New Books in Religion

Extensively based on fieldwork material, From Tapas to Modern Yoga: Sādhus' Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox, 2024) primarily analyses embodied practices of ascetics belonging to four religious orders historically associated with the practice of yoga and hatha yoga. This focus on ascetics stems from the fact that yogic techniques probably developed in ascetic contexts, yet scholars have rarely focused their attention on non-international ascetic practitioners of yoga. Creating a confrontation between textual sources and ethnographic data, the book demonstrates how 'embodied practices' (austerities, yoga and hatha yoga) over the centuries accumulated layers of meanings and practices that coexist in the literature as well as in the words of contemporary sadhus. Drawing from conversations with these interlocutors, the book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic fieldwork in shedding light on past historical developments, transmissions, contemporary reinterpretation and innovation. The strength of the work lies in its methodological approach and in the richness of its materials: by analysing present situations through comparisons and the support of past evidence, the book not only fills an academic gap but also stimulates further research on this highly complex topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband across state borders, Zainab's Traffic unsettles our approaches to ziyarat (pilgrimages) by provoking the reader to dwell in matters of urban and spatial development, sectarian demarcations, flows of consumer goods (Syrian lingerie and Ceylon tea) and the seeking of spiritual blessings. Yildiz moves with various pilgrims, traders, and goods on buses on a nearly eight-hundred-mile journey. These stories of flow from his interlocutors based on extensive fieldwork experiences renders any easy framing of pilgrimage practices in Islamic parlance impossible and forces us to contain the multitudes of ever-changing reality of ritual and lived Islam set against fickle state borders and its sociality. This book will be a great resource to scholars of anthropology of Islam, especially those interested in methodology of fieldwork and writing ethnography, and scholars who think about pilgrimages, and the regions of Iran, Turkey, and Syria and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. In The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024), Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

This week on International Horizons, John Torpey, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, speaks with sociologists Mucahit Bilici and Samuel Heilman about their book, Following Similar Paths: What Jews and Muslims Can Learn From One Another (University of California Press, 2024). Bilici and Heilman explore how Judaism and Islam, as minority religions in the U.S., share common challenges and cultural adaptations. The discussion dives into topics like religious identity, multiculturalism, and the American experience, while also reflecting on the historical relationship between Jews and Muslims. Tune in to hear how these two groups navigate their religious lives in America and what lessons can be drawn for interfaith understanding today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The study of Jewish text, over two millennia, has traditionally taken place in the Bet Midrash (the communal study hall), sitting at a table or desk. Studying the Bible has been a project of thinking, talking, contemplative reflection, and debate.There are other ways.Dr. Ora Horn Prouser, Cantor Michael Kasper, and circus artist and choreographer Ayal Prouser have joined to edit this volume which explicates their philosophy and technique as they work with students to study Hebrew Bible through the embodied experience of movement and circus arts.They have invited an international group of distinguished scholars and practitioners to share their own visions and work; each chapter adds information about circus, movement, educational practice, and theory.When seen as a whole, Under One Tent: Circus, Judaism, and Bible (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023) helps to frame the book's central premise: that circus and dance are perfectly matched to help students study and think through their bodies, finding valuable and enlightening textual interpretations.This flows logically as movement has been central to the Jewish experience. Similarly, though less known, circus has a documented, long, and powerful connection to Judaism and the Jewish people.Prouser, Kasper, and Prouser do not attempt to interpret text through art creation. Rather, they use art as a study partner and method, a context within which to do the research that yields new and exciting learning possibilities and readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law.In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held―one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today―recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity. Blending intellectual rigor, a respect for tradition and the practices of a living Judaism, and a commitment to the full equality of all people, Held seeks to reclaim Judaism as it authentically is.In Judaism Is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (FSG, 2024), he shows that love is foundational and constitutive of true Jewish faith, animating the singular Jewish perspective on injustice and protest, grace, family life, responsibilities to our neighbors and even our enemies, and chosenness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China. Amidst this diversity, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 (Open Book, 2024) offers readers sympathetic and immersive insight into the religious realities of its subjects. To this end, this book identifies two perspectives: one uncovers hidden meanings and unexpected connections, while the other restricts Jesus to the space and time of human history. Minds that believed in Jesus, and those that opposed him, made use of both perspectives to make sense of their worlds. 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 to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020).As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she would remain for a few historic days, challenging the wickedness of the Islamic leadership, defending the actions of her brother, initiating the commemorative rituals, protecting and nurturing the new Imâm, al-Ḥusayn's son ʿAlî b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlî b. Abî Ṭâlib, until he could take his rightful place. This is her story.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities across Morocco, Algeria, and Cyprus. At the heart of these case studies is the question of how to approach and study Sufi communities across an ever diversifying social, religious/spiritual, and political landscape and across categorical commitments such as New Age, New Religious Movements, esotericism, diasporic Islam, Traditionalism and mysticism. Piraino argues for the limitations and utilities of these various categories, and ultimately helps us shift our focus to to the everyday embodied ebbs and flows of a variety of Italian and French Sufi communities to showcase how these terms should be used with fluidity to reflect the lived realities of his interlocutors. This book will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Sufism, sociology of Islam, contemporary Islam, Islam in Europe and much more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger Lawyers Association rocked the nation: protests were launched around India and throughout the diaspora, a record-setting human chain called the ‘Women’s Wall’ was coordinated, and dozens of petitions were filed asking the Supreme Court to review, and potentially reverse, its landmark opinion. Perhaps most significantly, IYLA led the Court to openly reconsider the Essential Practices Doctrine that has been a mainstay of Indian religious freedom jurisprudence since 1954. In this first monograph-length study of the dispute, legal anthropologist Deepa Das Acevedo draws on ethnographic fieldwork, legal analysis, and media archives to tell a multifaceted narrative about the ‘ban on women’. Reaching as far back as the eighteenth century, when the relationship between temple deities and the government was transformed by an ambitious precolonial ruler, and coming up to the litigation delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Das Acevedo reveals the complexities of the dispute and the constitutional framework that defines it. That framework, Das Acevedo argues, reflects two distinct conceptions of religion-state relations, both of which have emerged at various stages in the—still unresolved—battle for Sabarimala. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion