New Books in Religion

Ever since their composition in the 13th century the poems of the Persian writer Rumi have enthralled millions of readers around the world. In Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017), Brad Gooch describes the life of their author and the path that took him from scholarship to poetry. The son of a scholar and cleric, Rumi traveled extensively as a child and enjoyed a wide-ranging education that prepared him for a life as a teacher and jurist. His meeting with the traveling mystic Shams of Tabriz transformed Rumi’s life, as he soon abandoned his education and responsibilities in favor of immersion into a life of aestheticism. As Gooch explains, it was this relationship which sparked Rumi’s development into the poet he became, as his deep and passionate relationship with Shams created a wellspring of emotions that were subsequently embodied in some of the most enduring verses ever written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions. Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations. On this program, we talk about her new translation of Augustine’s Confessions, published by The Modern Library in June 2017. Publishers Weekly has called it “delightfully readable while still densely theological. In this lively translation filled with vivid, personal prose, Ruden introduces readers to a saint whom many will realize they only thought they knew.” Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Armando Salvatore’s (Professor Global Religious Studies, McGill University) formidable new book Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power, Civility (Wiley, 2016) is a dense yet delightful meditation on the concept of sociology of Islam. Building on the work of the towering Marshall Hodgson, this book combines intellectual, social, and institutional history with remarkable nimbleness. Among the signature contributions of this book is the theorization of Islamic conceptualizations and articulations of civility in a manner that help provincialize Eurocentric understandings of this concept. Salvatore also traces ways in which pre-modern Islamic articulations of civility transformed in the conditions of colonial modernity. Sure to spark debate, this book will also enliven upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars in the study of religion and Islam. 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 at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@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

In her new book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017), Professor Sarah Imhoff explores the relationship between American identity and American Jewish depictions and definitions of masculinity. Professor Imhoff examines Jewish communal efforts to consciously create an American Jewish masculinity — one that is tied to the land, modeled on Protestant delimitations of masculine virtues — and she analyzes popular conceptions about and ambivalence toward the American Jewish male. Professor Imhoff explores the ways in which conscious efforts to forge a connection between the Jewish male body and the American land collide with anti-Semitic stereotypes, and with an emerging range of Jewish masculinities, in this multifaceted work. Sarah Imhoff is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When is war justified? What makes a just war? These are difficult questions to answer, but particularly so for Christians, followers of Jesus, who suffered violence without responding in kind. One philosopher-theologian who wrestled with these issues was Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Gregory Reichberg, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, explores this subject in his new book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Not only does this work do an excellent job in probing in an accessible yet deep way Aquinas understanding of just war, Reichberg both reveals aspects of Aquinas thought on war that are rarely examined, such as the connection between the cardinal virtue of fortitude and military service, and connects Aquinas and the just war tradition to contemporary debates about the waging of war. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in this subject, and it has something to say both to people largely unfamiliar with it, as well as those who have studied the subject at length. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Psalms 120-134, designated the “Songs of Ascents,” form their own distinct collection within the Psalter. Who wrote these psalms and for what occasion? David Mitchell, a biblical scholar, musicologist, and Hebraist, is here to answer these questions. His book, The Songs of Ascents: Psalms 120 to 134 in the Worship of Jerusalem’s Temples (Campbell Publications, 2015), aims to reconstruct the ritual and liturgical context in which the Songs of Ascents were first sung, providing not only a commentary for each of the psalms but also sheet music, attempting to recapture the original music through the Masoretic cantillation. David C. Mitchell is Director of Music for Holy Trinity Pro-Cathedral in Brussels. His publications include The Message of the Psalter (1997), The Songs of Ascents (2015), Messiah ben Joseph (2016), along with various papers and musical works. You can visit his website at: www.brightmorningstar.org. L. 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

During the Civil War Father James Sheeran served as a Catholic chaplain for the 14th Louisiana Infantry. Between his various responsibilities Sheeran kept a journal in which he recounted his experiences with, and observations of, life in the Army of Northern Virginia. As editor of The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran, Chaplain, Confederate, Redemptorist (Catholic University of America Press, 2016), Patrick J. Hayes has provided readers with the most complete edition yet of Sheeran’s manuscript, one that details the activities of a man of faith in a time of war. An immigrant from Ireland, Sheeran joined the Redemptorist congregation in the 1850s and was serving as a parish priest in New Orleans when the war began in 1861. As a military chaplain, Sheeran witnessed firsthand many of the key battles of the Civil War, from Second Manassas in 1862 to Cedar Creek in 1864, and his recorded observations provide a valuable record of those clashes. Yet Sheeran’s diaries also serve as a window into what life was like for soldiers and civilians during the conflict, as observed by a man whose commitment to the Confederate cause was matched only by his piety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religious ideology or to make a case from the perspective of scientific evidence and the physical laws of reality. Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2016), written by Dr. Jon Mills, argues from the perspective of psychology and posits that god is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. In other words, He is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the forgiving all-powerful father you always wanted, the absolution of all your fears, the antidote to death. Mills writes that the conception of god is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation. He promotes secular humanism and a personal search for the numinous as a positive, life-affirming alternative. Dr. Jon Mills is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, active clinical psychologist, as well as Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto. He is the author and editor of many books and recipient of awards, including the the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 2015, given by the Canadian Psychological Association. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite 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

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley brings together black studies, queer theory, theology, and continental philosophy to theorize the ways in which what he calls “otherwise worlds of possibility” can serve as disruptions against marginalization and violence and also produce possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and tongue speaking of Black Pentecostalism, Crawley reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. In the process, he does much more: suggesting a hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture when people are under siege. Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions. Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations. Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion