When people think of the Virgin Mary in terms of American religious history, there is a tendency to focus on opposition. For instance, Catholic devotion to Mary on the one side, and Protestant critique of that devotion on the other side. However,

Trying to figure out what Hitler “really” thought about anything is difficult because he was–among many other things–a clever, opportunistic politician and a very prolix one at that. Over the course of his 20+ career he gave thousands of speeches,

Beginning with a network of reformed figures that orbited around Billy Graham, from J. Howard Pew’s money to Carl Henry’s passion for cultural esteem, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford Univer...

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek,

Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado. His book Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) provides an accessible and expansive narrative of the relationship between ra...

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lank...

Matthew Poole (1624-1679) was an English Nonconformist theologian educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; he held the rectory of St Michael le Querne in London from 1649 to 1662. Poole is principally associated with the work Synopsis Criticorum Biblic...

What is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects.

Archaeologists and scholars of the ancient Near East regularly make statements to the effect that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for many events of the Bible, including Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, the Exodus out of Egypt,

When you think of black power, do you think about churches and religious institutions, or do you relate them more to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? How do the social justice struggles of the past relate to those of today?

Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume,

Medieval Egypt had a rapid influx of Sufis, which has previously been explained through reactionary models of analysis. It was argued that the widespread popularity of Sufism was marked by a public adoption of practices that satisfied the masses in way...

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over the faith’s future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. In Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Cul...

How was the ‘Book’ of Psalms formed, and why? The first question relates to the diachronic growth of the collection, while the second relates to issues of purpose–to what end are psalms being juxtaposed in a collection? On this show,

In his recent monograph, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2015), Erik W. Davis explores funerary ritual in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism and the way in which Buddhist monks manage death such that its n...

The Pope said that Donald Trump wasn’t much of a Christian if all he can think about is building walls. Trump replied that it was “disgraceful” for a any leader, even the Pope, “to question another man’s religion or faith.

Matthew Pehl is an associate professor of history at Augustana University. His book, The Making of Working-Class Religion (University of Illinois Press, 2016), gives us a rich and deep study of working class religion in Detroit beginning with the growt...

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University,

One of the particular markers of the Latin rite of the Catholic Church is priestly celibacy. How did this discipline develop there? Why did it develop? What does it mean? Since it is a discipline that can be changed, should it be made optional? Fr.

On today’s program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Song of Exile weaves together the 2,500-year history of one of the most famous psalms in ...

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study...

The essays in Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup’s new edited volume, Recovering Buddhism in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2016), collectively make a compelling argument that Buddhism and Buddhists played important roles in the modern transforma...

Muslims and the Making of America (Baylor University Press, 2016) offers a succinct and gripping account of Muslim presence in the United States. The book gives attention to the contemporary moment and also reaches as far back as the days of Columbus,

In popular discourse today, few concepts are more sensationalized and maliciously caricatured than that of the Islamic State. In his fascinating new book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton University Press,

Traditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016), Michael Brown challenges this assumption,