New Books in Religion

In the depths of the internet there is many an article discussing the infinity of God. Its authors argue that God is infinite and endless and knows no bounds (what the difference is among those attributes is not usually explained). Imputing infinity to God is nothing new – one rarely (if ever) hears of a god that is deemed finite. In his new book, Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly (Onus Books, 2013), James Lindsay argues that declaring God to be infinite is no help to the arguments of believers. Infinity is a concept that almost everyone except mathematicians misunderstands, which doesn’t stop apologists from using the adjective to label their god. Arguing against Platonism, Lindsay explains that infinity is an abstraction, and that abstractions are not equal to reality. He has no objection to the notion of God as an abstraction, but decries the point of view that this necessarily implies existence. Words and numbers are abstractions which we use every day, but no one would argue that they are real they way that a table is real. Human beings, Lindsay argues, invented these abstractions in order to make sense of the universe, and they are limited to the human mind. Apologists who use the concept of infinity as a way to argue for their god are, as the author puts it, “confuse the map for the terrain.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide, is seen as a popular handbook on how to relate to others and how to overcome the narcissism ingrained in every human being. In his book The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (Columbia University Press, 2013), Harvard professor Lawrence J. Friedman explores the life of this towering figure of psychoanalytic thought, and his position in the humanistic movement, which he belonged to. He gives an overview of the religious thought Fromm was inspired by, from Judaism to the Old Testament to Buddhist philosophy. Fromm’s credo was that true spirituality is expressed in how we relate to others, and how to bring joy and peace to the global community. His plea that love will be the vehicle to realize one’s true purpose was the central message of his view on spirituality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Here’s an odd thing: there really haven’t been any universally-acclaimed geniuses since Einstein. At least I can’t think of any. Really smart people, yes. But geniuses per se, no. It seems Einstein was such a genius that he destroyed the entire concept of genius for us. Or perhaps we’ve just become tired of “genius.” There is, it must be admitted, something democratic cultures don’t like about “geniuses.” If we’re all equal, well, then how can some of us be “geniuses” and others just ordinary folks? It seems that either we’re all “geniuses” or none of us are. In his fascinating book Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books, 2013), Darrin M. McMahon explains Einstein’s impact on the idea of “genius” and much more. You will learn, for example, how in Greco-Roman culture a “genius” was a spiritual double: it was something you had, a ghostly sidekick, not something you were. Sometimes your “genius” was good–a guardian angel–and sometimes it was bad–a demon. It’s only since the Enlightenment that we’ve come to think of “genius” as a certain kind of person, namely, someone with truly extraordinary capacities. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011), Carla Bellamy explores the role of saint shrines in India, while focusing on a particular venue known as Husain Tekri, or “Husain Hill.” Through her in-depth ethnographic research, Bellamy’s monograph provides vivid description and analysis of the site as well as first-person narratives of pilgrims in order to offer a dynamic portrayal of the shrine complex. Bellamy shows how lines between religious communities are often fluid rather than fixed. She also problematizes notions of so-called spirit possession, interrogates the metaphysical power of frankincense, and articulates myriad perspectives of what healing might mean for those who visit Husain Tekri and participate in its rituals. Bellamy’s rich ethnography should appeal to numerous audiences, including those interested in South Asia, shrine culture, Islam, Indian religion, and Sufism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

How should one understand Islamic law outside of its application? What happens when we think about religious jurisprudence theoretically? For medieval Muslim scholars this was the field where one could enumerate the meaning and purpose of Islamic law. But to the uninitiated these justifications for legal thinking are submerged in rote repetition of technical language and discourses. Luckily for us, Rumee Ahmed, professor in the Department of Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, dives into the depths of various legal theory manuals to draw narrative understandings of shari’a to the surface. In Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 2012), Ahmed examines two formative contemporaneous jurists from the Hanafi school of law to determine the relationship between law and ethics through legal discourses. He focuses on the nature and meaning of the Qur’an, the role of the sunnah (the Prophetic example), and the use of considered opinion in structuring legal boundaries. Ultimately, he views their positions not merely as academic debates over the minutia of religious opinions and injunctions but as ritual observance, which formulates a world ‘as if’ it were ideal. In our conversation we discuss abrogation, punishment, salvation, Abraham’s sacrifice, hadith transmission, Peircean notions of abduction, religious law, stoning, adultery, the role of scholars, and contemporary calls for reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy years.  Worthen argues that attentive observers of American evangelical history must contend with the imagination as much as the mind when considering how evangelicals have “navigated the upheavals in modern American culture and global Christianity.”  Expertly weaving the intellectual and religious histories of institutions and movements with the biographies of specific people, Worthen provides a rigorous and fluid analysis of a much maligned and often misunderstood category of American religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical violence of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Spain in the early twentieth century appears to confirm his verdict. Yet, not everyone in interwar Europe accepted the incompatibility of religion and socialism, as we learn in this interview with political theorist and Professor at Queen’s University Belfast Vincent Geoghegan. The dynamism of Stalinist Russia in the early 1930s sent shockwaves through Depression-era Britain, leading a group of intellectuals to rethink their Christianity. In his new book Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (Routledge, 2011) Geoghegan explores the efforts of four intellectuals to fuse the two in theory and in the form of a short-lived political party called Common Wealth. Our conversation begins with the pivotal theorist in Common Wealth, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Macmurray saw in communism a continuation of the ethical and social project of Christianity. He interpreted communist anticlericalism as a correction to the Christian churches, which had lost sight of this project. Of his own earlier Protestantism he wrote in 1934, “That faith today is in rags and tatters. I should rather go naked than be seen in it.” Socialism became his new form of Christian faith. Our interview ends with a contemplation of the relevance of Common Wealth for today’s theoretical debates about post-secularism. One sign that we live in a post-secular age is that even left-of-center statesmen, such as Barack Obama or Tony Blair, publicly identify religious faith as a starting point for their political and ethical commitments. To explain his own views, Blair told Labour Party supporters in 1994, “if you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It’s all there.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In these times, when more and more people are looking for spiritual truth and engage in practices like meditation, it’s hard to know what to expect from attaining a lofty goal like Enlightenment. What does Enlightenment look like? What happens when we attain it? What does it mean in terms of our relationships? Our families? Our jobs? In his book Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be (Changemakers Books, 2011), spiritual teacher and religious scholar Robert K. C. Forman explores the illusions we buy into when we enter and walk the spiritual path. “People so want a life that is easy, effortless, satisfying. And the promise [of enlightenment] itself becomes part of the problem. Because now you have a strong wish for that kind of perfection”, he says in our interview. “And that gets in the way of recognizing the transformations that are actually taking place. The drive for a perfect marriage gets in the way of a good enough marriage. The drive for having a perfect life gets in the way of what we do have.” Enlightenment is not about attaining some perfect state of mind, but to be honest to oneself and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the preface of There was no Jesus, There is no God (Amazon Digital Services, 2013),Raphael Lataster states that “it is not my job to disprove Christianity or any other religion. It is not my intention to destroy the fait of the faithful; nor do I desire to offend or upset believers in any way.” His new book is, in fact, meant to be an objective analysis of the evidence available for the existence of Jesus and of God. He details, for example, the evidence present for the two different “Jesuses” people believe in, categorized as the “Biblical Jesus” (the son of God who performed miracles and died for our sins) and the “Historical Jesus” (a non-divine but cool guy who preached and helped others). He relates how many people who fail to find evidence for a divine Jesus tend to fall back on the position that at least a historical Jesus existed, but Lataster thoroughly examines the evidence and finds it lacking for either version. By using Bayesian methodology and the mindset that history is a study of probabilities, Lataster points out the problems in the arguments of apologists and Biblical scholars. In the second portion of this book, the author focuses on God and monotheism, sorting through the arguments used to support God’s existence. He concludes that even if one gives each argument considerable leeway, they all still ultimately fail to providence evidence for any god – least of all the monotheistic Christian god. Though Lataster is a skeptic, his book is one focused on evidence, not on the pros or cons of religious faith. As he states in his preface, “the truth is not a democracy, and certainly does not care about our feelings.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Al-Qāḍī al-Nu῾mān (d. 363/974) was the primary architect of Ismā῾īlÄ« jurisprudence which was formed under the Fatamids. The Early History of Ismaili Jurisprudence (I. B. Tauris, 2013) provides an English translation and edited Arabic edition of a work held to be written by al-Nu῾mān, the Minhāj al-farā’iḍ, a brief tract on inheritance law. However, author Agostino Cilardo, Professor at the ‘Orientale’ of Università degli Studi di Napoli (Naples), offers his readers much more in this book. The first half of this work explores critical questions concerning the development of Ismā῾īlÄ« jurisprudence which includes synopses of the theories concerning the progression and originality of Ismā῾īlÄ« jurisprudence. This is followed by an analysis of the Minhāj alongside four other works penned by al-Nu῾mān: Kitāb al-iqtiṣār, Kitāb al-yanbū῾, Mukhtaá¹£ar al-āthār, and Da῾ā’im al-Islām. This study allows Professor Cilardo to draw a number of conclusions about the work itself, the maturation of Ismā῾īlÄ« jurisprudence, and how Ismā῾īlÄ« law (fiqh) compares to other Shī῾ī and the Sunni legal traditions, in terms of legal inheritance. The book is well written and meticulous in its organization. Scholars and students of Islam will find this work invaluable, and it is a good tool for those interested in both jurisprudence and Ismā῾īlÄ« studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion