New Books in Religion

The intersection between ethnic and religious identities can be both complex and rich, particularly when dealing with a community that still has deep roots in the immigrant experience. In his book, Memory and Honor: Cultural and Generational Ministry with Korean American Communities (Liturgical Press, 2013), Fr. Simon C. Kim explores these issues in the Korean American Catholic community. In this deeply reflective work, Fr. Kim grapples with the many issues, such as the generational divide between ethnic Korean Catholics who immigrated, the children they brought with them from Korea, and their grandchildren born in the United States, and what it means to be a Catholic of Korean ethnicity when Protestant forms of Christianity are linked so tightly with that ethnic group in the popular imagination. This pioneering work will be of interest not only to scholars working in Asian American religion, but anyone who is curious about the connection between ethnicity and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism could flourish in China despite the distance between the middle kingdom and the land of the Buddha. On the one hand, this project traces these three legendary figures as they are portrayed first as exemplars of how to revive the Dharma in a world without a Buddha, then as representatives of a lineage stretching back to Shakyamuni, and finally as scholar types who transmitted the Dharma to China via their exegetical and doctrinal works. More broadly, however, Young uses this transformation as an index of changing views of medieval China’s relationship to Shakyamuni’s India, and of Chinese Buddhists’ confidence in their own ability to realize the Buddhist soteriological path and firmly establish the Indian tradition on Chinese soil. One theme running throughout the book is the way in which these three patriarchs bridged the Sino-Indian divide.This was particularly important for those Chinese Buddhists who were unsettled by the geographical and historical distance that separated them from the India of Shakyamuni’s times. The Chinese found Asvaghosa, Nagarjuna, and Aryadeva particularly attractive because while their Indian origins lent them authority, they were, like the Chinese who peered down the well of history at them, living in a time without a Buddha and thus faced a dilemma not so dissimilar from the predicament in which medieval Chinese found themselves. Unlike the arhats, who experienced Shakyamuni’s ministry first-hand, and unlike the celestial bodhisattvas, who were not bound by history, these three Indian patriarchs occupied a temporal position between Shakyamuni’s India and medieval China. In addition, as Young shows, the Chinese attributed qualities to and highlighted aspects of these Indian patriarchs that were in accord with the values of Chinese literati, Buddhist and otherwise. In so doing, the Chinese rendered the Indian patriarchs familiar and made them into models that Chinese literati could realistically and willingly emulate.This point is related to another theme linking the chapters together: the Chinese Buddhist appropriation of Indian Buddhist and Chinese religious elements so as to claim them as their own. Young notes, however, that even as the patriarchs developed into models to be emulated, they were also transformed into objects of veneration. Besides being scholarly-types who sat around writing doctrinal treatises, Nagarjuna came to be associated with Pure Land thought and practice (and even had his own pure land, according to some,) and was worshipped for his apotropaic powers and ability to provide this-worldly benefits, while Asvaghosa became a silkworm deity and served as the protagonist in myths that provided a Buddhist justification for the killing of silkworms, to give but a few examples. And in a final chapter, Young shows how Buddhists co-opted Chinese conceptions of sanctity and sainthood so as to show that these qualities that were in reality of Chinese provenance were in fact Indian and Buddhist through-and-though. Readers will thus learn not only the details of Asvaghosa, Nagarjuna, and Aryadeva’s Chinese careers over a five-and-a-half-century period, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Christians, like other religious people, have to manage the relationship between their belief in supernatural forces and an afterlife on one side, and how those beliefs impact their daily life on the other. This was especially difficult for Korean Protestant Christians (and members of an indigenous religion influenced by Christianity during the Japanese Colonial period (1910-1945), when Christians faced a repressive government, growing criticism of religion, and the social and cultural dislocations caused by the continued onrush of modernity into the peninsula. In his thorough and well-researched book, Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), Albert L. Park examines how Korean Protestant Christians dealt with these challenges by developing theologies that found the source of renewal and Korean national identity in the countryside. Through a sensitive and careful interrogation of the thought and efforts of these activists, Park unearths a largely ignored aspect of Korean religious history, leading to a book that will be of interest to both scholars of Christianity as well as students of religious responses to modernity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his remarkable new book Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Practice, and Perception in Islam (Harvard University Press, 2012), Jamal Elias, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, presents a magisterial study of Muslim attitudes towards visual culture, images, and perception. Through meticulous historical and textual analysis, Elias successfully unravels the stereotype that there is no place for visual images in Islam, or that calligraphy represents the only normative form of art in Islam. He shows that throughout history Muslims have approached the question of images and art in a much more nuanced and complicated fashion, while negotiating important philosophical, theological, and perceptual considerations. He argues that “Muslim thinkers have developed systematic and advanced theories of representation and signification, and that many of these theories have been internalized by Islamic society at large and continue to inform cultural attitudes toward the visual arts.” What is most unusual about this book is the almost overwhelming range and varieties of sources that Elias marshals to construct his argument. The reader of this book travels through a glittering arcade of intellectual histories populated by texts on philosophy, Sufism, alchemy, dreams, optics, and architecture and monuments. This painstakingly researched and lyrically written book is sure to delight the intellectual palate of specialists and non-specialists alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a chronologically-organized set of essays that collectively introduce key topics and themes in Tibetan history from prehistory all the way through the twentieth century. It collects and in some cases excerpts key works in Tibetan political, social, and cultural history from the last three decades that were originally published elsewhere, making them accessible in a new way. Sources of Tibetan Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle, Schaeffer, and Matthew T. Kapstein, collects translations of key works in Tibetan literature, including more than 180 selections from a wide range of genres and forms from medieval Tibetan empire through modernity. Both texts will be on my bookshelf for many years to come: they are exceptionally useful not only for research, but also for teaching a wide range of courses in East Asian history, religious history, diaspora history, and literary studies, to name just a few fields that these texts contribute to. Historians of medicine and science, take note! The Sources volume especially contains some great work that’s assignable in global science/medicine courses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a highly contentious political environment, the two languages have been identified with opposing national movements – Hebrew associated with Jews and Arabic with Palestinians. Lital Levy’s book destabilizes this categorization. Highlighting the space between these two languages, Levy asks not what it means to be Israeli or Palestinian, but rather how crossing the bridge between the two remakes Israeli and Palestinian cultures. Focusing on the work of Middle Eastern Jews writing in Arabic and various kinds of Hebrews, and Palestinians writing in Hebrew, Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014) reveals a literary world in which Arabic and Hebrew have a symbiotic relationship. Through her analysis of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, Levy shows us how writers bring Arabic and Hebrew into conversation with one another in illuminating, and often subversive, ways. These writers use the language of the “other” to question “othering” and insist that literature interrogate simplistic identity classifications. Jews writing in Arabic or mizrahi registers of Hebrew cannot but challenge a nationalist project that depends, in part, on the nationalization of Hebrew. Likewise, Palestinians writing in Hebrew use the power of language to disrupt Zionism, which excludes them as non-Jews, from within. Bring the work of several generations of authors to light, Poetic Trespass call on readers to use the power of literature to question our own assumptions and to rethink the static categories of Arab and Jew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Psalms have given voice to the prayers and petitions of generations of Jews and Christians alike. They represent the deepest longings of kings and desperate men, the righteous and the penitent, all “seeking the face of God” (27:8 and 105:4). But they often seem formidable poetically, as finely wrought articulations expressions of both grief and piety, but also ethically, where lamentation turns into imprecation. What’s the best way to access the meaning and significance of the Psalms? How does a commentary function alongside our reading of the text itself? And how did the early Christian witnesses summon or evoke their images and motifs in their writings? Why did they insist on reading their Christology back into the Psalms? We touch on the answers to these questions and others in an hour-long conversation with Tremper Longman III about his new book, Psalms: An Introduction and Commentary (IVP Academic, 2014) in the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series, published by IVP Academic. We talk about the peculiar enterprise of writing Biblical commentary, the challenge of writing about the Psalms in particular, and Longman’s own personal arc from meeting Billy Graham to learning Akkadian and studying Babylonian mythology and literature. Tremper Longman is the Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. Tremper has authored or co-authored more than 20 books, including commentaries on Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Nahum, Proverbs, Jeremiah and Lamentations, and Job. His scholarship has ranged widely from the literary study of the Bible to history and historiography, most notably expressed in his two textbooks A Biblical History of Israel, with Iain Provan and Phil Long, and Introduction to the Old Testament, with Raymond B. Dillard. Professor Longman was one of the main translators of the popular New Living Translation and has served as a consultant on other popular translations of the Bible including the Message and the Holman Standard Bible. He earned a BA in Religion at Ohio Wesleyan University, an MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern studies from Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Muslim debates regarding the translation of the Qur’an are very old. However, during the modern period they became heated because local communities around the globe were rethinking their relationship to scripture in new social and political settings. M. Brett Wilson, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, provides a rich history of how this conversation unfolding with the late Ottoman period and Republic of Turkey in Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey (Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2014). The Qur’an’s translatability is contested from various perspectives (both old and new) but emerging print technologies, shifting political authority, and changing economies of knowledge production offer contemporary challenges that mark the demand for Turkish translations. Wilson narrates the production of vernacular interpretations and commentaries, unofficial translations, and a state-sponsored project. In many cases, translation was viewed as a tool of progress, modernization, and Turkish nationalism. For others, it led to vernacular ritual practice and the disharmony of the global Muslim community. He also investigates the role of religious authorities, lay community members, publishers, calligraphers, Protestant missionaries, Arab neighbors, and the government in the creation and rejection of Turkish translations of the Qur’an. In our conversation we discuss print technologies, vernacular commentaries, shipping and trade, Ottoman politics, secularism, Arab nationalism, everyday ritual worship,  and arguments about the Qur’an’s translatability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC Press, 2013) is a detailed journey into the life of Margaret Reilly, an American Irish-Catholic from New York who entered the Convent of the Good Shepherd in 1921, taking the name Sister Crown of Thorns. During the 1920s and 1930s, Sister Thorn became known as a stigmatic who bled the wounds of Christ. In this microhistory of Thorn’s story, Professor Paula Kane immerses readers in a world in transition, where interwar Catholics retained deep mystical devotionalism, yet also began to claim a confident new role as assimilated Americans. She does so through a very provocative question: “How did a stigmatic help ordinary Catholic understand themselves as modern Americans?” In the process, Professor Kane explores religious practice and mysticism through a number of theoretical literatures–including theology, psychology, feminism, sociology, and cultural studies–opening up multiple new avenues for scholars of religion to consider. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does not usually figure into that story. However, Emily Anderson, in her new book Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014), shows how and why it must be included. Through her detailed and rich study of Japanese Protestants, particularly Congregationalists, Anderson illustrates the disparate ways these Christians related to empire. Some fully supported the Japanese empire, believing that through it Japanese Christians could both solve the problems faced by Western Christianity and bring “civilization” and Christianity to Chinese and Koreans. Others, through the dissemination of Christian understandings of anarchist and socialist ideas, challenged the very idea of empire and called for a small Japan. Anderson’s eye for detail and her careful presentation of these different views make this a must-read for anyone interested in Asian Christianity and the relationship between religion and empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion