New Books in Christian Studies

Matthew’s gospel employs more than half of its Old Testament citations within the gospel’s prologue (Matt. 1-4). Although these texts lead Matthew’s story, many scholars have long assumed that the scriptural citations have nothing to do with their original OT context. Was Matthew a bumbling hermeneutist? Not so, says Nicholas Piotrowski. In his book, Matthew’s New David at the End of Exile (Brill,...

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past...

Suffering and death are two topics that are frequently referred to in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but have rarely been examined within scholarship on this New Testament book. Join us as we talk with Bryan Dyer about his own study of these themes, and then discover how he connects them to the social situation addressed in Hebrews. In his book, Suffering in the Face of Death: The Epistle to the Hebr...

In an unlikely place at an unlikely time, a group of black and white former sharecroppers, socialist organizers, and Christian reformers began an agricultural experiment in pursuit of economic subsistence and human dignity. Historian Robert Hunt Ferguson, in Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press,...

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the qu...

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Wilcox i...

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616,...

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by...

When teaching the first half of world history, I always do a little section on Augustine. My focus is on how he was an important theologian who shaped Christian understandings of war and even influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as seen in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. The fact though is that I could have an entire course on Augustine, such was the breadth and depth of his thought. James K. L...

There is no such thing as religious freedom, or at least just one understanding of what that means. That’s the crux of the argument in Finbarr Curtis’ (Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University), The Production of American Religious Freedom (NYU Press, 2016). Americans are fixated on freedom and saturated in religion but define the concepts in various ways. The production of religious fre...

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). This “cultural biography” provides a len...

Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Bayl...

It’s not often that a single person’s life can reveal the dramatic social and political shifts of a community. From his youth, John Papa I’i, an important statesman and author, played a pivotal role in shaping and supporting the 19th century Kingdom of Hawai’i In Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa I’i (University Of Hawai’i Press, 2016), Marie Alohalani Brown, Assistant...

In a career spanning several decades, James L. Kugel has illuminated the Hebrew Bible from the perspectives of both a biblical scholar of enormous skill and eloquence and as an engaged and imaginative reader. In The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Kugel, Starr Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, consults not only biblica...

Is there one principal avenue of exploration that could lead to the very heart of the religious experience? For David L. Weddle, professor emeritus of Religion at Colorado College, that way in is the practice of ritual sacrifice. In his new book, Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York University Press, 2017) Weddle conducts a comparative study of the practice and the social signif...

Messiah ben Joseph, the slain Galilean messiah, is the most enigmatic figure in Rabbinic Judaism. David C. Mitchell‘s Messiah ben Joseph (Campbell Publications, 2016) proposes that this messiah is not a rabbinic invention at all, however, and convincingly details Messiah ben Joseph’s emergence as early as the Pentateuch. Join us as we talk with Mitchell about his fascinating book. David C. Mitchel...

I own many Bibles, but curiously, I didn’t purchase any of them. They were all given to me, almost all by Protestant Christians. And, considering the history of Protestant Christianity, that impulse to freely offer “God’s word” makes a lot of sense. John Fea takes up the institutionalized giving of Bibles in a primarily American context in his new book, The Bible Cause: A History of the American B...

A central theological and philosophical problem facing Christians is the question “How could a merciful God damn people to hell?” It is tempting to solve this issue by developing an image of God that leaves out mercy or an understanding of Christian doctrine that rejects the concept of hell. In his new book, Hell and the Mercy of God (Catholic University of America Press, 2017), Adrian Reimers tak...

In the 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically reshaped their empire. This effort and its consequences for the history of the region is the focus of Anthony Kaldellis‘s Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (Oxford University Press, 2017),...

This week on the podcast, Daniel Bennet joins us to talk about his new book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Bennett is assistant professor of political science at John Brown University. From Hobby Lobby to Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court has ruled on controversial social policy issues. At the center of many of...

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employe...

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture? Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analy...

The daughter of the emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia successfully navigated the tumultuous politics of the late Roman Empire to rule as regent for her son Valentinian III. In Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Joyce Salisbury details the extent of this accomplishment by situating it within the context of her time...

Were the sacrifices of the Old Testament effectual? The book of Hebrews offers a critique of the Levitical cult and the sacrifices of the old covenant, even while explaining Christ’s new covenant sacrifice by comparison to them. Yet, if the Levitical sacrifices were ineffectual, then why use them as a paradigm for the work of Christ? Here to tackle that question is Benjamin J. Ribbens in his recen...

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in...