New Books in Christian Studies

Christianity isn’t about following rules, it’s about a relationship. The rise in popularity of this phrase coincides with a growing disinterest and misunderstanding regarding the role of God’s life-giving, perfect law in the Christian life. Rather than the source of joy it was intended to be, the law is viewed as an angry god’s restrictions for a rebellious people. In Ten Words to Live By, Jen Wilkin presents a fresh biblical look at the Ten Commandments, showing how they come to bear on our lives today as we seek to love God and others, to live in joyful freedom, and to long for that future day when God will be rightly worshiped for eternity. Learn to see the law of God as a feast for your famished soul, open to anyone who calls on the name of the Lord.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

Come and Read: Interpretative Approaches to the Gospel of John (Fortress Academic, 2019) is a unique volume that both introduces numerous interpretive approaches to the Bible and includes examples in action with contributions from top scholars in the field. The book takes up three different passages throughout John’s Gospel—John 1:1–18, John 10, and John 20—and sets four different approaches to each passage side-by-side. The three selected texts move readers through the Gospel story and represent the three major sub-genres featured in the Gospel. John’s Prologue (1:1–18) is written in poetic style; John 10 represents a major discourse; and John 20 takes the form of dramatic narrative prose. Each section of the book includes readings on the focus passage from the same four interpretive perspectives: intertextual, sociocultural, rhetorical, and narrative. These approaches are broadly conceived to showcase varieties present even within approaches and how these ways of reading are connected to and benefit from one another. Overall, this book provides insight into current interpretive practices on the Gospel of John, and the rest of the Bible. It demonstrates how to use these methods effectively, illustrating not only the value of using a variety of approaches for interpretation, but also how methods impact the interpretations rendered.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Did the ideas of Deuteronomy influence the prophecies of Ezekiel? Jason Gile says Yes. His recent monograph argues that Deuteronomy's ideas influenced Ezekiel's response to the crisis surrounding the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile in significant ways, shaping how he saw Israel's past history of rebellion against Yahweh, present situation of divine judgment, and future hope of restoration.Tune in as we speak with Jason Gile about his recent book, Ezekiel and the World of Deuteronomy.Jason Gile serves as Dean of Program Development and Innovation, as well as Affiliate Professor of Old Testament at Northern Seminary in Illinois.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

Bishop Stephen Neill was one of the most prolific, accomplished, and fascinating Christian leaders of the global church in the twentieth century. Privileged to live in radically different cultural contexts over the course of his life, Neill was also a supremely gifted individual. He excelled by turns as a missionary, a bishop, an ecumenist, a professor, and a prolific author, all the while travelling around the world to share his tremendous knowledge of the world Christian movement with scholars, clergy and laypersons alike. This is the first complete biography of this influential figure, and builds on Daughrity's previous work Bishop Stephen Neill: From Edinburgh to South India (Peter Lang Publications, 2008). Worldly Christian: The Life and Times of Stephen Neill (Lutterworth Press, 2022) stands to become the authoritative word on a man who understood Christianity's changing contours better than most during the dramatic diversification that it underwent during his lifetime.Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Meatpacking America, she digs deep below the stereotype and reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production—and also, it turns out, of religion.Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases. Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected.Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the Communications Assistant for the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). His general interest is in American religious history, especially American Catholicism.Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they constructed a godly commonwealth according to precepts gleaned from Scripture. For these 'Puritan' Christians, religion both provided the center and defined the margins of existence. While some Puritans were called to exercise power as magistrates and ministers, and many more as husbands and fathers, women were universally called to subject themselves to the authority of others. Their God was a God of order, and out of their religious convictions and experiences Puritan leaders found a divine mandate for a firm, clear hierarchy. Yet not all lives were overwhelmed; other religious voices made themselves heard, and inspired voices that defied that hierarchy.Gifted with an extraordinary mind, an intense spiritual passion, and an awesome charisma, Anne Hutchinson arrived in Massachusetts in 1634 and established herself as a leader of women. She held private religious meetings in her home and later began to deliver her own sermons. She inspired a large number of disciples who challenged the colony's political, social, and ideological foundations, and scarcely three years after her arrival, Hutchinson was recognized as the primary disrupter of consensus and order--she was then banished as a heretic.Anne Hutchinson, deeply centered in her spirituality, heard in the word of God an imperative to ignore and move beyond the socially prescribed boundaries placed around women. The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, and the World They Made and Lost (Oxford UP, 2021) examines issues of gender, patriarchal order, and empowerment in Puritan society through the story of a woman who sought to preach, inspire, and disrupt.Hannah Smith is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She can be reached at smit9201@umn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Religion and Culture: A Historian’s Tale is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. After behind-the-scenes insights into Miri Rubin’s career path which led her from chemistry to working in an orthopaedic hospital to studying medieval history with a ‘cultural anthropologist” persuasion to the subject of medieval Christianity, this wide-ranging conversation covers several books that Miri Rubin has written, including The Life and Passion of William of Norwich; Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary; Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures; The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction; and Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.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 nine years, Stephen Colbert’s persona “Colbert”?—a Republican superhero and parody of conservative political pundits--informed audiences on current events, politics, social issues, and religion while lampooning conservative political policy, biblical literalism, and religious hypocrisy. To devout, vocal, and authoritative lay Catholics, religion is central to both the actor and his most famous character. Yet many viewers wonder, “Is Colbert a practicing Catholic in real life or is this part of his act?” This book examines the ways in which Colbert challenges perceptions of Catholicism and Catholic mores through his faith and comedy.Religion and the foibles of religious institutions have served as fodder for scores of comedians over the years. What set “Colbert” apart on his show, The Colbert Report, was that his critical observations were made more powerful and harder to ignore because he approached religious material not from the predictable stance of the irreverent secular comedian but from his position as one of the faithful. He is a Catholic celebrity who can bridge critical outsider and participating insider, neither fully reverent nor fully irreverent.Providing a digital media ethnography and rhetorical analysis of Stephen Colbert and his character from 2005 to 2014, author Stephanie N. Brehm examines the intersection between lived religion and mass media, moving from an exploration of how Catholicism shapes Colbert’s life and world towards a conversation about how “Colbert” shapes Catholicism. Brehm provides historical context by discovering how “Colbert” compares to other Catholic figures, such Don Novello, George Carlin, Louis C.K., and Jim Gaffigan, who have each presented their views of Catholicism to Americans through radio, film, and television. The last chapter provides a current glimpse of Colbert on The Late Show, where he continues to be voice for Catholicism on late night, now to an even broader audience.America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself) also explores how Colbert carved space for Americans who currently define their religious lives through absence, ambivalence, and alternatives. Brehm reflects on the complexity of contemporary American Catholicism as it is lived today in the often-ignored form of Catholic multiplicity: thinking Catholics, cultural Catholics, cafeteria Catholics, and lukewarm Catholics, or what others have called Colbert Catholicism, an emphasis on the joy of religion in concert with the suffering. By examining the humor in religion, Brehm allows us to clearly see the religious elements in the work and life of comedian Stephen Colbert.Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the Communications Assistant for the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). His general interest is in American religious history, especially American Catholicism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Willi Braun's Jesus and Addiction to Origins: Towards an Anthropocentric Study of Religion (Equinox, 2020)  constitutes an extended argument for an anthropocentric, human-focused study of religious practices. Part I presents the basic premise of the argument, which is that there is nothing special or extraordinary about human behaviors and constructs that are claimed to have uniquely religious status and authority. Instead, they are fundamentally human, and so the scholar of religion is engaged in nothing more or less than studying humans across time and place in all their complex existence-which includes creating more-than-human beings and realities. As an extended and detailed example of such an approach, Part II addresses practices, rhetoric, and other data in early Christianities within Greco-Roman cultures and religions. The underlying aim is to insert studies of the New Testament and non-canonical texts, most often presented as "biblical studies," into the anthropocentric study of religion proposed in Part I. How might we approach the study of "sacred texts" if they are nothing more or less than human documents deriving from situations that were themselves all too human? Braun's Jesus and Addiction to Origins addresses that question with clarity and insight.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

Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, commoners and even nuns at the end of the 11th century to leave their normal lives behind and trek thousands of miles across hostile territory in an unprecedented vicious and bloody quest to wrest Jerusalem from its occupying powers? Jay Rubenstein, historian of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds of Europe in the Middle Ages, carefully explores those questions based on his extensive research while discussing the Apocalypse: the crusaders’ sincere belief that the end of the world was approaching and their opportunity to participate in the last stage of the divine plan.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies