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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2051
Ben Gatling, "Expressions of Sufi Culture in Ta...
Ben Gatling’s debut book is a beautifully written ethnography exploring the lives, religious practice, and narratives of Sufi believers near Dushanbe, Tajikistan
52 min
2052
Nicholas J. Moore, "Repetition in Hebrews: Plur...
s repetition always bad? The Letter to the Hebrews lies at the heart of a tradition that views repetition always negative...
23 min
2053
Omid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Is...
Its often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States...
74 min
2054
Jesse A. Zink, "Christianity and Catastrophe in...
Zink’s book is an outstanding account of the growth and evolution of Anglican Christianity among the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan...
38 min
2055
Alan Jacobs, "The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christ...
Drawing on interventions made at the height of global war by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain, Jacobs shows how leading intellectuals worried about a world in crisis and how they imagined it might be set right...
47 min
2056
Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A ...
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance...
49 min
2057
Harry O. Maier, "New Testament Christianity in ...
Maier’s study steps away from debates about the formation of early Christian belief to reconstruct the social world in which the new religious movement emerged and began to take shape...
37 min
2058
Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empt...
The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War...
57 min
2059
Thomas Borchert, “Educating Monks: Minority Bud...
What makes a Buddhist monk? This is the motivating question for Thomas Borchert, Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, as he explores the social and educational formation of Buddhists from Southwest China...
63 min
2060
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
2061
Alireza Doostdar, "The Iranian Metaphysicals: E...
Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors.
59 min
2062
Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh, “Pentecostals in Ameri...
Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh‘s Pentecostals in America (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers a critical look at the history, key figures, and ideas that make Pentecostalism unique and challenges the narrative gloss offered by its adherents and church his...
60 min
2063
Lilian Calles Barger, “The World Come of Age: A...
A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the...
54 min
2064
Paul Djupe and Ryan L. Claassen, eds., “The Eva...
In 2016, despite only mixed support from evangelical leaders, Donald Trump won an enormous share of the white evangelical vote. How did Trump manage to overcome the seeming mix-match between his record on social and moral issues and the longstanding vi...
21 min
2065
Zoe Knox, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular ...
Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often persecuted,
28 min
2066
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard U...
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian...
62 min
2067
Donald H. Akenson, “Exporting the Rapture: John...
Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelic...
34 min
2068
Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Eco...
Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims...
54 min
2069
Iain Provan, “The Reformation and the Right Rea...
Exactly five centuries after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Christians continue to debate the best approach to the reading of their sacred book. The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Bay...
35 min
2070
Robert G. Ingram, “Reformation Without End: Rel...
Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were l...
40 min
2071
James S. Bielo, “Ark Encounter: The Making of a...
In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park,
79 min
2072
Stephen Batchelor, “Secular Buddhism: Imagining...
As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism,
68 min
2073
David C. Posthumus, “All My Relatives: Explorin...
In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota,
80 min
2074
Ann Taves, “Revelatory Events: Three Case Studi...
I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,
42 min
2075
Joshua J. F. Coutts, “The Divine Name in the Go...
Unlike many of the other early Christian texts, the Gospel of John emphasizes the name of the Father alongside the name of Jesus—why? One reason, says Joshua Coutts, is because of the significance of God’s name in the Old Testament book of Isaiah.
43 min