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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2001
D. G. Hart, “Calvinism: A History” (Yale UP, 2013)
Today I talked with D. G. Hart, an historian at Hillsdale College, MI, and the author of many books, including Calvinism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013). Listed on the front cover of Time (2009) as one of the ten “ideas changing the world righ...
40 min
2002
Harold Morales, “Latino and Muslim in America: ...
Harold Morales, an associate professor of Religion at Morgan State University, is the author of the momentous new book, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (Oxford University Press, 2018).
44 min
2003
Meredith Lake, “The Bible in Australia: A Cultu...
In her new book, The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Meredith Lake explores the various, often surprising ways Australians throughout history have read, utilized, and fought over the Bible.
17 min
2004
Louis Warren, “God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance R...
Historians and other writers often portray the Ghost Dance religious movement and massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as endings, the final gasps of armed Native resistance and their older ways of life. This interpretation is backwards for several reasons...
77 min
2005
Samira Mehta, “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christia...
With rates of interfaith marriage steadily increasing since the middle of the twentieth century, interfaith families have become a permanent and significant feature of the religious landscape in the United States. In her recent book,
55 min
2006
Sean Molloy, “Kant’s International Relations: T...
What does Kant have to tell us about International Relations? In Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Sean Molloy, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Kent,...
46 min
2007
Michele Margolis, “From Politics to the Pews: H...
On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics,
21 min
2008
Olga Borovaya, “The Beginnings of Ladino Litera...
When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than sc...
68 min
2009
Melani McAlister, “The Kingdom of God Has No Bo...
Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass the modern evangelical movement in the U.S.
58 min
2010
Cyrus Ali Zargar, “The Polished Mirror: Storyte...
Cyrus Ali Zargar, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, is the author of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oneworld, 2017). Zargar explores how the study of good character ...
40 min
2011
Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Ph...
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing,
50 min
2012
Mary E. Stuckey, “Political Vocabularies: FDR, ...
Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administrat...
49 min
2013
Judith Weisenfeld, “New World A-Coming: Black R...
A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identi...
65 min
2014
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in...
62 min
2015
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt...
History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law,
1 min
2016
Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classic...
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical...
36 min
2017
Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institution...
How was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017),
53 min
2018
Katherine A. Bowie, “Of Beggars and Buddhas: Th...
From the sidelines of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s biennial conference, where she presented the inaugural keynote address of the Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars, Katherine A. Bowie,
43 min
2019
Heather Curtis, “Holy Humanitarians: American E...
The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history,
56 min
2020
John O’Brien, “Keeping it Halal: The Everyday L...
What do the social worlds of teenage Muslim American boys look like? What issues do they grapple with and how do they think about issues that arise in their everyday lives? In his new book Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage...
47 min
2021
Jay Geller, “Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural His...
In Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program,
38 min
2022
John Bushnell, “Russian Peasant Women Who Refus...
In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with ...
72 min
2023
Ata Anzali, “‘Mysticism’ in Iran: The Safavid R...
In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of...
49 min
2024
Eliyahu Stern, “Jewish Materialism: The Intelle...
Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish hi...
52 min
2025
Elizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science...
The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations, which led to the birth of fantasy and science ficti...
76 min