New Books in Biblical Studies

Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2015), offers a rich and deep examination of the place of the bible, both as an object and a source of ideas, in the public life of early America. Noll sets out to show the evolution of the colonial relationship with the bible in the context of Christendom, anti-Catholicism and the British empire in which it was understood. Noll offers innumerable examples and references of New England as thoroughly immersed in scripture in which a broad biblicalism saturated the imagination, culture, and politics. Both fervent and lukewarm believers took the authority of the bible for granted providing analogies for interpreting immediate events, inductive instruction, and inspiration for a vast number of political and cultural projects. But the bible was also a double edge sword that could both unite and divide friends and foe. Noll teases out the often-subtle difference in views of the bible that had significant political consequence. Dissenters and religious radicals believed that the bible stood against Christendom and church establishment. Other issues were not only about the bible itself, and whether it was the sole or final authority, but also who could read it and understand it. Slaves, women, and common people under the sweep of revivals, increased literacy, and the tool of a versified text began to interpret the bible for themselves rather than look to the clergy for guidance. This worked to undermine Christendom and created a uniquely American attitude towards the bible. What remained was a providential rhetoric that replaced the empire with the nation, and ongoing debates over scriptural mandates on the economy, slavery, and arguments for or against the Revolution. Noll has demonstrated that it is virtually impossible to understand the colonial society without understanding the place, significance, and prominence of scripture in private and public life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

In his new book, Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil (Fortress Press, 2015), Dr. Mark S. M. Scott explores how people, largely within the Christian tradition, deal with the problem of evil and suffering. In clear prose, Dr. Scott both explains and critically examines ways Christians have deal with these issues and also proposes ways that this conversation can move forward, for instance, by greater attention to Biblical understandings of evil. This book would therefore be of interest both to specialists in this area and for a general readership interested in learning more about theodicy (or looking for a textbook that they can assign an undergraduate class). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fascist social movements in Europe. Drawing on oral interviews, memoirs and the archives of the Romanian secret police, Roland Clark reveals the contribution of seemingly contradictory practices – deadly violence and charitable activities, intellectual and manual labor, political action and religious rituals – to fascist subjectivities in interwar Romania. Arguing against fascism as primarily an ideology, Clark focuses on everyday practices through which young men and women “became fascist.” As he explores the rise and fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Clark places it in the broader political and social context of Romanian nationalism, 19th-century state-building and interwar European fascist movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Published by Palgrave in 2015, Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives brings together scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, the US, Germany, and Denmark. Through a set of wide-ranging essays, the authors collectively tackle a major question: how were emotions conceptualised and practised in Christian missions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries? Case studies take up sites in North America, the Philippines, India, China, the Congo, Germany, Papua New Guinea, Greenland and Australia in order to show how emotional practices such as prayer, tears, shouting, and feelings of joy or frustration, shaped relationships between missionaries, prospective converts, and supporters at home. Claire McLisky, one of the volume editors, speaks to NBIR from Brisbane, Australia where she is a research fellow at Griffith University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

In her new book, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (NYU Press, 2015), Annie Blazer shows through archival research and participant-observation how the paradigm of sports ministry transformed from one centered on celebrity male athletes using their fame to explicitly call audiences to conversion to Christ, to one in which female athletes predominate and implicitly seek to convert their sports fans through moral, Christian behavior while seeing themselves as engaged in spiritual warfare and enjoying the joy of athletic pleasure as God’s affirmation of their own devotion. At the same time, Blazer shows how their identity as female athletes and relationships with players who are lesbians has led many to reinterpret or challenge traditional Evangelical understandings of gender roles and sexuality. Throughout her book, Blazer skillfully weaves together the stories her subjects told her with her own insightful analysis, all done in a sensitive and even-handed way. This book is an excellent read, and anyone interested in the intersection of sports, gender, and Evangelical Christianity would gain much from it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

In How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), Michael L. Satlow, a professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University, explores how an ancient collection of obscure writing became, over the course of centuries, “holy.” We take for granted that texts have power, but that idea was not always so obvious to people. Satlow traces the story of how the Bible became the foundational, authoritative text of Judaism and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

At 2,300 pages and featuring 54 contributors and 42 contextual and interpretive essays, the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014) represents a monumental scholarly achievement. In my conversation with coeditor Marc Zvi Brettler, he talks about the complexity of that undertaking and the foundations upon... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

While many are familiar with the call for ‘One Love’ from the music of Bob Marley they more than likely know little about the tradition that this message is rooted in. In Rastafari and the Arts: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015), Darren Middleton, Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University, introduces his readers to Rastafari through the creative expressions of its members in literature, art, film, and music. He traces the development of the tradition in Jamaica and abroad, including Ghana, Britain, and Japan, as well as highlighting key narrative, doctrinal, social, and ethical teachings. In our conversation we discussed Haile Selassie, Rastafari and Gender, the literary tradition of insiders and outsiders, the notion of Babylon, the great masters of dub poetry, including Mutabaruka and Benjamin Zephaniah, documentary film, the role of reggae and Rastafari in Japanese culture, ethnographic work in Ghana, British Rastas, Bob Marley, and the commodification of Rastafari. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Identities are complicated things. Often contradictory and rarely easily understood, identities emerge early in ones life and are shaped continually through daily social relations as we seek to make sense of the world and our place in it. To some, the identities of Chicano and Mormon may seem contradictory or oxymoronic. The prior is an ethnic identity born out of the social activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s with specific reference to the cohort of Mexican American students and activists that embraced cultural nationalism and the anti-assimilationist politics of self-determination. The latter is a religious identity associated with a form of nineteenth-century Anglo-American Protestantism and conservative social values and politics. Yet, for Dr. Ignacio M. Garcia, Professor of Western & Latino history at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, there is no contradiction in being a Chicano Mormon. In his recently published memoir, Chicano While Mormon: Activism, War, and Keeping the Faith (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015) Professor Garcia recounts how his faith, acquired as a member of a Spanish-speaking Mormon congregation in the west side barrio of San Antonio, formed the basis for a lifetime of social activism and academic scholarship. In this deeply personal narrative, Dr. Garcia addresses the tension of navigating two seemingly contradictory social groups while growing up in a segregated barrio, fighting for America abroad, and organizing for la raza at home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies