New Books in Religion

Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were living in something called ‘the Enlightenment.’ Rather, they were still grappling with the fallout of the Reformation, and more specifically the results of two bloody seventeenth-century revolutions. Ingram’s excellent book analyzes the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the event caused them. Robert G. Ingram is a professor of History at Ohio University, where he teaches early Modern British and European religious, political, and intellectual history. He is also the founding director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park, which opened in July 2016. Entertainment has long been understood as important aspect of Christianity in the US, but the theme park, which includes a re-creation of Noah’s ark, provides a striking setting through which to ask questions such as how creationists present their beliefs to the broader public. Ark Encounter is, in part, a workplace ethnography, which describes the entwined conceptual and aesthetic work through which the park’s design team imagine how to most effectively and playfully communicate a controversial religious perspective. Bielo’s findings are situated in discussion with other groundbreaking anthropological work on how categories such as ‘fundamentalist’ have been constructed over time, perhaps most notably Susan Harding’s scholarship. While the whole book is ethnographically rich and reflexive, an appendix describes in useful detail (for both readers and for those planning or currently engaged in their own research projects) the processes through which Bielo entered – and left – his fieldsite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Clinical trials show that practicing Buddhist meditation has benefits regardless of whether or not one subscribes to the religion, raising fundamental questions about the nature of Buddhism itself. Today’s book, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World (Yale University Press, 2017) is a collected volume of Stephen Batchelor’s writings which explore the complex implications of Buddhism’s secularization. He explores questions such as, Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition? And, Is there an ethical framework that can underpin and contextualize these practices in a rapidly changing world? Ranging widely—from reincarnation, religious belief, and agnosticism to the role of the arts in Buddhist practice—Batchelor offers a detailed picture of contemporary Buddhism and its attempt to find a voice in the modern world. Stephen Batchelor is a teacher and scholar of Buddhism, as well as a cofounder and faculty member at Bodhi College based in the UK. He trained as a monk for ten years in traditional Buddhist communities and now presents a secular approach to Buddhist practice, having also written the bestselling book, Buddhism without Beliefs. 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

In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota, offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas’ religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the “ontological turn,” particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood. Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,” or had some sort of mystical-though-divinely-inspired experience. Ditto with miracles: I just don’t know if I’d believe someone who claimed to have witnesses a miracle. Perhaps it’s the age we live in: most of us just have a hard time swallowing encounters with the “supernatural.” Yet “religions” (if that’s the right word, and I think it is) have appeared in modern times among people who (dare I say) think pretty much the way I do–and perhaps you do as well. How does this happen? Well, Ann Taves, has written a wonderful book that attempts to answer this question, and in a way that is very respectful of the new religions she studies. It’s called Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton University Press, 2016) and I highly recommend it to you. In the interview, we spend most of our time talking about Bill Wilson and the emergence of Alcoholics Anonymous, a “spiritual path” (to use her excellent phrase) that I myself have walked. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Unlike many of the other early Christian texts, the Gospel of John emphasizes the name of the Father alongside the name of Jesus—why? One reason, says Joshua Coutts, is because of the significance of God’s name in the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Join us as we talk with Joshua Coutts about his recent publication, The Divine Name in the Gospel of John (Mohr Siebeck, 2017). Joshua Coutts is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Providence in Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Along with The Divine Name in the Gospel of John, he has published a number of articles in academic journals including Currents in Biblical Research and Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. Joshua has also taught at Regent College in Vancouver, Edinburgh Theological Seminary, Cornhill Training School in Glasgow, Prairie College in Alberta, and Evangelical Bible College in Zambia. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018). Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, and representing the expansion, assimilation and contraction of Christian religion in a global context, Stanley’s book offers a compelling account of how the Bible became a global book, and of how expectations for the global conquest of Christian missions in the 1910s gave way before the impact of World War One, the end of empire, secularisation, migration, religious pluralism, political change, persecution and genocide, and the constant proliferation of new religious movements. Christianity in the Twentieth Century is at its heart a story of survival – and of constant change. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) answers this question and others by chronicling how Black North Carolinians, through their robust Christian denominational culture, biblically interpreted the world made anew by the Civil War. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Samuel Helfont‘s Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) makes an invaluable contribution to an understanding of Iraqi strongman’s Saddam Hussein harnessing of Islam in support of his Baathist regime and ideology and to ensure that Islam as a social institution is incapable of turning against him. In doing so, Helfont also contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of religious legitimization of autocratic and illiberal regimes that is at the core of struggles in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Helfont’s well-written, easily accessible book benefits from access to documents of Saddam Hussein’s government and Baath Party that were captured by US and opposition forces in the wake of the 2003 US invasion and have been unavailable until recently. Helfont also positions religion as a social force that represents both an opportunity and an asset to autocratic leaders who on the one hand garner legitimacy by identification with the faith but also need to ensure that it does not emerge as the motor of opposition or resistance. Helfont further demonstrates that in contrast to the immense infrastructure that Saddam rolled out to bend Islam to his will and interpretation, US forces underestimated the degree of social control that he exerted and lacked the institutional and intelligence capacity to manage religious sentiment in the wake of his overthrow. The breakdown in social control explains, at least in part, the religious insurgencies the US confronted in Iraq since 2003. With his analysis of the management of religion by Saddam and the breakdown after his fall, Helfont has made an important contribution to the study of Iraq. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both scholarly and journalistic communities. Among the central assumptions driving such compatibility talk relates to Islam’s allegedly inherent incapacity for critique, a virtue often heralded as a signature achievement and characteristic of liberal secularism. Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) represents a devastating indictment of this dominant liberal assumption that Islam is inimical to critique. Turning this assumption on its head, Ahmad combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to argue that critique is and has always been central to Muslim intellectual thought and lived practice. The distinctive feature of this book is the way it fluctuates the camera of analysis between a genealogy of Western liberal discourses of critique as a way to puncture their universality and inevitability, while bringing into view alternate logics and imaginaries of critique in Muslim thought and practice, past and present. Eminently readable, this book will be widely discussed and debated in multiple fields, including Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. SherAli Tareen is Assistant 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 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