New Books in Christian Studies

In the essays offered in The Evangelical Theology of the Orthodox Church (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2021), Bradley Nassif argues that an evangelical (gospel) vision is embedded in the entire structure of the Church, and must be kept clear and central in each local parish. He also explores the elements of faith that Orthodox and Evangelicals share, without glossing over their differences, thus...

Two new books on secularism and atheism in German and Soviet socialist cultures are reshaping scholarly understandings of the relationship between socialism and religion. Todd Weir and Victoria Smolkin show that socialist secularism and atheism were not concerned solely with destroying a tool of class oppression, as Marx had envisioned, but with creating a positive faith in science and materialism...

Tim Staples is Director of Apologetics and Evangelization at Catholic Answers. His piece, “What Happens in Purgatory?” is the most read article on the entire website. I ask him to explain what the Catholic Church says (and doesn’t say) about purgatory. How does purgatory work? ...and how about heaven and hell? How should we think about these ‘places’ and about eternity? Tim Staple’s profile in Cat...

The third quest for the historical Jesus has reached an impasse. But a fourth quest is underway--one that draws from a heretofore largely neglected source: John's Gospel. In Jesus the Purifier: John's Gospel and the Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus (Baker Academic, 2023), renowned New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg advances the idea that John is a viable and valuable source for studying the...

Sr Maria Catherine was looking for Truth in the wrong places when she started practicing witchcraft as girl. But she found her way out of the darkness and into the Dominican Order; today she teaches theology and literature at JSerra High School in California. We talk about that journey and about the challenges facing young people today, the generation we are both teaching. In the second half of th...

Hindus and Christians have a long history of interaction on the Indian subcontinent. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, with the increased possibilities for immigration, Hindus and Christians live side by side in many parts of the Western world and there are growing numbers of Hindu-Christian marriages and families. In North America, for example, the population of Hindus is approachin...

Amidst fraught debates about what gender is, and how it fits into feminism, Annika sits down with Dr. Abigail Favale, an English professor specializing in gender studies and feminist literary criticism turned Catholic convert. Dr. Favale is now a professor and writer at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theor...

With Christmas approaching, in this episode we reflect on Christian persecution in the Middle East, the historic cradle of Christianity and the birthplace of Jesus, and the very different challenges Christians face in the East versus the West. Annika sits down with Father Benedict Kiely, a Catholic priest who has devoted his ministry to serving Christian communities in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.  N...

A New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters. You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all....

In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Durmaz uses stories of saints...

Religious commitments can be a powerful engine for progressive social change. In A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford UP, 2023), Raúl E. Zegarra examines the process of articulation of religious beliefs and political concerns that takes place in religious organizing and activism. Focusing on the example of Latin American liberation theology...

Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity (T&T Clark, 2023) is a natural outgrowth from McDonald’s significant and ongoing work in the field of canon studies, which traces the development of the Christian Old and New Testaments as we know them today. Given that McDonald holds, as is now common in canon scholarship, that the biblical canon does not begin its formation until the fo...

Quaker theologian Richard J. Foster and charismatic pastor Brenda Quinn talk with me about Foster’s new book (which Quinn worked on with him), Learning Humility: A Year of Searching for a Vanishing Virtue (InterVarsity Press, 2022). Foster explains why we should and how we can cultivate this greatest of virtues. He also tells me about his Quaker foundations, his investigation of Lakota history and...

The remarkable, and permanently influential, papal history known as the Liber pontificalis shaped perceptions and the memory of Rome, the popes, and the many-layered past of both city and papacy within western Europe. In Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Rosamond McKitterick offers a new analysis of this extraordinary combination o...

The pill has rocked our society to its core: but have we fully examined all its repercussions? Influential author and essayist Mary Eberstadt thinks we've only scratched the surface; in her most recent book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited (Ignatius Press, 2023) she argues that the papal encyclical Humane Vitae predicted our deep loneliness and other modern woes. Mary Eberstadt holds the Pa...

On Theology: Herman Bavinck's Academic Orations (Brill, 2020) presents four previously untranslated works by Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), here introduced and translated by Bruce Pass. These four speeches offer important insights into Bavinck's conceptualization of the discipline of theology, its place in the modern university, and the relation in which theology stands to religion. In the introducto...

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing wha...

Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, Wisconsin, wrote a statement in his diocesan journal, the Madison Catholic Herald about the German Synodal Way. The German Bishops, in defiance of Pope Francis, have been promoting same sex unions and the ordination of women and transgender persons. I ask Bishop Hying what is going on and how these matters should be handled: is there a correct way for the brother bi...

The christocentric character of Herman Bavinck's thought has long been acknowledged, but an analysis of Bavinck's christocentrism has not been forthcoming. The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) redresses this situation, offering a comprehensive study of Bavinck's concept of a christocentric theological system. Building on the more...

Garrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity’s outsized influence in modernizing Japan from almost the moment the centuries-long ban was lifted in the 1870s. Washington roots his research in the physical space of Protestant houses of worship in Tokyo, exploring the ways that the churches becam...

America’s religious and political public forum is no longer confined to debates between liberals (be they Catholics or Protestants) and socially conservative evangelicals and traditional Catholics—with atheists condemning all of the above. There is now among some Catholic intellectuals and academics a movement called integralism that calls for the United States to move towards an integration of ch...

Sebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Ch...

In The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity (Yale University Press, 2023), Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau present the background and historical context to a groundbreaking account of the Secret Gospel of Mark, one of the most hotly debated documents in Christian history.  In 1958, at the ancient Christian m...

Psychologist Paul Bloom and I talk about the human brain, morality, empathy, perversity, all the things—including Professor Bloom’s new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (Ecco Press, 2023). Culturally Jewish but in practice an atheist, Paul Bloom comes at the recurring theological questions familiar to the Almost Good Catholics audience from the materialistic perspective of psychology. Paul...

In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. C...