New Books in Religion

In a world filled with both enormous wealth and pockets of great devastation, how should the well-off respond to the world's needy? This is the urgent central question of Being Good in a World of Need (Oxford UP, 2024). Larry S. Temkin, one of the world's foremost ethicists, challenges common assumptions about philanthropy, his own prior beliefs, and the dominant philosophical positions of Peter S...

In this podcast we meet CIIS faculty member Sundari Johansen and speak about how her academic background in religious studies informs the critical perspective and frameworks she brings into her course on Hindu Tantra. We discuss research as deep listening and self-transformation, and get into the problems of traditional western ethnographic methodologies based upon the distinction between the insi...

Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century (Routledge, 2023) explores the creation of the collection now known as the New Testament. While it is generally accepted that it did not emerge as a collection prior to the late second century CE, a more controversial question is how it came to be. How did the writings that make up the New Testament - The Gospels, the so-called...

Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for more than three thousand years and is rooted in biblical law. Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. Horses, rabbits, squirrels, and even vultures, while also not kosher, do not inspire the same level of revulsion for Jews as the pig. The...

Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amélie Barras explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be ne...

What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch (Penn State University Press, 2024), Blake Leyerle explores this question through the writings, teachings, and reception of John Chrysostom—a priest of Antioch who went on to become the bishop of Constantinople in AD 397. Through...

The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through...

While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish histo...

Jana Byars talks to Veronica Strang about her new book Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis (Reaktion, 2023). Looking to the vast human history of water worship, a crucial study of our broken relationship with all things aquatic—and how we might mend it. Early human relationships with water were expressed through beliefs in serpentine aquatic deities: rainbow-colored, feat...

In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, v...

The compelling vision of religious life and practice found in Hasidic sources has made it the most enduring and successful Jewish movement of spiritual renewal of all time. In Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford UP, 2024), Ariel Evan Mayse grapples with one of Hasidism's most vexing questions: how did a religious movement known for its radical vi...

Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In p...

Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they reflect on their efforts to adapt to secular communities while retaining their identity and beliefs. In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the “Pacific Rim” refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives em...

In one of the first books to ask head-on what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state, Yaacov Yadgar delves into what the designation "Jewish" amounts to in the context of the sovereign nation-state, and what it means for the politics of the state to be identified as Jewish. The volume interrogates the tension between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state--one whose very character is informed by...

Leyla Ozgur Alhassen’s book Qur’anic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) provides excellent analyses of several Qur’anic surahs, or chapters, to explore how Qur’anic stories function as narratives – but not just any kind of narratives: narratives with a theological purpose behind them.  The specific stories she looks at include those of Maryam, Yusuf, and M...

In this fascinating interview, Nathanael J. Homewood discusses his new book,Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Stanford University Press, 2024). Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary a...

Shehnaz Haqqani's new book Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender (Oneworld 2024), masterfully blends textual analysis of pre-modern and modern Islamic consensus with qualitative interviews with Muslims in the contemporary United States, to track how notions of what constitutes Islamic and Islamic tradition shift over time. We learn from her interl...

Pagan Religions in Five Minutes (Equinox, 2024) provides an accessible set of essays on questions relating to Pagan identities and practices, both historically and in contemporary societies as well as informative essays on different Pagan groups, such as Druidry, Wicca, Heathenry and others. The book includes answers to a range of questions such as: How many Pagans are there? What do Pagans believ...

Today’s book is: Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials (Scribner, 2024), by Dr. Marion Gibson, which explores the global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate a pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history. Some of them are famous like the Salem witch trials, and some lesse...

In an era where congregations are shrinking and fewer people engage with faith communities, Michael Plekon's book Ministry Matters: Pastors, Their Life and Work Today (Wipf and Stock, 2024) offers a timely exploration of both the challenges and opportunities facing modern Christian ministry. Through detailed analysis, Plekon traces the factors behind congregational decline while also highlighting...

An illuminating history of religious and political controversy in nineteenth-century Bengal, where Protestant missionary activity spurred a Christian conversion “panic” that indelibly shaped the trajectory of Hindu and Muslim politics. In 1813, the British Crown adopted a policy officially permitting Protestant missionaries to evangelize among the empire’s Indian subjects. The ramifications proved...

In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium...

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one’s last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible. A Life of Ps...

The Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, have long been told as stories of men. But women were central to the transformations that took place in Europe and beyond. What was life like for them in this turbulent period? How did their actions and ideas shape Christianity and influence societies around the world? In Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2024), ren...

What does it mean that God hears? Can a God who is "pure act" be affected in such a way? What does this mean for those whom God hears? Who are those people? Join Benjamin Phillips as he asks such questions of Charles Helmer IV, author of The Lord Who Listens: A Dogmatic Inquiry into God as Hearer (Brill, 2024). More about the book: In The Lord Who Listens, Charles C. Helmer IV draws on Holy Script...