New Books in Religion

In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the millennialist faith of the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches, this careful ethnography calls into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern societies. It asks, how do the fishermen of Gamrie experience life as both modern and enchanted? Joseph Webster is Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. The Anthropology of Protestantism comes out in paperback in June 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scientists have begun to mark out new ground for robust conversation. Tom McLeish‘s book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes this conversation to new heights. Locating the impulse for science in much biblical literature, particularly the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, he shows how one might understand science as a theological endeavor. Rather than a paradigm of “science and theology,” he posits a “theology of science,” an interrelationship that not only gives us new eyes with which to read the history of science more coherently but also yields a renewed appreciation for science as part of a “ministry of reconciliation” with the natural world and the causes of human suffering. Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University. He studied for his first degree and PhD in polymer physics at the University of Cambridge and in 1987 became a lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield. In 1993 he took the chair in polymer physics at the University of Leeds. He took up his current position in Durham in 2008. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society. He is also involved in science communication with the public via radio, television, and school lectures, discussing topics ranging from the physics of slime to the interaction of faith and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dealing with moral issues in a fair and balanced way is never easy. This is especially true since many contemporary moral questions are of such a highly personal nature. However, in his book An Introduction to Catholic Ethics Since Vatican II (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Andrew Kim does an excellent job of sensitively introducing the Catholic Church’s teachings on moral issues and the reasoning behind them. Through his deep knowledge of Catholic moral theology and an ability to explain difficult concepts through easy-to-understand metaphors, Dr. Kim has written a rich and thought-provoking book that will be useful for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of Catholic ethics, as well as for those who have to teach it to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Studies on the subject of women’s participation in religious and intellectual life in Islam have been few.Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013)byAsma Sayeed, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, is a much needed addition to the fields of early and classical Islamic history, the study of hadith and its transmission, and women’s studies. Professor Sayeed leads readers through nine centuries, from the seventhto sixteenth century CE, of religious, social, and intellectual history of women’s participation as transmitters of hadith, the words and actions of Muhammad. Women’s participation within this area was not static, but ebbed and flowed throughout history as demonstrated in this book’s four chapters. Women were critical in the dissemination of hadith in the first century of Islam. As the study of hadith became more specialized from the fourthto tenthcentury, women were marginalized as transmitters which Sayeed validates through biographical dictionaries and chronicles as well as quantitative data from chains of transmissions, isnads, from numerous hadith collections. By the tenthcentury, the canonization of hadith was by and large complete. This ushered in a new phase in which women again became important actors in the reception and propagation of hadith. This period would last until the end of the Mamluk period and the rise of Ottomans in the sixteenthcentury, but this second decline would be for different reasons. Throughout each phase of this history, Professor Sayeed provides case studies on different women to further her argument on the participation of women, even at the least active moments, as propagators of hadith. Professor Sayeed has brought new understanding of women’s intellectual lives in the history of Islam and has opened the door for further inquiry into this subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kevin M. Kruse is professor of history at Princeton University and author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015). Kruse argues that the idea that America was always a “Christian nation” dates from the 1930s. In opposition to FDR’S New Deal, businessmen and religious leaders began to promote the idea of “freedom under God.” The post-war era brought new fears of the advancement of domestic communism. In a decisive turn from an earlier social gospel, these leaders established a Christian ethos based on the ideas of private property, capitalism, and individual economic freedom. Adding “under God” to the pledge of allegiance, designating “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the nation, the controversial attempt to institute prayer and bible distribution in American schools were all forerunner to the Christian Right at the end of the century. Kruse’s narrative focuses on how American leaders from different powerful sectors of the nation sought through legislation and public practices to unify a pluralistic nation under a capitalist-affirming Christian framework. The result was not unity but a more fragmented and divided nation. In unfolding the narrative Kruse challenges the often-benign public religious images of men like Billy Graham, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a multitude of recognizable business leaders. The book opens up a timely conversation on the meaning of religious pluralism and the place of religion in American public life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that informs contemporary postural movements which are intricately connected and indivisible. Others contend that  contemporary yoga is simply a set of health practices that have nothing to do with religion. In Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Andrea Jain, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, helps us navigate the recent history of yoga in the west and the debates surrounding its ‘religious’ nature. Overall, what we find is that while yoga has been mediate through an emerging global consumer market and branded for strategic purposes it can still be seen to serve the function of a body of religious practice for many practitioners. In our conversation we discussed Hindu, Buddhist, Jain variations of yogic practice, Ida Craddock’s Church of Yoga, legal definitions, Iyengar Yoga, Siddha Yoga, and Anusara Yoga, Theosophists and Transcendentalists, Swami Vivikenanda’s Vedanta Society, counterculture yogis, consumer culture and the mass market, Christian Yogaphobia, the Hindu American Foundation, and the politics of yoga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities, so there’s no reason not to commit them. The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of its own accord. At the heart of Fatma Muge Gocek’s book is the claim that forgetting doesn’t just happen. Rather, forgetting (and remembering) happens in a context, with profound political and personal stakes for those involved. And this forgetting has consequences. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015) looks at how this process played out in Turkey in the past 200 years. Gocek looks at both the mechanisms and the logic of forgetting. In doing so she sets the Turkish decisions to reinterpret the Armenian genocide into a longer tale of modernization and collective violence. And she illustrates the complicated ways in which remembering and forgetting collide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his recent book, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), John K. Nelson delves into the historical circumstances that have led to the declining fortunes of Japanese Buddhism and explores recent and ongoing attempts by Japanese Buddhist clerics to render Buddhism relevant to Japanese society once again. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and the author’s own participation in some of the innovative programs featured in the book, Experimental Buddhism features forty-five temples and some of the experiments that they are undertaking. Shingon monks chanting in a jazz club in Tokyo, a female cabaret dance troupe performing in front of the massive seated Buddha of the twelve-and-a-half-century-old Tōdaiji, a priest-run counseling center located in a covered shopping arcade, and a suicide prevention group run by priests are but a few of the fascinating examples that Nelson identifies as a part of a new trend within Japanese Buddhism, albeit a minor one as of yet. Rather than simply being another transformation within Japanese Buddhism that has developed over time, the experimental Buddhism at the center of Nelson’s work arises from individual agency, a type of personal freedom that was absent in previous eras, and new communication technologies. From priest-run bars where monks-cum-bartenders serve cocktails with Buddhist names and look for chances to chat with patrons about the middle way (or about the patrons’ personal woes), to a Nichiren temple in Tokyo where sutras were transformed into rap lyrics set to a beat, the experiments described here are carefully thought-out attempts made by clerics who recognize that in the modern period Buddhist institutions and teachings have largely failed to address the problems that most concern the Japanese laity. Before presenting us with specific case studies, Nelson spends the first third of the book clarifying the larger social context in which experimental Buddhism should be understood. Central here is the rapid modernization that Japan experienced beginning in the 1950s and the heightened importance and freedom of the individual in Japanese society. As Japanese felt increasingly free to choose their religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations, many terminated the relationship between family and temple that had been a central feature of Japanese Buddhism since 1635. Besides this gradual loss of parishioners, other factors directly impacting Buddhism include the 1946 land reforms whereby temples lost most of their leasable lands and were thus driven to even greater economic reliance on funerals and memorial services, the negative public image of the Buddhist priest in Japanese society, and a refusal by a large percentage of Buddhist clerics to recognize the deteriorating relationship between Buddhist institutions and Japanese society. In asking how Japanese Buddhism might make itself relevant once again, Nelson points out that the sectarianism common in Japanese Buddhism means that each institution is structured to focus on perpetuating itself rather than asking about the health of Japanese Buddhism more broadly. Because of this, ecumenical collaboration and a willingness to introspect and ask difficult questions are vital if Japanese Buddhism is to survive as more than cultural and architectural heritage. Concerning this point, Nelson discusses two groups that are attempting such a feat, and here, as throughout the book, his research is lent an extra dimension by his own participation in the program in question. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the current state of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese religion more broadly. However, while readers will be skillfully led through Japan’s o... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael Birkel‘s Qur’an in Conversation (Baylor University Press, 2014) challenges its readers to think deeply about the Qur’an. The book will likely leave the reader with many answers but also many questions. By drawing on academic scholars, imams, lawyers, and activists this edited volume presents a series of compelling, masterfully written, digestible, and personal accounts of the Qur’an. It addresses tough questions about violence, gender, interfaith relations, and authority, but not in an apologetic manner. The authors make clear that the Qur’an is not merely an old text, but also a living text, teeming with evolving interpretations and debates. Because all of the writers are based in the United States, moreover, the Qur’an in Conversation seamlessly incorporates discussions of the Qur’an with contemporary issues in American culture. It thus becomes clear that the Qur’an is an American text as well as an Arabic text and a Muslim text. The chapters are arranged thematically, and one could reasonably read them sequentially or not, depending on the purpose. The text, therefore, offers a range of pedagogical functions and is sure to benefit classroom use, especially because of its readable and erudite prose. Birkel has set a high bar for future edited volumes that follow models anything like Qur’an in Conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Amy Kittelstrom is an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University. In her book The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin Press, 2015), Kittelstrom gives us profiles of seven individual and their circle. They embodied the ideas of what she calls an “American Reformation.” Beginning with John Adams, who believed every man had the duty to think for himself, to Jane Addams, who went beyond Christian charity to live among the poor, the book show us how these individuals combined liberalism and moral values to create a post-Christian “religion of democracy.” The “American Reformation” was the process of moving from Protestant orthodoxy and dogma to instituting the values of equality, liberty, and democracy within the social and political structure of the nation. These seven Americans combined the classic liberal values of reason and scientific inquiry with element of reformed Christianity, such as free will and equality before God, while rejecting the Calvinist teaching of human depravity. These ideals were not only political but a social practice in a progressive vision of society. In the process liberals acquired a reputation as “godless” discarding religion for a mere moral relativism. Kittelstrom presents us with individuals whose concern for moral values were derived from their religious roots and argues that the democratic ethos of her subjects valuing the individual, as both free and equal, was due to their reconstituted religious beliefs rather than a rejection of religion. The Religion of Democracy provides the reader an opportunity to consider the religious and moral sensibilities of the liberal tradition in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion