Paul Contino’s Catholic reading of Dostoevsky’s final masterwork, premised on the novel’s “powerful capacity to inspire readers to be better people”, follows hero Alyosha Karamazov’s spiritual maturation as a “monk in the world”, his ministry to his brothers, and his ultimate message of hope. In Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs (Cascade Books, 2020), Contino argues that Alyosha exemplifies incarnational realism – a theologically-informed way of life in which the human being apprehends reality in the light of Christ’s incarnation and acts upon it – in his relationships with those around him, resisting totalization in favor off attentiveness to the particularities of human experience. In this interview we discuss the theological underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s narrative, the relationship between characters Alyosha and The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin as two attempts to portray Christian love in action, the recurring problem of theodicy in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, squaring Dostoevsky’s criticism of Catholicism with a Catholic reading of his novel, teaching The Brothers Karamazov, and reading Dostoevsky counter-culturally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world.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

The predominantly secular focus of socialism can often obscure the parts of its ideology that reflect the elements it inherited from Western religious thinking. In Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History (Lexington Books, 2021), Andrei Znamenski shows how this religious inheritance created elements within it that were closer in form to a belief system than a philosophy. These religious elements were most prevalent in socialism’s formative period, as Znamenski identifies the debt the socialist world-view owed to Christian millennialist ideas that were current in the early 19th century. Because of this the socialist world-view soon echoed the Christian one, with the working class becoming the chosen people who were anticipated to be the vanguard leading the world to the promised land of a socialist system. These elements persisted even as socialism focused on social engineering and nationalist forces caused socialist thinking to branch off into different forms. This continued in the 20th century as the economic conditions changed, as the “embourgeoisement” of the working classes and the post-World War II desire to disassociate from Soviet-style socialism led many socialists to turn instead to culture as the means towards attaining their millennialist vision. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

What wisdom does the Roman Catholic Church hold for our modern world? Can it become more inclusive? Join us as we speak to Ruth Roth, a Roman Catholic Woman Priest, who was ordained by a Bishop of the Church as part of one such effort.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. 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 most of the eighteenth century, the format, size, and price of the earliest novels meant that they would have been sold and bought alongside Protestant religious texts. In When Novels Were Books (Harvard UP, 2020) Jordan Alexander Stein brings the insights of book history into conversation with literary criticism. He explores the antecedents that stretch the story of the novel all the way to the early seventeenth century. The norms of character representation that emerged in Protestant conversion narratives were picked up by the earliest proto-novels. Spiritual and literary rhetorical forms, book trade markets, and networks of readers mingled for much of the novel's eighteenth-century development. The material features of novels as books opens new vistas for literary studies and the historiography of the rise of the Anglophone novel. This is a must read for those interested in book history, literary studies, or book culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) 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

Brace yourself for a sobering analysis of the state of the body politic and national soul. America is ailing from three main afflictions that are dangerously undermining the nation’s ability to act in the interest of the common good.So argues Joshua Mitchell, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, in his 2020 book, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (Encounter Books, 2020)According to Mitchell, the first and most serious of these afflictions is the rage for identity politics which he argues has become a religious arena for sacrificial offering. The sacrificial scapegoat of our day is the white, heterosexual man. Those who do not fall into that category are deemed pure and innocent groups who must purge the stained transgressor group.The second affliction is a sort of bipolarity in which many Americans veer from feeling invincible on their social media platforms at one moment to suddenly feeling impotent in the face of everyday problems. In the latter mode, they abjectly rely on the expert class and global managers to see them through all manner of problems from climate change to pandemics to economic travails.The third affliction, says Mitchell, is the enervating hope held by many Americans that they can find shortcuts that negate the need to acquire basic life skills. Mitchell gives the examples of substituting social media “friendship” for actual face-to-face contact with others, online shopping instead of navigating the brick-and-mortar world and relying on technology to get us to our destinations be that technology online maps or, in days to come, self-driving cars.But the book is not all gloom and doom. Mitchell argues that we can regain national cohesion via the recovery of liberal competence and adherence to three pillars of renewal: committing to the middle-class commercial republic our country was founded as; a sincere effort to address the legacy of slavery; and a modest foreign policy.Given what minefields race and politics are currently, this is a fearless book.Give a listen.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

Professor Wayne Hudson knows a lot - a whole lot - about religion and society. In Australian Jurists and Christianity (The Federation Press, 2021) Wayne, as co-editor, assembles a collection of biographical essays providing new perspectives on the relationship between law and religion in Australia. It claims that the relationship between law and religion was more significant in Australia than has been suggested. Specifically, it suggests that Christianity was a significant influence on Australian jurists, both as public figures and as makers of Australian law.The work includes case studies of 24 leading Australian jurists: Lachlan Macquarie, James Stephen, Richard Bourke, John Hubert Plunkett, George Higinbotham, Samuel Griffith, Inglis Clark, Henry Bournes Higgins, Alfred Deakin, Edith Cowan, Lord Atkin, Robert Menzies, WJV Windeyer, Roma Mitchell, Gough Whitlam, Ron Wilson, Christopher Weeramantry, Gerard Brennan, William Deane, Robin Sharwood, Eddie Mabo, Murray Gleeson, Michael Kirby and John Hatzistergos.This volume forms part of the international series Great Christian Jurists produced under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and includes a foreword by Australia’s renowned legal historian, Bruce Kercher.Professor Wayne Hudson - Research Professor at Charles Sturt University, Canberra and Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.  Working across the fields of philosophy, history, politics and religion, he has published twenty-four books and eighty-four refereed articles and book chapters, and has won twenty-five research grants. He has lectured at Oxford University, the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, McGill University in Canada, and at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Frank Buckley's new book offers some important guidance for those of us who have emerged jaded from a year of social distancing. Curiosity, and Its Twelve Rules for Life (Encounter Books, 2021) is too playful and witty to fit into the genre of self-help, and it rewards readers with a vast range of literary, cultural and religious reference. Buckley's first rule is "don't make rules" - and by tugging away at the earnest and responsible publications to which its title alludes, Curiosity encourages that fascination with ourselves and our worlds that should lead to a life well lived. 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

In Earthquakes and Eschatology in the Gospel according to Matthew (Mohr Siebeck, 2020), Brian Carrier provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that seismic language plays within the Matthean Gospel narrative. After reconstructing what connotations seismic language likely carried in Matthew's cultural context, the author utilizes an historically informed author-oriented narrative criticism that is complemented with redaction criticism to analyze the relationships that Matthew's seismic references display with regards to each other and to the overall narrative. This analysis leads to the conclusion that Matthew's seismic references collectively indicate that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus together represent the partial fulfillment of the Old Testament eschatological Day of the Lord.Join us as we talk with Brian Carrier about his recent book, Earthquakes and Eschatology in the Gospel according to Matthew!Brian Carrier earned his PhD in Biblical Studies from The Catholic University of America, and currently serves as Director of Discipleship at The District church in Washington, DC.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). 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

From the beginning of his career, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was often in conflict with the spirit of his times. While during the First World War German poets and philosophers became intoxicated by the experience of community and transcendence, Barth fought against all attempts to locate the divine in culture or individual sentiment. This freed him for a deep worldly engagement: he was known as "the red pastor," was the primary author of the founding document of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and after 1945 protested the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany. In Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2021), Christiane Tietz compellingly explores the interactions between Barth's personal and political biography and his theology. Numerous newly-available documents offer insight into the lesser-known sides of Barth such as his long-term three-way relationship with his wife Nelly and his colleague Charlotte von Kirschbaum. This is an evocative portrait of a theologian who described himself as "God's cheerful partisan," who was honored as a prophet and a genial spirit, was feared as a critic, and shaped the theology of an entire century as no other thinker.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