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
1876
Melvin C. Johnson, "Life and Times of John Pier...
Hawley was an active member of several Latter Day Restoration denominations in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Texas, the Indian Nations of Oklahoma, and Utah Territory from 1838 to 1909...
76 min
1877
Christopher J. H. Wright, "The Old Testament in...
Some people find the Old Testament to be confusing, out of date, and essentially replaced by the New Testament. They are missing out...
36 min
1878
Ashley Thompson, "Engendering the Buddhist Stat...
Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century...
40 min
1879
George Kinder, "A Golden Civilization and the M...
Kinder states “If we want our children to live in a Golden Civilization, the first step is for each of us to imagine it.”
56 min
1880
Darren Dochuk, "Anointed with Oil: How Christia...
Dochuk places religion and oil at the center of American history...
48 min
1881
Joan Wallach Scott, "Sex and Secularism" (Princ...
"Sex and Secularism" is a compelling analysis of the discourse of secularism in the modern democratic (imperial) nation-states of “the West”.
57 min
1882
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
1883
Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Cat...
Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression...
59 min
1884
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
1885
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
1886
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
1887
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
1888
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
1889
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
1890
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
1891
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
1892
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
1893
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
1894
Michael Ruse, "A Meaning to Life" (Oxford UP, 2...
Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today?
59 min
1895
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
1896
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
1897
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
1898
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
1899
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
1900
Mimi Hanaoka, "Authority and Identity in Mediev...
How do peripheral places assert the centrality of their identity?
51 min