New Books in Christian Studies

One of the earliest Christian confessions—that Jesus is Messiah and Lord—has long been recognized throughout the New Testament. Joshua Jipp shows that the New Testament is in fact built upon this foundational messianic claim, and each of its primary compositions is a unique creative expansion of this common thread. Having made the same argument about the Pauline epistles in his previous book Chris...

With around two million children currently enrolled in home schools in the USA, no-one can doubt that the subject of Milton Gaither’s new book is timely. Gaither, a professor of education at Messiah College, PA, first published this study in 2008, but has updated his text to reflect both the levelling out of the number of children involved in the movement as well as to explain some of the scandals...

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fra...

Mario Baghos's book From the Ancient Near East to Christian Byzantium: Kings, Symbols, and Cities (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities—commissioned by their mona...

For generations, Pauline scholars have responded in different ways to the Apostle’s “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7), our clearest indication that Paul was disabled—some with clinical diagnoses along biomedical lines, more with reticence and agnosticism as to the specifics of Paul’s disability, and others with doubts that Paul could have accomplished his apostolic work had he been physically imp...

One of the eight national dances of India, bharatanatyam, partly originates from the area around Tranquebar. During the time that Tranquebar was a Danish colony, devadasis, women who did service at temples through dance, were patronized by the Thanjavur royal court. In 1623, a Danish–Icelandic soldier routinely observed the devadasis dancing outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansbo...

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides.  In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin...

A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture. "What's wrong with you?" Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What's wrong isn't her wheelchair, though--it's exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cult...

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery....

It turns out that our familiar narrative of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Mary appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 and left her image on his tilma, resembles an indigenous Mexican myth. And this myth of the Flower World in “Cuicapeuhcayotl” (“Origin of Songs”) has led some secular historians and anthropologists to conclude that the Catholic version must therefore be an imitation, a fabrication.  Yet Jo...

The Tabernacle Narrative comprises passages in Exodus and Leviticus that detail the construction, furnishing, and liturgical use of the tabernacle. Given its genre and style, the narrative is often passed over by those reading Scripture for theological insight. What does Israel’s tabernacle mean for Christians today? Join us as Gary Anderson shows how these passages shed light on incarnation and a...

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived?  In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was...

In Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023), political scientist Anna Grzymała-Busse corrects a long-standing distortion in the study of state formation in Europe, writing religion back into the story and examining, at once pithily and methodically, the multiple contributions of the Roman Church to the emergence of modern practic...

In his book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press, 2023), J. Christopher Edwards explores the early Christian teachings regarding who actually killed Jesus. Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter...

The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of...

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms...

This episode, which is co-hosted with Michael Nishimura, features a conversation with Dr. Diane C. Fujino, the author of Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Reverend Michael Yasutake (University of Washington Press, 2020).  The book traces the activism of two siblings who charted their own paths for what it meant to be Nisei. Reverend Mike was an...

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of act...

Jay Richards PhD, OP discusses the new book to which he contributed a chapter, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), edited by Ann Gauger. We take on the insufficient explanations of Darwinian orthodoxy which insists that our world—from the vast cosmos to the also vast (in its complexity) genetic code in our cells. At the end of this episode (at 5...

In her book Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale University Press, 2021), Meghan Henning illuminates how the bodies that populate hell in early Christian literature are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, effectually criminalizing those bodies on Earth. Contextualizing the apocalypses alongside an...

Exegetes have long relied on the framework of the Acts of the Apostles to understand the behavior and organization of Paul’s various ekklēsiai (assemblies), or church communities, from which Christ-groups have often been conceptualized as extensions from practices of diasporic Jewish synagogues. However, Richard S. Ascough’s work has been at the forefront of a scholarly movement emphasizing the re...

When one thinks of your typical horror movie and it’s usual imagery, a number of tropes may come forward. Graveyards behind old cathedrals, crucifixes and holy water, possessions and exorcisms. The uniting thread of all of these is that they are all tied to the religious. One might then wonder if there is some underlying thread of meaning beneath the facade. Addressing this topic directly is Jonat...

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their test...

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport (Routledge, 2021) examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed includ...

The book of Kings tracks the division of Israel's kingdom into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah, narrating each one's demise. Yet Kings is no mere history; the sacred record holds a message still relevant for God's people today. Tune in for part two of our interview with Walter Maier III, this time on volume 2 of his commentary on Kings, which covers chapters 12-22....