New Books in Religion

New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is needed. The volume critically eng...

With the plurality of Hinduism in mind, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hindu Ethics focuses on the human, sociological and situational ethical framework underpinning Hindu ethics. Chapters go beyond the traditional classical sources-such as the Vedas, epics, mythological narratives and Dharmasastra texts-to include lesser known vernacular based moral texts, as well as contemporary sources from organiz...

In this episode, host Pierce Salguero sits down with Linda C. Ceriello, a scholar of mysticism and popular culture from Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Linda is one of the foremost scholars of metamodernism, with particular focus on contemporary spirituality and mystical experiences. She talks with us about what this concept of metamodernism means, and how it can open up new kinds of more ca...

Molly Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagin...

Tamil Śiva Temples, Āgamas, and Śivabrāhmaṇas/Ādiśaivas addresses the issue of whether members of all castes can become priests in Tamil Śiva temples. The history of the Śivabrāhmaṇas or Ādiśaivas as priests in Tamil Śiva temples is described using the epigraphic corpus as well as other Śaiva texts in Tamil along with information from the Śaiva studies of the likes of Richard Davis, Alexis Sanders...

Gentiles often appeared in the news sections of the London Yiddish press, and sometimes they also appeared in the regular “feuilleton” section in character sketches and fiction, stories and scenes from immigrant East-End Jewish life. Many of these portrayals were humorous local scenarios and imagined tales. This talk will look at a broad section of how and where Gentile characters appear and their...

Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why? In A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we m...

The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times (Wipf and Stock, 2026) features meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused attention. Its fundamental premise is that individuals move...

The Power of Publishing in Early Modern Tibetan Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2025) is a rich exploration of the history of Tibetan books during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Looking at this ‘golden age’ of book production, Benjamin Nourse focuses on two core topics: What was driving Tibetan publishing in the eighteenth century, and what happened as a result of that growth? How...

In her latest book, Sanctuary People: Faith Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gina Perez explores sanctuary practices in Ohio, locating them in broader local and national efforts to provide refuge and care in the face of the challenges facing Latina/o communities in a moment of increased surveillance, migrant detention, displacement, and economic and social marginaliz...

Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) brings together insights from religion, anthropology, sound, and migration studies to explore the sonic traces of untouchability and forced migration across the Bay of Bengal. Based on an immersive, multi-sited ethnography with Matua devotees—a low-caste, Bengali-speaking Dalit religious...

Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotra/stuti/stava) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotras continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress in recent...

In Jewish memory, Jesus and Shabbtai Zvi were heretics, false messiahs who rebelled against the rabbis and against normative Judaism. But a funny thing happened in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: modern Jewish writers and artists reclaimed these heretics and gave them an honored place in Jewish history. In doing so, they transformed the historical figures, Jesus and Shabbtai Zvi, int...

Korean New Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is an excellent primer for anyone interested in modern Korea’s religious landscape. The Korean peninsula has dramatically transformed over the past century, and various new religions have emerged. Dr. Donald Baker outlines these new religions, explores their basic beliefs and shared features, and compares them with the peninsula’s three spiri...

Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana St...

Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to prot...

One of the things that stood out in my conversation with John Longhurst about his book Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? A Journalist Reports on Faith (CMU Press, 2024) was his seriousness about journalism itself. Longhurst understands the journalist's vocation not as providing definitive answers but as asking good questions, paying close attention, and engaging thoughtfully with the people and ev...

The relationship between the Church and the world has been a subject of debate since the Church's earliest days. In ⁠A Church for a Secular World: The Development of Klaas Schilder's Ecclesiology⁠ (Brill, 2025), Marinus De Jong explores how Stanley Hauerwas, with his emphasis on the Church as polis, made a significant contemporary contribution—one that has also faced strong criticism. This study e...

Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human being...

What if the book of Genesis is not only the story of humanity’s first family, but also the story of God learning how to parent? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Stephen Spector to discuss his book God and the First Families: Parenting, Trauma, and Healing in the Book of Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 2026), a provocative reexamination of the Bible’s foundational stories thro...

Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācār...

This episode features a conversation with Prachi and Ram, organizers with Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans and partners standing together in the fight against the rise of the transnational far right. After laying out Hindu supremacy as an ideology, we considered the different phases of consolidation of the Hindu right in the United States from its late 20...

In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for...

Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an emotion such as grief. Late Roman mosaics show people covering their hands with veils when receiving or giving something precious. They covered their altars, doorways, shrines, and temples; and many covered their heads when sa...

Dr. Annie Selak (she/her/hers) is an expert in feminist ecclesiology. She studies wounds in the church, or moments where the church fails to live into its mission and causes harm. Racism, sexism, and the clergy sex abuse crisis are examples of the church failing to credibly be church. Guided by a feminist methodology, Selak integrates the lived experience of women with a robust vision for the chur...