New Books in Religion

Is love between man and woman the source of wisdom and the cornerstone of moral life? Naftali Rothenberg says it is, based on the works and life of the first century Jewish scholar and sage, Rabbi Akiva.In Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Rothenberg explores the philosophy of love through the thought and life of Rabbi Akiva whose life was transformed by the love of his wife, Rachel. From this starting point, Naftali Rothenberg conducts a thorough examination of the harmonious approach to love in the obstacle-laden context of human reality. Discussing the deterioration of passion into simple lust, the ability to contend with suffering and death, and so forth, Rothenberg addresses the deepest and most pressing questions about human love. The readings and observations offered here allow readers to acquire the wisdom of love—not merely as an assemblage of theoretical arguments and abstract statements, but as an analysis of the internal contradictions and difficulties revealed in the context of attempts to realize and implement harmonious love.Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet Renee Garfinkel@embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularly relevant. Betsy Perabo’s book Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is a unique and important contribution to this area of inquiry, representing a rare contemporary academic exploration of just war theory within Russian Orthodoxy in the context of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Perabo examines the conflict through the concept of an “interreligious war” between Christian and Buddhist nations, paying particular attention to the writings of Nikolai of Japan, the Russian leader of Orthodox Church in Japan, as well as Russian soldiers, chaplains, military psychologists, and missionary leaders. In this interview we discuss the genealogy of Christian just war theory, the Russian Orthodox mission in in the late 19th-early 20th century the Japanese and Russian perception of religious motivations and divine influence in the 1904-05 war, and the implications of this history for Russian militarism today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship? Through a careful study of ritual (śanti) texts geared towards appeasement of inauspicious forces (primarily the Atharva Veda and in the Bṛhatsaṃhitā, an Indian astrological work), Marko Geslani demonstrates the persistent significance and centrality of the work of Brahmanical priesthood from ancient to medieval to modern times. In doing so he aptly problematizes the scholarly tendency to demarcate Vedic ritual from popular Hinduism. Join me today as I speak with Marco about his new book Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism(Oxford University Press, 2018).For 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

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion.  Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire.  Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities.  Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity.  Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West (Greg Kofford Books, 2019) narrates the wide-ranging life of John Hawley’s search for an authentic Mormon faith. Melvin C. Johnson has been researching Hawley’s adventurous life along the American borderlands and frontier for three decades. Hawley was an active member of several Latter Day Restoration denominations in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Texas, the Indian Nations of Oklahoma, and Utah Territory from 1838 to 1909.A Mormon Ulysses follows Hawley’s adventures in the West growing up as a logger, woodworker, settler, church official and missionary. He helped build the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi, battled the Comanches, was entangled in the horrors of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and pioneered the Pine Valley community in southern Utah. Hawley’s western odyssey is timely, worthy, and deserves to belong in the canon of American history and biography.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

Over the past 50 years, the architects of the religious right have become household names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. They have used their massively influential platforms to build the profiles of evangelical politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Now, a new generation of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress enjoys unprecedented access to the Trump White House.What all these leaders share, besides their faith, is their gender. Men dominate the standard narrative of the rise of the religious right. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s nationally prominent evangelical women played essential roles in shaping the priorities of the movement and mobilizing its supporters. In particular, they helped to formulate, articulate, and defend the traditionalist politics of gender and family that in turn made it easy to downplay the importance of their leadership roles. In This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right(Oxford UP, 2019), Emily S. Johnson begins by examining the lives and work of four well-known women-evangelical marriage advice author Marabel Morgan, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, author and political lobbyist Beverly LaHaye, and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The book explores their impact on the rise of the New Christian Right and on the development of the evangelical subculture, which is a key channel for injecting conservative political ideas into purportedly apolitical spaces. Johnson then highlights the ongoing significance of this history through an analysis of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and Michele Bachmann's presidential bid in 2012. These campaigns were made possible by the legacies of an earlier generation of conservative evangelical women who continue to impact our national conversations about gender, family, and sex.Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at the University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at stephencolbrook@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. In American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019), professor Diana Pasulka examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system she asserts is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media such as The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her research focuses on religion and technology, including supernatural belief and its connections to digital technologies and environments. She is also a history and religion consultant for movies and television, including The Conjuring (from 2013).Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Some people find the Old Testament to be confusing, out of date, and essentially replaced by the New Testament. They are missing out. The Old Testament offers us a grand narrative that reveals God's work, God's purposes, and God's wisdom.In his new book The Old Testament in Seven Sentences: A Small Introduction to a Vast Topic(IVP Academic, 2019), Christopher J. H. Wright fits the pieces together and shows us the coherent whole. Using seven key sentences drawn straight from the Old Testament, he connects the dots and points us toward Jesus."In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.""All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.""You shall have no other gods before me.""How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news."Such sentences as these are not merely beautiful or helpful (though they are that). They are part of the great drama of Scripture, the story of God's plan of redemption that embraces all nations and the whole of his creation. Wright starts from the beginning, describing God's promises and covenants with his people and his mission to bless the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We are especially familiar with those haunting images of the face of King Jayavarman VII, represented in the stone sculptures of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Archaeologists and historians tend to relate the history of the Angkorean era through the dynasties of great kings. These are, of course, all male images. But this apparent maleness of the Angkorean state contrasts with one of the paradigms of Southeast Asia as a cultural zone: the comparatively high status of women. Ashley Thompson addresses this apparent contradiction in her new book titled, Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge, 2016). Among the themes of this rich, challenging, and provocative book is the gendered nature of the Angkorean state.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In this interview, George Kinder, a global thought leader and mindfulness meditation teacher, talks about his latest book, A Golden Civilization & The Map of Mindfulness (Serenity Point Press, 2018).  He states, “If we want our children to live in a Golden Civilization, the first step is for each of us to imagine it.” To do this, we must reflect upon what really matters and endeavor to work collectively to make mindful changes.George Kinder, known as the father of the Life Planning movement, revolutionized the profession of financial advice by training over 3,000 professionals world-wide in the field of Financial Life Planning.  Harvard educated, he is the recipient of numerous professional awards, a sought after speaker at industry events and conferences, a regular guest on media programs, and the founder and CEO of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning.His expertise extends beyond the role of speaker or advisor.  He is an artist, poet, photographer, author, mindfulness practitioner and teacher. He leads weekly meditation classes and retreats around the world.  His articles have appeared in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Model Adviser, Forbes, and Time magazine. He is the author of Life Planning for You: How to Design & Deliver the Life of Your Dreams (2014), Transforming Suffering into Wisdom: The Art of Inner Listening (2011), A Song for Hana & the Spirit of Leho’ula (2007) and The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life (2006).  Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed psychologist and mindfulness teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA.  You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website at https://drelizabethcronin.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion