New Books in Religion

Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton UP, 2024) provides a major reassessment of this monumental figure in the Western religious and political tradition, tracing the remarkably close connections between Augustine’s unders...

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effect...

Extensively based on fieldwork material, From Tapas to Modern Yoga: Sādhus' Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox, 2024) primarily analyses embodied practices of ascetics belonging to four religious orders historically associated with the practice of yoga and hatha yoga. This focus on ascetics stems from the fact that yogic techniques probably developed in ascetic contexts, yet scholars hav...

Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband across state borders, Za...

A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very begin...

This week on International Horizons, John Torpey, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, speaks with sociologists Mucahit Bilici and Samuel Heilman about their book, Following Similar Paths: What Jews and Muslims Can Learn From One Another (University of California Press, 2024). Bilici and Heilman explore how Judaism and Islam, as minority religions in the U.S., share common challenges and cultur...

The study of Jewish text, over two millennia, has traditionally taken place in the Bet Midrash (the communal study hall), sitting at a table or desk. Studying the Bible has been a project of thinking, talking, contemplative reflection, and debate. There are other ways. Dr. Ora Horn Prouser, Cantor Michael Kasper, and circus artist and choreographer Ayal Prouser have joined to edit this volume whic...

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law. In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held―one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today―recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs...

For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbu...

Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020). As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she...

Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate...

The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended...

Speaking with Professor Shalva Weil, one receives a glimpse into the wider world. Through her family ties, her personal journeys, and her research, she has gained, and shares, an understanding of the unique nature and histories of different groups. In this interview she shared the significance of a Jewish community that lasted less than 200 years but made an incredible impact whose reverberations...

A question has long hung over the the United States regarding the proper role of religion in public life. Those who long for a Christian America claim that the Founders intended a nation with political values and institutions shaped by Christianity. Secularists argue that those same Founders designed an enlightened republic where church and state should be kept separate.  American Heretics: Religi...

Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders of their urban centres in the Nile Valley. Regarded as angels and warriors, the wisdom of the Desert Ascetics formed part of the oral and literary tradition of wonder-working saints whose commitment to asceticism was legendary and inspirational.  Dese...

It is well-known that the institution of marriage has changed dramatically in the past few decades. However, very little research has focused on the role of religious institutions in helping couples form and maintain their relationships. Guiding God's Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Courtney Irby offers an examination of Christian marriage prepar...

In their book Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur’an: A Patronage of Piety (Oxford UP/Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2024), Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza make a compelling and thought-provoking argument about the role of everyday life in the Qur’an. They aptly demonstrate that the idea of households and women is integral to the salvific message of the Qur’an, to the Qur’an’s understanding...

Michael C. Baltutis' book What is Hinduism?: A Student's Introduction (Routledge, 2024) is an engaging introduction to the complex religious tradition of Hinduism. Central to its focus is demonstrating the fundamental diversity within Hinduism through the multiplicity of its core beliefs and traditions. Chapters are divided into four historical categories – Vedic, Ascetic, Classical, and Contempor...

Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses: For the abandonment of all views He taught the true teaching By means of compassion I salute him, Gautama But how could anyone possi...

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises...

The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil a...

In this episode, we are joined by the anthropologist Tone Bleie for a discussion of her book A New Testament: Scandinavian Missionaries and Santal Chiefs from Company and British Crown Rule to Independence (Solum Bokvennen, 2023), a pioneering piece of scholarship that innovatively rethinks the economic, legal, and social history of the power-laden relationship between a Scandinavian Transatlantic...

Today I talked to Iemima Ploscariu about Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands (Brill, 2024). Evangelicals in interwar Romania were a vibrant mix of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Jews, Roma, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Russians sang, prayed, and preached in their native languages. Romanian statesmen perceived...

It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light.  In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen dra...

A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its...