph Smith and other married Church officials had been "sealed" to multiple women. Evidence of polygamy soon became undeniable, and non-Mormons reacted with horror, as did many Mormons--including Joseph Smith's first wife, Emma Smith, a strong-willed woman who resisted the strictures of her deeply patriarchal community and attempted to save her Church, and family, even when it meant opposing her husband and prophet.A raucous, violent, character-driven story, Kingdom of Nauvoo raises many of the central questions of American history, and even serves as a parable for the American present. How far does religious freedom extend? Can religious and other minority groups survive in a democracy where the majority dictates the law of the land? The Mormons of Nauvoo, who initially believed in the promise of American democracy, would become its strongest critics. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows the many ways in which the Mormons were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates nineteenth century Mormon history into the American mainstream.Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies