New Books in Christian Studies

Utilizing insights from trauma studies, James Yansen's book Daughter Zion's Trauma: A Trauma Informed Reading of Lamentations (Gorgias Press, 2019) advances the view that awareness of trauma's potential effects sheds light on many of the book of Lamentations' complex literary features, and suggests new interpretive possibilities. Three characteristic features of traumatic experiences make this concept useful for a critical reading of Lamentations: 1) survivors' testimonies often convey a history that is not straightforwardly referential; 2) trauma causes rupture in memory; and 3) the trauma process includes rhetorical dimensions; individuals and communities work through and construct trauma in different ways in order to reconstitute themselves and ensure their survival in the aftermath of extreme catastrophe. Furthermore, social, political, cultural, historical, and theological/religious contexts are crucial for understanding how individuals and collectivities construe, respond to, witness to, work through, and create trauma.Attending to Lamentations' likely traumatic matrix, the concept of non-referential history functions as a heuristic lens through which to view the historical significance of the Book's content, particularly its ubiquitous uses of stereotypical and metaphorical language. In addition, trauma-informed structural analysis demonstrates and mirrors the debilitating realities of caesura in life often associated with experiences of trauma. Drawing on insights from cultural trauma, specifically the rhetorical dimensions of the trauma process, Daughter Zion's Trauma asserts that Lamentations ensures the survival of those whose pain and anguish it voices by strategically adapting some of ancient Israel's religious traditions. The literary figure of Daughter Zion embodies and witnesses to the trauma of the survivor-communities she represents. The sheer enormity of Daughter Zion's trauma overshadows and undermines assertions and acknowledgements of her culpability. Further, protest, ambiguity, and ambivalent hope form the foundation for resilience and survival in Lamentations. Ultimately, trauma-informed readings of biblical literature that utilize an historically-informed, synchronic approach enable biblical scholars to pursue the interpretive possibilities of trauma studies without bracketing historical questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In this episode, we chat with Dr. James Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin University about his most recent book How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Brazos Press, 2022). This text encourages us to cultivate the spiritual discipline of memento tempori, a temporal awareness of the Spirit's presence -- indebted to a past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present. To gain spiritual appreciation for our mortality. To synchronize our heart-clocks with the tempo of the Spirit, which changes in the different seasons of life. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, Smith provides insights for pastoring, counseling, spiritual formation, politics, and public life.Our conversation focuses on institutions and individuals reckoning with the past and discerning how to live in the light and shadows of the past, the role of liturgy, and finding stability with our community admits rewriting our own stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Eugenia Roussou's book Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The 'Evil Eye' in Greece (Bloomsbury, 2021) thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity.Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the ‘evil eye’ produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences concerning globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness, and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, who called him a “prophet and a peasant.” He helped the homeless on the Bowery, founded the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, and protested the US development of nuclear missiles, becoming in the process one of the most celebrated anarchists of the twentieth century. To our era, when so much “protest” happens on social media, his actual sacrifices seem unworldly.Ammon Hennacy was a forerunner of contemporary progressive thought, and he remains a beacon for challenges that confront the world and especially the US today. In this exceptional biography, William Marling tells the story of this fascinating figure, who remains particularly important for the Catholic Left. In addition to establishing Hennacy as an exemplar of vegetarianism, ecology, and pacificism, Marling illuminates a broader history of political ideas now largely lost: the late nineteenth-century utopian movements, the grassroots socialist movements before World War I, and the antinuclear protests of the 1960s. A nuanced study of when religion and anarchist theory overlap, Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left (NYU Press, 2022) shows how Hennacy’s life at the heart of radical libertarian and anarchist interventions in American politics not only galvanized the public then, but offers us new insight for today.William Marling is Professor of English and World Literature at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s (Oxford UP, 2016), which won the Nancy Dasher Prize and was the subject of an international conference in Hannover, Germany.Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Russell McCutcheon shares his views on the academic study of religion, and the path ahead for religion graduates and the field itself. McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama and a contributor to the Religious Studies Project podcast. 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

This recasting of Nathaniel's familiar question from the Gospel is a fair summary of many modern Christians' assessment of the Pentecostal tradition. Yet in recent years, a growing number of Pentecostals have been turning afresh to the ancient, creedal Christian faith.Bishop Emilio Alvarez has himself been at the forefront of this movement. In Pentecostal Orthodoxy he introduces the phenomenon, and extends the project of paleo-orthodox ressourcement (associated with scholars such as Thomas Oden and Robert Webber) to include orthodox expressions within Pentecostalism, particularly his own Afro-Latino Pentecostal movement. Pentecostal Orthodoxy: Toward an Ecumenism of the Spirit (InterVarsity Press, 2022) is a manifesto of sorts, promising not only to open up the possibility of a genuinely orthodox Pentecostalism, but to reframe modern ecumenical dialogue as well.Emilio Alvarez (PhD, Fordham University) is the presiding bishop of the Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches, a communion that embraces the one holy, catholic, apostolic tradition. He is also associate provost for lifelong learning at Asbury Theological Seminary.Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford UP, 2021), Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed.Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher 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

Aidan Enright holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University Belfast and is an Associate Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer in History at Leeds Beckett University, where he teaches Modern British History and he is also a Teacher of Social Sciences at University of Bradford International College.In this interview, he discusses his first book, Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts, 2022)This book uncovers the world of Charles Owen O’Conor, the O‘Conor Don (1838–1906), one of the most prominent Catholic landlords and Liberal MPs of his generation. The scion of the last high king of Ireland and one of a long line of politically active O’Conors, he was a wealthy, fair-minded landlord who served as MP for his native County Roscommon between 1860 and 1880. In parliament, he supported reforms in education, juvenile care, factory law, Sunday closing, the Irish language and landownership. However, as a loyalist, unionist and imperialist, he was out of step with the mood and aims of popular Irish nationalism, especially on the issue of home rule. Indeed, although he was a devout Catholic, proud Irishman and critic of the union, his liberal Catholic and unionist outlook ensured that he became an increasingly marginalized figure as Irish politics polarized along Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist lines.Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland is published by Four Courts Press.Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

George Tyrrell insisted that the quest for the historical Jesus was no more than scholars staring into a well to see their own reflections staring back. Jesus is the mirror image of those who study him. A similar phenomenon accompanies the quest for the historical Magi, those mysterious travelers who came from the East, following a star to Bethlehem.In this work, ancient historian and scholar Eric Vanden Eykel helps readers better understand both the Magi and the ancient and modern interpreters who have tried to study them. He shows how, from a mere twelve verses in the Gospel of Matthew, a varied and vast literary and artistic tradition was born. The Magi: Who They Were, How They've Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate (Fortress Press, 2022) examines the birth of the Magi story;its enrichments, embellishments, and expansions in apocryphal writing and early Christian preaching;its artistic expressions in catacombs, icons, and paintings and its modern legacy in novels, poetry, and music.Throughout, the book explores the fascination the Magi story elicits in both ancient and modern readers and what the legacy of the Magi story tells us about its storytellers--and ourselves.Eric Vanden Eykel is associate professor of religion and the Forrest S. WIlliams Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Ferrum College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today.At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and disability held significance for more than the body, opening opportunities for virtue, charity, and even redemption. Dunn demonstrates that when these reflections collide with modern thinking, the effect is a certain kind of freedom to reimagine what sickness and disability might mean to us.Reminding us that the meanings we make of embodied difference are historically conditioned, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See makes a forceful case for the role of history in broadening our imagination.Brenna Moore teaches in the Department of Theology at Fordham University and works in the areas of Catholic Intellectual History, particularly in modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies