New Books in Catholic Studies

Christianity is now a majority-global South religion, with more believers living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America than in Europe and North America. However, most Americans have little exposure to Christians around the world.In addition, the United States is still the country that sends the most international missionaries. While many American churches support missionaries overseas, they may not understand the beliefs, practices, histories, and challenges Christians' experience abroad.Gina Zurlo's book Global Christianity: A Guide to the World's Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Zondervan Academic, 2022) is an accessible quick-reference guide to the global church. Filled with at-a-glance maps and charts, it puts relevant and up-to-date information into the hands of churches, mission organizations, and individuals. Useful for prayer, missions, outreach, and study of the global church, this is the new standard resource on the world's largest religion.Understand Christianity within each continent, country, tradition, and movement with: - Current demographic information from the United Nations - Research from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity - A focus on historical, sociological, political, and religious contexts - "Things to consider" within each local context, such as political conflicts, church-state relations, religious freedom, gender equality, education, health, economics, and climate change. This resource will satisfy those looking for background on the global church and equip individuals and churches to strategically pray for, give to, and unite with fellow Christians around the world.Byung Ho Choi is a PhD candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Queer Voices podcast, John Marszalek interviews author John D’Emilio, one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history, about his memoir, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Duke UP, 2022)At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word divorce was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City?Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement.This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.Listeners can receive a 30% discount on the cost of the book by ordering through Duke University Press here using the following discount code: E22DEMIL.A pioneer in the field of LGBTQ studies and the history of sexuality, John D’Emilio is Emeritus Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. John Marszalek III is a co-host of the Queer Voices podcast and author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. On Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780–1850 (U Toronto Press, 2021) by Dr. S. Karly Kehoe explores how the agency of Scottish and Irish Catholics redefined understandings of Britishness and British imperial identity in colonial landscapes. In highlighting the relationship of Scottish and Irish Catholics with the British Empire, Dr. S. Karly Kehoe starts an important and timely debate about Britain’s colonizer constituencies.The colonies of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Newfoundland, and Trinidad had some of the British Empire’s earliest, largest, and most diverse Catholic populations. These were also colonial spaces where Catholics exerted significant influence. Given the extent to which Scottish and Irish Catholics were constrained at home by crippling legislation, long-established patterns of socio-economic exclusion, and increasing discrimination, the British Empire functioned as the main outlet for their ambition. Kehoe shows how they engaged with and benefitted from the security needs of an expanding empire, the aspirations of an emerging middle class, and Rome’s desire to expand its influence in British territories.Examining the experience of Scottish and Irish Catholics in these colonies exposes how the empire levelled the playing field for Britain’s national groups and brokered a stronger and more coherent British identity. In highlighting specific aspects of the complex and multifaceted relationship between Catholicism and the British imperial state, Dr. Kehoe presents Britishness as an identity defined much more by civil engagement and loyalism than by religion. In this way, Empire and Emancipation furthers our understanding of Britain and Britishness in the Atlantic world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith.As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.This valuable primary source collection also contains a historical introduction written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at the University of Scranton.Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. 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. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war.Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Maria Berbara, illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions—expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images—and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The intricacies of imperialism and colonialism within the context of the Bible are nuanced and varied. Understanding the legacy of European Imperialism requires careful reflection of the Bible’s affinity with the empire and concentration of power. In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Steed Vernyl Davidson, author of Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective (Brill, 2017) elaborates on the ambiguities of the Bible as an anti-imperial tool and his work in tracing the evolution of the Bible from its production in ancient empires to its role in the development of modern imperialism.The book sets the context within which further exploration of postcolonial biblical critical work can take place and lays out the challenges of intersectional work with queer studies, terrorism studies, technology, and ecological studies as future tasks.Summary: A discussion on the interpretations of the Bible as a tool of colonialism and imperialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion--team sports--to reveal their surprising connections. In Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022), Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, The Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means.Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College.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/adchoices

Joe Drape is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen and American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise. His book Black Maestro was the inaugural winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award. Today we talked about his book The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices