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.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
2401
Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s...
“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experi...
66 min
2402
Erskine Clarke, “By the Rivers of Water: A Nine...
Jane Bayard Wilson and John Leighton Wilson were unlikely African missionaries, coming as they did from privileged slaveholding families in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively. Yet in 1834 they embarked on a nearly twenty-year adventure as Christi...
65 min
2403
Charlotte Eubanks, “Miracles of Book and Body: ...
In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between MahÄyÄna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body,
71 min
2404
John Renard, “Islamic Theological Themes: A Pri...
Islamic theology is generally understood or approached in terms of its systematic or speculative forms. In Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader (University of California Press, 2014), John Renard,
53 min
2405
Emma Anderson, “The Death and Afterlife of the ...
Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers on a journey of more than 300 years,
63 min
2406
Christopher Shannon and Christopher Blum, “The ...
Scholars studying the history of Christianity are used to writing about different Christian traditions. But what does it mean to write from within a particular Christian tradition? How can a Christian be a historian who does academically respectable wo...
73 min
2407
Isra Yazicioglu, “Understanding Qur’anic Miracl...
In Understanding Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), Isra Yazicioglu draws connections between an array of scholars, from different time periods and cultures,
63 min
2408
Carol E. Harrison, “Romantic Catholics: France’...
Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives.
48 min
2409
R. Keller Kimbrough, “Wondrous Brutal Fictions:...
In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyÅ and ko-jÅruri.
78 min
2410
Joseph Laycock, “The Seer of Bayside: Veronica ...
In understanding a tradition what is the relationship between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’? How do the lived religious lives of practitioners contest or affirm authority? In The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicis...
62 min
2411
Gene Luen Yang, “Boxers & Saints” (First Second...
I love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to figure out ways to bring in other sorts of works that wi...
65 min
2412
Erik Braun, “The Birth of Insight: Meditation, ...
Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuri...
67 min
2413
Matt Tomlinson, “Ritual Textuality: Pattern and...
Religious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of f...
62 min
2414
Jacob Dalton, “The Taming of the Demons: Violen...
Jacob Dalton‘s recent book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), examines violence (both symbolic and otherwise) in Tibetan Buddhism. Dalton focuses in particular on the age of fragmentati...
69 min
2415
James Mace Ward, “Priest, Politician, Collabora...
In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest,
72 min
2416
Kavita Datla, “The Language of Secular Islam: U...
In her brilliant new book, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (University of Hawaii Press, 2013),Kavita Datla, Associate Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, explores the interaction of language, nationalism,
52 min
2417
Matthew A. Sutton, “American Apocalypse: A Hist...
Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (2012), and, most recently,
60 min
2418
Michael Hawkins, “Making Moros: Imperial Histor...
For many Muslim communities particular religious identities were formulated or hardened within colonial realities. These types of cultural encounters were structural for the various Muslim tribes in the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao and Sulu ...
59 min
2419
Timothy Michael Law, “When God Spoke Greek: The...
When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third ...
56 min
2420
Ernest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’...
In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P.
59 min
2421
Yaacov Ariel, “An Unusual Relationship: Evangel...
“In no other instance,” notes Yaacov Ariel, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “have members of one community of faith considered another group to hold a special role in the divine course of human redemptio...
31 min
2422
Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Ninet...
If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word.
63 min
2423
Pamela Klassen, “Spirits of Protestantism: Medi...
Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen,
50 min
2424
Sahar Amer, “What is Veiling?” (UNC Press, 2014)
There are few concepts commonly associated with Islam and Muslims today that evoke more anxiety, phobia, and paranoia than the veil, commonly translated as the hijab. Seen by many as the most quintessential symbol of the alleged Muslim oppression of wo...
44 min
2425
Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, “Fountainhead of J...
Vahid Brown and Don Rassler‘s Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a meticulously researched and remarkably detailed exposition of the Haqqani network’s growth and ongoing importance among Pakistani mil...
64 min