New Books in Religion
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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2626
David Gordon White, “Sinister Yogis” (Universit...
A classic text, the Mahabharata, reports, “Yogis who are without restraints [and] endowed with the power of yoga are [so many] masters, who enter into [the bodies of] the Prajapatis, the sages, the gods, and the great beings.
55 min
2627
David Horowitz, “A Point in Time: The Search fo...
In his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next (Regnery Publishing, 2011), David Horowitz, long ago editor of Ramparts magazine and creator of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture,
41 min
2628
Laury Silvers, “A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-...
A broad portrait of early Islamic mysticism is fairly well-know. However, there are only a few key figures that have been explored in great detail and their activities shape how we understand this early history of Sufism. Laury Silvers,
49 min
2629
Abdulkader Tayob, “Religion in Modern Islamic D...
Many people believe that the current Islamic resurgence is not necessarily a “return of religion,” but rather a continuation of tradition. According to this line of thought, therefore, Islam is essentially resistant to modernity and incompatible with c...
78 min
2630
Tim Goeglein, “The Man in the Middle: An Inside...
In his new book, The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era (B&H Books, 2011), Timothy S. Goeglein, former deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush,
28 min
2631
Charles Prebish, “An American Buddhist Life: Me...
Charles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book,
58 min
2632
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “A History of Islam in Am...
Despite the fact that many American Muslim families have lived in the United States for generations they are often thought of as foreigners. I have witnessed on several occasions someone asking an African American Muslim when they converted to Islam or...
62 min
2633
Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: B...
Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008).
58 min
2634
Carool Kersten, “Cosmopolitans and Heretics: Ne...
Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition.
60 min
2635
David McMahan, “The Making of Buddhist Modernis...
For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origina...
56 min
2636
Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the ...
“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much...
56 min
2637
Nile Green, “Bombay Islam: The Religious Econom...
Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them.
66 min
2638
Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Fem...
Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of J...
56 min
2639
Jason Clower, “The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiant...
The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America.
60 min
2640
Daniel Veidlinger, “Spreading the Dhamma: Writi...
New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or machine,
48 min
2641
Douglas Rogers, “The Old Faith and the Russian ...
What are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas Rogers‘. So it was only natural that I would be drawn to Rogers’ new book T...
63 min
2642
David Shneer, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Phot...
We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition.
68 min
2643
Laurie Manchester, “Holy Fathers, Secular Sons:...
The lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia’s priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has been focused on explaining the country’s torturous mode...
53 min
2644
Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russia...
For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not ...
74 min
2645
Lesley Hazleton, “After the Prophet: The Epic S...
Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and...
59 min
2646
Kip Kosek, “Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonvi...
There’s a quip that goes “Christianity is probably a great religion. Someone should really try it.” The implication, of course, is that most people who call themselves Christians aren’t very Christian at all. And, in truth,
64 min
2647
Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Prince...
I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this,
68 min
2648
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Ch...
I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope,
62 min
2649
Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvar...
One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made Amer...
69 min
2650
Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacu...
By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of buildin...
67 min