New Books in Christian Studies

How does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity? L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural environment of the Pacific. The book argues that Stevenson was religiously literate within a Scottish Presbyterian tradition and therefore well placed to grasp with subtlety the breadth and dynamics of a Christianized Pacific culture. It considers his legacy with respect to issues of indigenous sovereignty and agency and positions him within an important and wide-ranging modern debate about inculturation, defined as the emergence of Christianity from within a particular culture rather than imposed on it from outside. Through this study of a major Scottish writer, the book offers a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.L. Michael Ratnapalan is Associate Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He has published widely on modern intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on Britain’s interactions with the wider world.Joseph Gaines can be reached at jgaines1091@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Early in the third century, a small group of Greek Christians began to gain prominence and legitimacy as intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Examining the relationship that these thinkers had with the broader Roman intelligentsia, Jared Secord contends that the success of Christian intellectualism during this period had very little to do with Christianity itself.With the recognition that Christian authors were deeply engaged with the norms and realities of Roman intellectual culture, Secord examines the thought of a succession of Christian literati that includes Justin Martyr, Tatian, Julius Africanus, and Origen, comparing each to a diverse selection of his non-Christian contemporaries. Reassessing Justin’s apologetic works, Secord reveals Christian views on martyrdom to be less distinctive than previously believed. He shows that Tatian’s views on Greek culture informed his reception by Christians as a heretic. Finally, he suggests that the successes experienced by Africanus and Origen in the third century emerged as consequences not of any change in attitude toward Christianity by imperial authorities but of a larger shift in intellectual culture and imperial policies under the Severan dynasty.Original and erudite, Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen (Penn State UP, 2020) demonstrates how distorting the myopic focus on Christianity as a religion has been in previous attempts to explain the growth and success of the Christian movement. It will stimulate new research in the study of early Christianity, classical studies, and Roman history.Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Paul Helm is a distinguished philosopher, with particular interests in the philosophy of religion. His work covers some of the most important aspects of the field as it has developed in the last thirty years with particular contributions to metaphysics, religious epistemology, and philosophical theology. In celebration of Helm's life's work, Reason in the Service of Faith: Collected Essays of Paul Helm (Routledge, 2023), edited by Oliver Crisp and Daniel J. Hill, brings together a range of his essays which reflect these central concerns of his thought.Over thirty of Helm's selected essays and four unpublished articles are gathered into five parts: Metaphilosophical Issues; Action, Change, and Personal Identity; Epistemology; God; and Creation, Providence, and Prayer. The volume is prefaced with a short editorial introduction, and ends with an extensive bibliography of Helm's published works.Demonstrating the important connection between Helm's theological and philosophical interests across his body of work, this collection is a remarkable resource for scholars of religion, philosophy, and theology.Crawford Gribben is a professor of 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

On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and sing; they offer testimonials of healing, and receive the blessings of encounter from an unlikely deity. Facing this ocean of humanity is a 12-foot billboard Christ, arms outstretched, urging in Hindi: "Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest." At the lectern stands a saffron-clad priest offering teachings punctuated by hallelujahs, met with boisterous echoes.Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on a novel movement of low and no-caste devotees worshipping Jesus in the purported heart of Hindu civilization. Through thick description and analysis, and by attending to devotees and clergy in their own voices, Kerry P. C. San Chirico examines the worldview and ways of life of these Khrist Bhaktas, or devotees of Jesus, along with the Catholic priests and nuns who mediate Jesus, Mary, and other members of the Catholic pantheon in a place hardly associated with Jesus or Christianity. San Chirico places this movement within the context of the devotional history of the Banaras region, the history of Indian Christianity, the rise of low caste and Dalit emancipatory strategies, and the ascendance of Hindu nationalism. Attending to convergences and disparities between devotional Hinduism and charismatic Catholicism, Between Hindu and Christian demonstrates that religious categories are not nearly as distinct as they often seem.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

For Augustine, the world is replete with meaning; it represents not merely a collection of facts to be catalogued but a repository of truths to be discovered and discerned, a view which contrasts with the one we have inherited as a result of the thought of figures such as Descartes, Newton, and Kant. What difference would it make to see the world as created?In On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2019), Matthew W. Knotts explores this question in close conversation with Augustine, according to whom our nature as God's creatures determines fundamental aspects of our identity and our knowledge. In a postmodern context informed by a renewed appreciation of the limitations of human nature and reason, Augustine once again emerges as an insightful and compelling source for further reflection.Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a broad-ranging account of international humanitarian programs in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near East from 1918 to 1930. Davide Rodogno shows that international 'relief' and 'development' were intertwined long before the birth of the United Nations with humanitarians operating in a region devastated by war and famine and in which state sovereignty was deficient. Influenced by colonial motivations and ideologies, these humanitarians attempted to reshape entire communities and nations through reconstruction and rehabilitation programmes. The book draws on the activities of a wide range of secular and religious organisations and philanthropic foundations in the US and Europe including the American Relief Administration, the American Red Cross, the Quakers, Save the Children, the Near East Relief, the American Women's Hospitals, the League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.Eyad Houssami is a doctoral researcher focusing on ecology, agriculture, and education in post-independence Lebanon at the University of Leeds. His research and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. Houssami also works as a consultant, organization leader, writer/editor, and theatre artist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (U California Press, 2023) explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution--with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe--was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.Brad H. Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. PhD in Public History. Asst. Prof. of Latin American History at Alabama A&M University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Annie Rachel Royson's book Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness: Cultural Translation in Kristapurana (Routledge, 2023) presents a critical reading of Kristapurāṇa, the first South Asian retelling of the Bible. In 1579, Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), a young Jesuit priest, arrived in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity to the local subjects of the Portuguese colony. Kristapurāṇa (1616), a sweeping narrative with 10,962 verses, is his epic poetic retelling of the Christian Bible in the Marathi language. This fascinating text, which first appeared in Roman script, is also one of the earliest printed works in the subcontinent. Kristapurāṇa translated the entire biblical narrative into Marathi a century before Bible translation into South Asian languages began in earnest in Protestant missions.This book contributes to an understanding of translation as it was practiced in South Asia through its study of genre, landscapes, and cultural translation in Kristapurāṇa, while also retelling a history of sacred texts and biblical narratives in the region. It examines this understudied masterpiece of Christian writing from Goa in the early era of Catholic missions and examines themes such as the complexities of the colonial machinery, religious encounters, textual traditions, and multilingualism, providing insight into Portuguese Goa of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The first of its kind, the book makes significant interventions into the current discourse on cultural translation and brings to the fore a hitherto understudied text. It will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation studies, comparative literature, religious studies, biblical studies, English literature, cultural studies, literary history, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies.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

Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience and grace (which includes really listening) to people we disagree with and regard as eccentric. So why not talk it over on Almost Good Catholics? Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio. Kevin Vallier’s personal website. Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled. Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna. “What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar. 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

In John Cassian and the Creation of Monastic Subjectivity (Equinox Books, 2023), a revision of his 2019 dissertation, Joshua Schachterle evaluates the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian with a keen eye toward the possibility that he envisioned monasticism as a version of Christian piety distinct from that of the institutional church. Schachterle elaborates on comments from a variety of monastic writings indicating that monks should “flee” from bishops, who characteristically sought to ordain these famous ascetic figures for broader church service and to enlist them for support in theological disagreements against the mounting ideological challenges of so-called heretics. Furthermore, Schachterle observes that materials internal to monastic discourses, ranging from the various collections of sayings (“apophthegmata”) of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the writings of Cassian himself, formed a closed discursive system that made no meaningful appeals to the more mainstream institutional church fathers, and he argues that Cassian pursues a separate monastic authority based not on apostolic succession but on apostolic praxis, the notion that monastic practices such as prayer and asceticism can be traced back to the primitive church without recourse to genealogical rhetoric privileging the identities of bishops as guarantors of the true faith. Finally, Schachterle leans on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the creation of subjects to examine Cassian’s formation of a specifically Egyptian form of monastic subjectivity for his new Western audience, the monks of Gaul. Schachterle joined the New Books Network recently to discuss these topics, the origins of Egyptian monasticism, and more from his engaging study of John Cassian’s primary works.Joshua Schachterle (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) undertook his doctoral studies after a long career as a punk rock musician and an equally long and overlapping career as a high school English teacher. His research focuses on the origins of Christian monasticism and how early monastic texts contributed to the formation and development of both eastern and western Christianity in the Late Antique period. He currently writes articles on the New Testament and Early Christianity, with subjects ranging from The Didache to the Gospel of Matthew and John the Baptist, for Bart Ehrman’s website and Early Christian Texts, and he has a forthcoming article in Cistercian Studies Quarterly on monastic uses of Scripture.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, please see 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