New Books in Religion

This book, or one might say sefer ('book of religious significance'), collects letters from leading Torah scholars to professor Marc B. Shapiro from over a 30 year period. Both the subject matter and the individuals in question are vast and fascinating.Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Golda Akhiezer's Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism Among the Karaites of Eastern Europe (Brill, 2017; translated by David Greenberg) is the first of its kind to deal with Eastern European Karaite historical thought. It focuses on the social functions of Karaite historical narratives concerning the rise of Karaism from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The book also deals with the image of Karaism created by Protestants, and with the perception of Karaism by some leaders of the Haskalah movement, especially the scholars of Hokhmat Israel. In both cases, Karaism was seen as an orientalistic phenomenon whereby the “enlightened” European scholars romanticized the “indigenous” people, while the Karaites (themselves), adopted this romantic images, incorporating it into their own national discourse. Finally, the book sheds new light on several conventional notions that shaped the study of Karaism from the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his innovative and conceptually ingenious new online, open-access, interactive book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), Shahzad Bashir invites his readers to rethink and reimagine Islam and time as unbounded, non-linear, and abundantly capacious beyond the confines of text, theology, and normative confessional projects limited to Muslims. Bashir presents this argument through a beautifully presented and lyrically written digital book that traverses an extraordinary variety of premodern and modern texts, places, figures, material objects, and conceptual nodes. While browsing through and reading this book, the reader will travel through multiple places, genres of text, and theoretical arguments as the multiplicity of time in Islamic thought, practice, and geographies is performed and unfolds. Theoretically invasive and ambitious, aesthetically and visually delightful, and eminently accessible, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts is bound to spark important and productive debates in islamic Studies and beyond.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@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 recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem.Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As we start the second year of Almost Good Catholics, I asked my old friend David Basile, the theology teacher (and our very first guest last year) to come back and explain the mystery of our redemption in the sacrifice of Christ crucified. What is more central to our Christian faith, and yet – at least for me – what is more difficult to understand?David Basile is Chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana. He explains how Paul’s verdict—“the wages of sin are death” (Roman 6:23)—is not the bad news it sounds like and how the power of sacrifice and redemption—“whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:15)—is good news indeed.The episode ends with two Christmas carols from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band: What Child is This? and Silent Night. Bishop Robert Barron’s commentary on the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on Genesis and his anthropological discussion of sacrifice. Sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist.” (1966) Sermon by John Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (1741) David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 01: How Do We Know There is a God? Rational Proofs for a Loving Creator. David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 09: From Zen Monastery to Catholic Church: Talking about Buddhist and Christian Mysticism. Cathleen Chopra-McGowan on Almost Good Catholics, episode 33: The Mesopotamian Connection: Comparing the Bible to Other Literature of the Ancient Near East. Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 22: Better Call Paul: How Did the Early Jewish Christians “Works of the Law”? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology (T&T Clark, 2020) is a ground-breaking volume that gathers together the voices of veteran theologians and some of the most promising emerging scholars publishing in the field of theological anthropology today. The contributing essays outline the various approaches (classical, modern, postmodern) that Christian theologians have taken to present and interpret the doctrines of creation, the human person as imago dei, sin, grace, and the final destiny of humans and other creatures. In presenting theological anthropology, the editors have striven for ecumenical balance (Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox), inclusion of previously neglected voices (women, African American, Asian, Latino/a and LGBTQ), revisiting authors from the “Great Tradition” (early church, medieval, modern); as well those with theological perspectives that are critical and liberationist (feminist, theological, decolonial, intersectional, critical race theory, queer performance theory, etc).Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The philosophy of deconstruction, most famously pushed forward by Jacques Derrida, has left an undeniable dent on contemporary thought, and even religion has found itself in deconstruction’s sights, with Church, faith and even God put under philosophical scrutiny. But is this a one-way street, or is there something faith might teach deconstruction? This way of framing the relation is itself questionable, since deconstruction itself is an indifferent, impersonal force, something that simply happens as part of reality, but this gives it a certain seduction for theorists who don’t simply want to bear witness to it’s work but to master it as a tool, wielding it as they please, unwittingly falling into the very sort of traps deconstruction often unravels.This is one of the main ideas Chris Boesel wants to remind us of with his new book, In Kierkegaard’s Garden With the Poppy Blooms: Why Derrida Doesn’t Read Kierkegaard When He Reads Kierkegaard (Fortress Academic, 2021). Written as part academic monograph, part dialogue between a philosophy professor and theology student, the book stages a confrontation between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Derrida’s The Gift of Death, where he claims to draw deconstructive lessons from Abraham’s famous ‘leap of faith’, although Boesel finds the lessons he draws questionable. In fact, Boesel contends, Derrida doesn’t seem to have read the text at all! Derrida, renowned for his capacity to find the smallest cracks on the margins and in between the lines of philosophical and literary texts, blatantly misses many of the actual points Kierkegaard was trying to make, and in doing so illustrates the uniqueness of Kierkegaard’s inquiries into the nature of faith and subjectivity. In critically analyzing Derrida’s work, Boesel finds opportunity to remind us of what deconstruction can (and can’t!) do in animating commitments for justice, while also suggesting that a Kierkegaardian faith may offer a more productive possibility for thinking through those same commitments.Chris Boesel is an associate professor of theology at Drew University. His other publications include Reading Karl Barth: Theology That Cuts Both Ways and Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith, Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Burning Book (Common Consent Press, 2022) is an unusual and intriguing memoir about Jason Olsen's conversion from Judaism to Mormonism. But it tells no simple story of triumphant conversion away from error toward truth. Follow Olson's spiritual journey from aspiring rabbi to Latter-day Saint missionary, from Brigham Young University student to Israeli immigrant, and from Jewish Studies scholar to military chaplain. Co-written with novelist and poet James Goldberg (author of The Five Books of Jesus and A Book of Lamentations), The Burning Book offers readers a glimpse into Jewish and Mormon cultures while weaving spiritual longing together with scholarly thought. Olsen and Goldberg join host Blair Hodges in this episode to talk about the nature of conversion, religious memoir, the life of the mind, anti-Semitism, and more. Blair Hodges hosted and produced the Maxwell Institute Podcast for eight years before going independent with his current show, Fireside with Blair Hodges. It features interviews with writers, scholars, social justice advocates, and artists talking about culture, faith, memory, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle-Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the AHA’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of Jewish diaspora. In it, Michach Gottlieb looks at Bible translations by Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Gottlieb argues that each translator sought a "reformation" of Judaism along bourgeois lines, which involved aligning Judaism with a Protestant concept of religion.Michah Gottlieb is Associate Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion