New Books in Catholic Studies

Here is a fun quiz question. What distinction does Charles Carroll (1737–1832) hold in American History? Answer: he was the longest-surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the only Catholic to have signed it.And therein lies a tale of religious prejudice against Catholics and the ingenious and determined efforts over decades of leaders like Carroll and the founding family of Maryland, the Calverts, to prove their devotion to their country while not compromising on the tenets of their faith.In his fascinating 2021 book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael D. Breidenbach traces in detail the delicate balance Catholics in the period of roughly 1600-1832 had to maintain in order to secure basic civil and property rights in both Britain and the New World colonies while avoiding excommunication by the pope for swearing oaths to British rulers that often entailed denying certain rights the pope claimed.We read in the book about the crucial importance of the exact wording of a series of oaths crafted and argued about over centuries and the implications of even a slight change to each for the often persecuted Catholic minority on both sides of the Atlantic.A major contribution of this book is its discussion of the conciliar movement (or conciliarism) and its intellectual and political impact on American politicians of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Ranging back to medieval figures and then to John Locke and forward into the early years of the United States as a nation proper, Breidenbach illustrates the difference between religious toleration versus religious liberty and helps us see why the matter of bishops and even church architecture were matters of such contention in the founding era.This is a book not just for Catholics, but for all of us who care about and live under the protection of the First Amendment—and, as Breidenbach makes clear, under this part of Article 6 of the Constitution, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” As we saw during the hearings for Amy Coney Barrett’s initial judicial appointment, this issue and anti-Catholic sentiment live with us still.Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America makes intellectual, legal, religious and political history come alive. It is global history too, given its coverage of all these matters in locales such as Jamaica and Barbados.We see powerful and influential Catholics like the Carrolls (including John Carroll 1735 –1815, the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States) taking both brave public stands and maneuvering tirelessly and shrewdly behind the scenes with non-Catholic allies like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin on behalf of religious liberty. This is a work abounding in insights about heretofore little recognized but crucial players and modes of thinking that made us the freedom-focused country we became.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Rabia Gregory’s primary research interest is the history of Christianity in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She approaches the study of religion through book history, material culture, and theories of gender. Her book, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform, published by Ashgate, uses previously unpublished cultural artifacts to revise long-standing assumptions about religion, gender, and popular culture. In the book, she demonstrates that by the fourteenth century, worldly, sexually active brides of Christ, both male and female, were no longer aberrations and provide a history of the dispersion of theology about the bride of Christ in the period between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and explains how this metaphor, initially devised for a religious elite, became integral to the laity’s pursuit of salvation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the fall of 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country’s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother’s life. The court’s decision triggered a nationwide Women’s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe.In the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal’s ground-breaking book The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism’s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import. The Politics of Morality examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women’s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In What John Knew and What John Wrote: A Study in John and the Synoptics (Fortress, 2020), Wendy E. S. North investigates whether or not the author of John could have crafted his Gospel with knowledge of the Synoptics. Unlike previous approaches, which have usually treated the Gospel according to John purely as a piece of literature, this book undertakes a fresh approach by examining how John’s author reworks material that can be identified within his own text and also in the Jewish Scriptures. An assessment of these techniques allows North then to compare the Gospel of John with its Synoptic equivalents, and to conclude at last that John indeed worked with the knowledge of the Synoptic texts at certain points.Wendy E. S. North is a honorary research fellow in the department of theology and religion at the University of Durham.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

Robert Kennedy, S.J. is one of several practicing Catholic men and women who are recognized by the Buddhist community as zen teachers. He is the author of Zen and Christianity: Zen Gifts to Christians and Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire (Cornell UP, 2020) undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors.Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire.The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.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/adchoices

Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, 1840-1922 (Edinburgh UP, 2022,) explores the shifting influences of religious demography, educational provision, and club culture to shed new light on what makes a diasporic ethnic community connect and survive over multiple generations. Sophie Cooper focuses on these Irish populations as they grew alongside their cities establishing the cultural and political institutions of Melbourne and Chicago, and these comparisons allow scholars to explore what happens when an ethnic group – so often considered ‘other’ – have a foundational role in a city instead of entering a society with established hierarchies. Forging Identities in the Irish World places women and children alongside men to explore the varied influences on migrant identity and community life.Allison Isidore is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department 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/adchoices

In Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism In America (Cornell UP, 2021), Carl R. Weinberg argues that creationism's tenacious hold on American public life depended on culture-war politics inextricably embedded in religion. Many Christian conservatives were convinced that evolutionary thought promoted immoral and even bestial social, sexual, and political behavior. The "fruits" of subscribing to Darwinism were, in their minds, a dangerous rearrangement of God-given standards and the unsettling of traditional hierarchies of power. Despite claiming to focus exclusively on science and religion, creationists were practicing politics. Their anticommunist campaign, often infused with conspiracy theory, gained power from the fact that the Marxist founders, the early Bolshevik leaders, and their American allies were staunch evolutionists.Using the Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a starting point, Red Dynamite traces the politically explosive union of Darwinism and communism over the next century. Across those years, social evolution was the primary target of creationists, and their "ideas have consequences" strategy instilled fear that shaped the contours of America's culture wars. By taking the anticommunist arguments of creationists seriously, Weinberg reveals a neglected dimension of antievolutionism and illuminates a source of the creationist movement's continuing strength.Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion. His website is https://carlrweinberg.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter @Euclid585.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

Survivors tells the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. As the epicenter of Polish resistance, Warsaw was subjected to violent persecution, the ghettoization of the city's Jewish community, the suppression of multiple uprisings, and an avalanche of restrictions that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed countless lives. In Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jadwiga Biskupska traces how Nazi Germany set out to dismantle the Polish nation and state for long-term occupation by targeting its intelligentsia. She explores how myriad resistance projects emerged within the intelligentsia who were bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. In contrast to other studies on the Holocaust and Second World War, this book focuses on Polish behavior and explains who was in a position to contest the occupation or collaborate with it, while answering lingering questions and addressing controversies about the Nazi empire and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose.Recent scholarship has overturned popular assumptions about Israel’s past, suggesting, for instance, that the five books of the Torah were written not by Moses but during the reign of Josiah centuries later. The sources of the Gospels are also under scrutiny. In this book, Dr. Konrad Schmid and Dr. Jens Schröter reveal the long, transformative journeys of these and other texts en route to inclusion in the holy books. The New Testament, the authors show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. Rather the two evolved in parallel, in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, Schmid and Schröter argue that Judaism might not have survived had it not been reshaped in competition with early Christianity.The book argues that the Bible is the result of diverse developments that unfolded over many centuries. It is not a homogeneous document but reflects a multiplicity of different viewpoints on the God of Israel and his interventions in history. And finally, the Bible generated a rich history of reception and interpretation that Jews and Christians alike should keep constantly in mind when trying to understand the Bible, interpret it, and live with it and according to its precepts.A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, the book is the most comprehensive history yet told of the world’s best-known literature, revealing its buried lessons and secrets.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