New Books In Religion

This recasting of Nathaniel's familiar question from the Gospel is a fair summary of many modern Christians' assessment of the Pentecostal tradition. Yet in recent years, a growing number of Pentecostals have been turning afresh to the ancient, creedal Christian faith. Bishop Emilio Alvarez has himself been at the forefront of this movement. In Pentecostal Orthodoxy he introduces the phenomenon, and extends the project of paleo-orthodox ressourcement (associated with scholars such as Thomas Oden and Robert Webber) to include orthodox expressions within Pentecostalism, particularly his own Afro-Latino Pentecostal movement. Pentecostal Orthodoxy: Toward an Ecumenism of the Spirit (InterVarsity Press, 2022) is a manifesto of sorts, promising not only to open up the possibility of a genuinely orthodox Pentecostalism, but to reframe modern ecumenical dialogue as well. Emilio Alvarez (PhD, Fordham University) is the presiding bishop of the Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches, a communion that embraces the one ho

In Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures (Maggid, 2020), Moshe Koppel explores the central differences between traditional societies - including traditional Judaism - and contemporary cosmopolitan ones. He explains the subtleties of Jewish morality, tradition, and belief, and how these have unfolded to beat cosmopolitanism at its own game: advancing cooperation, fairness, and freedom. Written with a scientific sensibility that draws on economics, game theory, and other disciplines - Judaism Straight Up attempts to explain Jewish traditionalism's endurance. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork

In this interview, we speak with Dr. amina wadud about her latest book Once in a Lifetime (Kantara Press, 2022), a book that started out as a blog for her hajj journey back in 2012. Dr. amina wadud is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She earned her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. Her other books are Qur’an and Woman: Re-reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective published in 1992 with Oxford UP and Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam, published with Oneworld in 2006. The book is rooted in her experience of the famous five pillars of Islam, through a feminist, inclusive, and faith-centered lens. Each chapter includes relevant experiences related to the theme of the chapter, such as her specific experiences at hajj or the gendered nature of certain Islamic rituals and the ways that common understandings of these rituals might affect women. In our conversation, we talk about the theme of the masculine and th

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India’s electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly ‘Western’ concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of

Samuel J. Levine's Was Yosef on the Spectrum?: Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources (Urim Publications, 2018) offers a coherent and cohesive reading of the well-known Biblical story of Joseph, presenting a portrait of him as an individual on the autism spectrum. Viewed through this lens, he emerges as a more familiar and less enigmatic individual, exhibiting both strengths and weaknesses commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In this episode, Pierce Salguero comes on to discuss two of his books: Buddhish, A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (Beacon Press, 2022) and A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (Columbia UP, 2022). Pierce is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, near Philadelphia. The major theme in his scholarship is discovering the role of Buddhism in the global transmission and local reception of knowledge about health, disease, and the body. After graduating in 1996, he lived in Asia for four years — more than two years in Thailand, with extended stays in India, China, and Indonesia as well. During this time, he trained as a practitioner of Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM).

Elimelech’s family living in Moab, the conversion of Ruth, and Boaz’s efforts to establish his permission for marrying Ruth despite her Moabite roots, these were all important links in the chain that led to the establishment of the Davidic dynasty. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Boruch Twersky about his adaptation of the Maharal Tzinz’s commentary on the story of Ruth. Boston-born Boruch Twersky lives in Beitar, Israel, with his wife and 15 children. He has spent several years pursuing advanced Torah learning in kollel, authored many articles and translated a number of books.  Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and l

In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today. At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and d

The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period literary sources, this material was produced by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion; the inscriptions are eyewitnesses to the religious life of Arabian nomads prior to the spread of Judaism and Christianity across Arabia. Al-Jallad reconstructs this world using the original words of its inhabitants, interpreted through comparative philology, pre-Islamic and Islamic-period literary sources, and the archaeological context. In this episode we discuss the lifestyles, worldviews, belief systems, languages, and gender and social norms of the nomadic peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia based on the epigraphic evidence. Magg

Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of

Today I talked to Jame Malinson about The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: The Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition (Institut français de Pondichéry, 2021), a critical edition and translation of the Amṛtasiddhi, the earliest Haṭhayoga text. The book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022) present a portrait—arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible—of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe—and every part of the body in between—this is a god of stunning surprise and complexi

Ernest M. Valea's Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature (Resource Publications, 2021) explores old and new hopes that have emerged in the human quest to defeat death. On the one hand, it answers questions such as: Are we just physical machines of great complexity, with the brain as the hardware on which consciousness operates as its software? If so, can we speculate on ways in which the mind could be uploaded to a machine and no longer suffer the frailty of this biological body? And could an android robot or a mindfile in a computer simulation be conscious? On the other hand, the book examines the hope of survival through reincarnation according to the teachings of Eastern religions and New Age thought. All these topics are discussed from the perspectives of Christian theology and the philosophy of mind. This dual investigation will help Christians formulate a coherent response to old and new challenges to their faith. Ernest M. Vale

Ken Chitwood’s book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (Lynn Rienner Publishers Inc, 2021) is a provocation to its readers to include Latin American and Caribbean Muslim histories and contemporary expressions of piety in our studies of Islam and Muslim societies, particularly those committed to the theorization of global Islam. The book synthesizes histories and scholarship of Latin American and Caribbean Muslim’s narratives, but also draws on ethnographic study conducted across the hemisphere to provide complex textures and layers to how Muslim identities are constructed and negotiated in diverse regions of Brazil, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba and much more. The first half of the book maps historical lineages and conjectures of Muslim histories and claims that inform Latin American and Caribbean Muslim imaginations, such as of potential pre-Columbian contact, and connections with Spain, as well as the enduring legacies of enslaved African Muslims across the Black Atlantic and

In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God (Duke University Press, 2022), Dr. Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in postindependence Nigeria, where Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions have all been associated with violence. He investigates the root causes and historical evolution of Nigeria’s religious violence, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule, which planted the seeds of discord that religion, elites, and domestic politics exploit. Dr. Alao discusses the histories of Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in the territory that became Nigeria, the effects of colonization on the role of religion, the development of Islamic radicalization and its relation to Christian violence, the activities of Boko Haram, and how religious violence intermixes with politics and governance. In so doing, he uses religious violence as a way to more fully understand intergroup relations in contemporary Nigeria. This interview

Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial and Native life in Plymouth Colony, of religious toleration, and of historical memory. New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2019) brings together a wealth of insights that will surely benefit anyone interested in the origins of New England's first colony.  Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho

Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narratives often identified as Hindu. Suitable for beginning students and the general reader. Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky's book The Voice of Silence: The Story of the Jewish Underground in the USSR (Academic Studies Press, 2021) is the personal story of an underground Hebrew teacher in the communist Soviet Union who was sentenced to prison after false claims by the KGB. He kept a hunger strike for 207 days to draw international solidarity. But his book is more than exotic memoir literature. It is a vivid, touching and thoughtful account of his Jewish spiritual growth, a painful discovery of the most subtle inner aspects of faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion