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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Religion & Spirituality
1851
Jeremy F. Walton, "Muslim Civil Society and the...
Walton explores how members of three contemporary Muslim groups, the Nur community, the Gülen movement, and Alevis, articulate religiosity within the Turkish public sphere...
63 min
1852
Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Cat...
Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression...
59 min
1853
Scott Harrower, "God of All Comfort: A Trinitar...
Harrower takes on the tremendous topic: the problem of horrific evil that seems to omnipresent in today’s world...
48 min
1854
Rebecca Janzen, "Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonite...
Janzen examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen through Mexican culture...
51 min
1855
John O'Brien, "States of Intoxication: The Plac...
Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state?
44 min
1856
Joseph Hill, "Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic...
Hill provides life stories of various fascinating and powerful female muqaddamas (or Sufi leaders) in Dakar and explores how they navigate the complexity of their gendered authority in religious, familial, and public domains...
61 min
1857
Brett Grainger, "Church in the Wild: Evangelica...
Grainger argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment..
44 min
1858
Patton E. Burchett, "A Genealogy of Devotion: B...
Burchett re-examines what we assume about the rise of devotionalism in North India, tracing its flowering since India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” to present day...
59 min
1859
Kirsteen M. MacKenzie, "The Solemn League and C...
MacKenzie re-examines the political and constitutional bonds that were implied by the covenant to which the English and Scottish parliaments had subscribed at the beginning of the first civil war, and considers why so many Presbyterians understood the Cromwellian occupation to represent a breach of the covenant’s obligations...
32 min
1860
Harvard S. Heath, "Confidence Amid Change: The ...
With his secretary’s coaxing over the course of nineteen years, McKay documented how he charted a steady course through institutional storms...
55 min
1861
Amira Mittermaier, "Giving to God: Islamic Char...
Mittermaier conducts a dazzling and at many times moving ethnography of an Islamic economy of giving and charity in Egypt..
53 min
1862
Thomas S. Mullaney, “The Chinese Deathscape: Gr...
Contributors combine narrative analysis, visualized data, and dynamic maps with exceptional ease to introduce readers to infant burial practices in late imperial China, grave and cemetery relocation in Shanghai from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and grave relocation during the contemporary period...
70 min
1863
Michael Ruse, "A Meaning to Life" (Oxford UP, 2...
Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today?
59 min
1864
Aaron Rock-Singer, "Practicing Islam in Egypt: ...
Aaron Rock-Singer focuses on three principal characters to tell us the story of the Islamic revival: Salafis, the Muslim Brothers, and state institutions...
80 min
1865
Megan Bryson, “Goddess on the Frontier: Religio...
Bryson’s research explores the various social and historical contexts of the Dali region in Southwest China where the deity was shaped by local expressions of the Buddhist tradition...
56 min
1866
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, "Waiting for Elijah: Ti...
HadžiMuhamedović takes readers through intimate encounters and syncretic moments as he and his interlocutors wait for Elijah’s Day...
72 min
1867
Richard Averbeck, "Paradigm Change in Pentateuc...
For some two hundred years now, Pentateuchal scholarship has been dominated by the Documentary Hypothesis, a paradigm made popular by Julius Wellhausen...
21 min
1868
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, "The Chinese Sisters of the P...
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters...
38 min
1869
Mimi Hanaoka, "Authority and Identity in Mediev...
How do peripheral places assert the centrality of their identity?
51 min
1870
Dirk Jongkind, "An Introduction to the Greek Ne...
Is the New Testament text reliable? What do we do with textual variants? How do I use the Greek New Testament?
26 min
1871
Quincy D. Newell, "Your Sister in the Gospel: T...
A free black woman from Connecticut, Jane Manning James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision...
52 min
1872
John W. Tweeddale, "John Owen and Hebrews: The ...
John Owen is one of the most significant seventeenth-century Protestant theologians...
36 min
1873
David Woodbridge, "Missionary Primitivism and C...
Woodbridge focuses on a small but very significant evangelical community, the so-called Plymouth Brethren, and documents the attempts made by their missionaries in China during the first half of the twentieth century...
25 min
1874
Matthew W. King, "Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood...
Matthew W. King tells the story of Zawa Damdin, one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject...
61 min
1875
Rosalyn LaPier, "Invisible Reality: Storyteller...
Rather than “living in harmony with nature,” as stereotyped by the ecological Indian mythos, the Blackfeet people of the northern plains believed they could marshal supernatural forces to bend the nonhuman world to their will...
56 min