New Books in Christian Studies

The Epistle to the Hebrews is one of the most fascinating texts in the New Testament, having arguably the highest Christology, the most comprehensive soteriology and realized eschatology. Hebrews is also shrouded in mystery, whether related to its unknown author or to the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek. Here to help is Scott Mackie. In The Letter to the Hebrews: Critical Readings (T&T Clark, 2018...

Questions about the nature of the American founding undergird our fraught political discourse: was the American Revolution justified? How religious were the Founding Fathers? How should we deal with the fact that they owned slaves? What is Christian Nationalism? Mark David Hall, current Garwood Visiting Fellow with us at the James Madison Program and Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Polit...

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of tradition...

In this new history of the Reformation in the Netherlands, Christine Kooi synthesizes fifty years of scholarship provide a broad general history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. Kooi's writing focuses on the political context of the era and explores how religious change took place against the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Special a...

I talk with a Muslim friend about the places that Islam and Christianity overlap, and also the places where they diverge. Of these subjects, none is more interesting than the role of Jesus Christ whom Muslims call the Prophet Issa (peace be upon him). Muslims hold him in high esteem but do not believe in his divinity or in the Trinity itself. Muslims believe in the Resurrection and Second Coming b...

Jack Phillips is the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado. In 2012, Jack Phillips declined to create a custom wedding cake celebrating a so-called same-sex marriage. The men who requested the cake filed a charge with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, beginning a legal battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Jack Phillips joins the show to discuss his new book, The Cost of My...

Why is Jordan Peterson so popular? In what ways is Jordan Peterson's approach to Scripture unique? What can Christians learn from Peterson about the Bible? Christopher Kaczor, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life. Jordan Peterson's Bi...

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious tra...

In Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (Bloomsbury, 2022), the authors and the three editors (Eric Hones del Pinal, Marc Rosco Loustau and Kristin Norget) explore how Catholicism is produced, maintained and challenged through processes of communication. This book focuses on the ethnographic study of Catholicism and media. Chapters demonstrate how people engage...

How did liberationist Christianity develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War? How did liberation theology develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War?  Understanding the movement to be dynamic and highly diverse, Pablo Bradbury's book Liberationist...

Robert P. George is the indispensable man of American social conservatism. The Princeton professor is a scholar of such intellectual power that he almost single-handedly rescued the anti-abortion movement from the fringes of the American sociopolitical and legal landscape in the 1990s when the secular left assumed that the reign of abortion on demand for any reason was a done deal. George (born 19...

Today I talked with Senator Joe Lieberman—who ran for Vice President in 2000 with Al Gore, and for President in 2004 in the Democratic primary—about his book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011). Senator Lieberman is a devout Jew and talks with me about the Sabbath tradition, a custom rooted in God’s day of rest at the end of creation (Genesis 2) and the Mosaic Law and...

Pastors, thoughtful Christians, and students of Scripture must learn how to carefully read and understand the Bible, but it can be difficult to know where to start. In this clear, logical guide, Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell explain how to interpret Scripture from three effective viewpoints: canonical, thematic, and ethical. Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Appro...

How did American Catholics go from subjects to citizens? Who is the "godfather" of the First Amendment? How can spiritual and temporal duties be reconciled? Michael Breidenbach, Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University, joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. Learn more about your...

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up...

Today I talked to Ninon Dubourg about her new book Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/Suitable for Divine Service? (Amsterdam UP, 2023). The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impai...

Today I talked to Deidre Nicole Green about her book Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). Drawing on the thought of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in order to illuminate and interrogate feminist critiques of self-sacrifice, Green relies on Kierkegaard's view of Christian love to offer a constructive theological framew...

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, treated as fringe cultists at best or marginalized as polygamists unworthy of serious examination at worst. In Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020), the historian Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mo...

Jonathan Fessenden and I talk about two movies, Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986) and Fred Zinneman’s A Man for All Seasons (1966), both written by Robert Bolt, and both about men of Faith facing persecution and a sudden reversal of political fortune. These are themes that we began in our first discussion, Episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1. Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, and t...

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism?  In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archiv...

"What could I have done more for my vineyard?" In one of the Book of Mormons most magisterial passages, the lord of a vineyard looks over his beloved olive trees with great sorrow and strives to redeem them. This allegory represents Jesus Christ s labor to save not only individual souls but an entire world. Perhaps more than any other Book of Mormon prophet, Jacob manifests the same divine anxiety...

In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism, and later, a cor...

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that...

For three weeks in February of 2023, a spontaneous ‘Outpouring’ at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, set the hearts of American Christians aflame, reviving their faith and our spiritual conversation. Fr Norman Fischer, pastor of nearby St. Peter Claver Catholic Church and the chaplain at Lexington Catholic High School, in Lexington Kentucky, went over to Asbury to check it out. He tells us a...

Could totalitarianism take root in America? What does it mean to "live not by lies"?  Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of several books, including The Benedict Option. He joins the show to answer these questions and discuss his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Solzhenitsyn's 1974 essay is here. Learn more about your ad choices....