New Books in Religion

In this episode, we talk with Michael Gubser about the pioneering art historian Alois Riegl, one of Eisler’s teachers in Vienna and a major influence on his thought. Then we look at Eisler’s first work on the history of religions, World Mantle and Heavenly Canopy, a massive two-volume study of ancient cosmology published in 1910. In the second half, we turn to Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism, larger questions about the figure of Orpheus and the idea of a widespread cult devoted to his worship in the ancient world, and even larger questions about what we can learn from “outdated” scholarship.Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb CrawfordAdditional voices: Brian EvansMusic: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.Guests: Michael Gubser (James Madison University) Vladimir Marchenkov (Ohio University School of Interdisciplinary Arts) and Radcliffe G. Edmonds, III (Paul Shorey Professor of Greek and Chair of the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College)Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.Special thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford.Bibliography and Further Reading--Edmonds, Radcliffe G. Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.--Eisler, Robert. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. London: J. M. Watkins, 1921.———. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. [World Cloak and Heavenly Canopy: Investigations into the Ancient Worldview through the History of Religions].Two Volumes. Munich: Oscar Beck, 1910. --Gubser, Michael. Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2006.--Marchenkov, Vladimir. The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music. Hillsdale, NY : Pendragon Press, 2009.Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepegAssociate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio,edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whose vitality reveals itself in her devotees' rapidly changing encounters with local and far from local players, powers, and ideas. These include invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and more recently the onslaught of modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Hadimba has provided her worshipers with discursive, ritual, and ideological arenas within which they reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist these changing realities, and she herself has been transformed in the process.Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered in the region from 2009 to 2017, The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess: Hadimba, Her Devotees, and Religion in Rapid Change (Oxford University Press, 2019) is rich with myths and tales, accounts of dramatic rituals and festivals, and descriptions of everyday life in the celebrated but remote Kullu Valley. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Hadimba from the ground up, or rather, from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The result is an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.Ehud Halperin lectures in the East Asian Studies Department at Tel Aviv UniversityFor information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to the feelings of ordinary men and women―so often left out of the history of atheism.Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this lively and startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through their hearts more than their minds.Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith.These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records.Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics.In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age.Alec Ryrie is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, specializing in the history of Protestant Christianity, England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School.His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew) and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Philip A. Craig’s new book on John Owen, the premier puritan theologian, demonstrates how carefully his subject tracked the influence of antinomianism in his writing.Craig’s book roots Owen’s ideas of conversion in Augustine and Calvin. The Bond of Grace and Duty in the Soteriology of John Owen (Founders Press, 2020) shows how the seventeenth-century divine argued for “preparation for grace” – the idea that those seeking conversion should “put themselves in the way of grace” by attending sermons and reading Scripture – while also arguing that Christians should make special efforts to “prepare for glory.”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 f John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens is a Visiting Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her first book is titled Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home (University of Alabama Press, 2019).In it, Dr. Løvdal Stephens shows how Dr. James Dobson—child psychologist, author, radio personality, and founder of the Christian conservative organization Focus on the Family—reached millions of American evangelical households and shaped the cultural sensibilities and political attitudes of the U.S. culture wars.Most poignantly, Dr. Løvdal Stephens analyzes how Dobson and other evangelicals defined and defended the traditional family as an ideal and as a symbol in an ever-changing world.Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Every great book has a great backstory. In Joe Geisner’s new edited work, Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books (Signature Books, 2020), well-known historians describe their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past, offering an unprecedented glimpse into why they wrote these important works.Writing Mormon History is a must-read for anyone interested in Mormonism--historians, students of history, scholars, and aspiring authors. The volume’s contributors are: Polly Aird, Will Bagley, Todd Compton, Brian Hales, Melvin Johnson, William MacKinnon, Linda King Newell, Gregory Prince, D. Michael Quinn, Craig Smith, George D. Smith, Vickie Cleverley Speek, Susan Staker, Daniel Stone, John TurnerThe majority of the essays appear here for the first time.Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

"Every morning of my life in the past few years I would wake with the thought, I’m a murderer. I have no right to enjoy life.” Evan Pederick speaking to psychiatrist William Barclay in prison about what lead him to confess to the Hilton bombing.In 1978, Evan Pederick, a naive 22-year-old in the thrall of a radical religious movement, Ananda Marga, placed an enormous bomb outside Sydney's Hilton Hotel. It killed three people. A decade later, Pederick confessed to this act of terrorism. But when one of his alleged accomplices was later acquitted, significant parts of Pederick's testimony were undermined and he was accused of being a 'fantasist'. Conspiracy theories flooded in to fill the vacuum. Was it a plot by ASIO, rather than, as Pederick asserted, a plot to assassinate the Indian prime minister? In the absence of a Royal Commission or a similar inquiry, the mystery continues to shroud the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil. Pederick, an Anglican priest, stands by his confession and testimony. Here is his story, told for the first time in this authorized biography by Imre Salusinszsky. The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga, (Melbourne University Press, 2019) is an extraordinary tale of guilt, remorse, renewal, and the search for forgivenessImre Salusinszky was born in Budapest in 1955. He and his family came to Australia as refugees following the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and at Oxford. Between 1994 and 2012, Imre’s weekly column appeared in daily newspapers across Australia. He served on the Australia Council between 2006 and 2009. Imre spent seven years reporting on NSW politics, and between 2013 and 2017 was a senior adviser to the former NSW Premier, Mike Baird. His previous publications include, as an editor, The Oxford Book of Australian Essays.Dr Matthew Thompson is a literary journalism specialist until recently with the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, but now based in the USA. Dr Thompson has a special focus on the conflict areas of the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. He is the author of MAYHEM, Running WithThe Blood God, and My Colombian Death. For more information visit matthewthompsonwriting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Salvation in Indian Philosophy: Perfection and Simplicity for Vaiśeṣika (Routledge, 2019), Ionut Moise offers a comprehensive description of the ‘doctrine of salvation’ (niḥśreyasa/ mokṣa) and Vaiśeṣika, one of the oldest philosophical systems of Indian philosophy and provides an overview of theories in other related Indian philosophical systems and classical doctrines of salvation.The book examines liberation, the fourth goal of life and arguably one of the most important topics in Indian philosophy, from a comparative philosophical perspective. Contextualising classical Greek Philosophy which contains the three goals of life (Aristotle’s Ethics), and explains salvation as first understood in the theology of the Hellenistic and Patristics periods, the author analyses six classical philosophical schools of Indian philosophy in which there is a marked emphasis on the ultimate ontological elements of the world and ‘self’. Analysing Vaiśeṣika and the manner in which this lesser known system has put forward its own theory of salvation (niḥśreyasa), the author demonstrates its significance and originality as an old and influential philosophical system. He argues that it is essential for the study of other Indian sciences and for the study of all comparative philosophy.An extensive introduction to Indian soteriology, this book will be an important reference work for academics interested in comparative religion and philosophy, Indian philosophy, Asian religion and South Asian Studies.Ionut Moise is a tutor in Comparative Philosophy at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS), University of Oxford, UK.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century scholar ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Arabic Poetics presents and explores a panoply of scholars and texts situated at the intersection of religion, and literature. Written with sparkling clarity, this book will also make an excellent text to teach in various undergraduate and graduate courses on the Muslim Humanities, Arabic, Religion and Literature, and Religious Studies more broadly.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

New Testament introductions fall into two categories: those that emphasize the history behind the text through discussions of authorship, dating, and audience, and those that explore the content of the text itself. Few introductions weave the Old Testament into their discussions, and fewer still rely on the grand narrative of the Old Testament. But the New Testament was not written within a vacuum. Rather, it stands in continuity with the Old Testament. Israel's story is the church's story. In The Story Retold: A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament (IVP Academic, 2020), G. K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd explore each New Testament book in light of the broad history of redemption, emphasizing the biblical-theological themes of each New Testament book. Their distinctive approach encourages readers to read the NewTestament in light of the Old, not as a new story but as a story retoldDr G. K. Beale (PhD, Cambridge) is the J. Gresham Machen Chair of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He has published many books, including The Temple and the Church's Mission, We Become What We Worship, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, and commentaries on 1-2 Thessalonians and Revelation.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist theological seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and 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/religion