New Books in Catholic Studies

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Sara J. Charles takes the reader on an immersive journey through mediaeval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a mediaeval narrator – including a parchment-maker, scribe and illuminator – introducing various aspects of manuscript production.Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

For people in medieval England, the parish church was an integral part of their community. In Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021), Nicholas Orme describes how parish churches operated and details the roles they played in the lives of their parishioners. While there was a considerable variety of experience over the centuries and between the parishes throughout England, the basic practices in them largely remained the same. These were supervised by a range of people, both lay and clerical, who staged the Mass and managed the church’s everyday operations. Their activities touched on the lives of the members of the community in a variety of ways, from regular attendance at daily and weekly services to celebrations marking the seasons and the great events of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, and comfort in sickness and death. And while the English Reformation transformed the relationship between England and the Roman Catholic Church, Orme shows how some of the changes associated with it were already underway before it began, while much of what went on in parish churches remained as before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Dr. Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core.This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals.Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalisation and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

This autobiography--Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (Bloomsbury, 2024)--traces Francis X. Clooney's intellectual and spiritual journey from middle-class American Catholicism to a lifelong study of Hinduism. Clooney sheds fresh and realistic light on the idea and ideal of scholar-practitioner, since his wide learning, Christian and Hindu, is grounded in his Catholic and Jesuit commitments, as well as in a commensurate learning with respect to several Hindu traditions that are most accessible to scholars willing to learn empathetically and in a participatory manner. What Clooney has learnt and written must be understood in terms of a love of Christ deeply informed by a Hindu instinct for loving God without reserve. A fundamental spiritual disposition - intuitions of God present everywhere - has energized his work over his long career, love giving direction and body to his professional academic work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? The book is open access at Cambridge Core.New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew ReviewMark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) should appear in 2025.Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did José de León Toral kill Álvaro Obregón, leader of the Mexican Revolution? So far, historians have characterized the motivations of the young Catholic militant as the fruit of fanaticism. Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pete Imperial has been principal of St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Berkeley, California, a Lasallian Catholic School of 160 years and going strong. Yet only 45% of the students are Catholics (though a similar number are Protestant Christians) and some of the kids have had no religious experience at all. How does a good Catholic school infuse the souls of its charges and the secular society at large with the Gospel and the teachings of the Holy Roman Catholic Church?Dr. Imperial has a BA from the University of California in Berkeley, an MA in history from San Francisco State University, and an EdD in Educational Administration from the University of San Francisco. In addition to running the school, he also teaches Islamic Studies, Economics, and East Asian History.This episode is indebted to Ryan Anderson, the listener and a friend of the podcast who suggested this episode and introduced me to Peter. St. Mary’s College High School website and Pete’s faculty webpage. About Lasallian education. Other Almost Good Catholics episodes on the subject of Catholic Education: Joseph Nagel and Heather Skinner on Almost Good Catholics, episode 8: It's Elementary! Catholic Education in the 21st Century. Rich Meyer on Almost Good Catholics, episode 45: Education in the World not of the World: A School Director and Father Talks about Forming the Whole Child. Here is the pilgrimage with Monique and Joseph González this coming September with Inside the Vatican, and the related episodes from Almost Good Catholics: Pilgrimage to Mexico: Our Lady of Guadalupe & the Flower World Prophecy 2024 Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 16: Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics. Joseph and Monique González on Almost Good Catholics, episode 74: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth: How the Flower World Bloomed into History in 1531. Here is my first discussion with Pastor Brian Zahnd and the film A Hidden Life which we will be talking about in August: A Hidden Life (2019) trailer, IMBD, and on Amazon Prime. Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price.This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also listen to the trailer for next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Elizabeth O’Brien foregrounds the racial and religious meanings of surgery to draw important connections between historical and contemporary politics regarding fetal and maternal healthcare. She traces practices of caesarean section and coercive Christianization throughout Mexico’s colonial period; patriarchal pregnancy management during republican state formation; and tubal ligation and vaginal bifurcation in Mexico’s twentieth century Eugenics movement. Surgery and Salvation has received several awards including the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies’ Judy Ewell Award; the Latin American Studies Association 2024 Best Book Award for the Nineteenth-Century Section; and Honorable Mention for the 2024 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize (WAWH) as well as the Thomas McGann Prize (RMCLAS). O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and Latin American History at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this episode, O'Brien is interviewed by Leah Cargin (PhD candidate, University of Oklahoma). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christine Wohar talks about Finding Frassati: And Following His Path to Holiness (EWTN, 2021), her book about Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. The book is a biography, hagiography, and delightful conversation about the participation of the Communion of Saints in our lives and how can join hands with them in our daily lives. Like many of us, Bl. Pier Giorgio was a normal guy with a comfortable life, and he did normal fun things available to him a young wealthy, Italian a hundred years ago, like mountain climbing, Alpine skiing, studying at university, and playing pool with his friends. But he also showed extreme love for the Eucharist, care for the poor, evangelization, and chastity—so, normal, and yet extraordinary.Not only was Bl. Pier Giorgio’s body free from corruption when it was exhumed 75 years after his death, but he also has a couple of astounding miraculous healing attributed to him through his intercession. Christine Wohar talks to me about this remarkable figure in the church and how we can follow in his footsteps. Christine Wohar’s organization, FrassatiUSA, on the web. Christine Wohar’s book, Finding Frassati from Sophia International Press and also on Amazon.com. Kevin Becker on YouTube discussing the miraculous healing through Bl. Blessed Pier Giorgio and also an article about it. Other Almost Good Catholics episodes that we referred to in this interview: Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 17: Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA. Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices