New Books in Religion

Christopher Jain Miller's book Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge, 2023) is a refreshingly original, multi-sited ethnography of transnational yoga that obliges us to look beyond postural practice (as̄ana) in modern yoga research. The book introduces readers to three alternative, understudied categories of transnational yoga practice which incl...

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions. Today you get to...

It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that follow...

Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft: A Hi...

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and...

When King Arthur was conveyed to Avalon they were there. When Odin summoned warriors to Valhalla they were there. When Apollo was worshipped on Greek mountains they were there. When Brendan came to the Island of Women they were there. They are the Nine Maidens – from the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, to the nine sisters at the heart of the found myth of the G...

Yanki Tauber's The Book of Genesis with Commentary and Insights from 500 Sages and Mystics (Open Book Press, 2022) features a new foundational English translation of the first book of the Bible, an anthology of commentaries representing the full spectrum of Jewish learning spanning 33 centuries, and an abundance of illustrations, maps, and infographics. Never before has the English reader been giv...

In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors' zealous movement involved other acts that...

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of t...

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic. In Voodoo: The Hi...

Histories of political religion since the 1960s often center on the rise of the powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc since the 1970s. One of the beliefs that has united these citizens is the idea that they are treated unfairly or are marginalized, despite their significant influence on public life. From the ascent of Reagan to the "Contract with America," from 9/11 to Obama to Trump--thes...

A candid conversation with Corinne Dempsey on her wide-ranging, fascinating research in religion, from the Indian Goddess in New York and Icelandic Spirit Work. Books The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York: Breaking Convention and Making Home at a North American Hindu Temple Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures...

For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves? Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights int...

The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these pa...

Gina A. Zurlo's book Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their...

The Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans has been foundational for Christianity, and well-studied throughout the history of the Church. Ben Witherington, however, gleans fresh insights by reading Paul's epistle in light of early Jewish theology, the historical situation of Rome in the middle of the first century, and Paul's own rhetorical concerns. Join us as we speak with Ben Witherington III abou...

The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879- 1950) is perhaps the most widely known Indian spiritual figure of the last century, second only to Gandhi. Patrick Laude's book Surrendering to the Self: Ramana Maharshi's Message for the Present (Hurst, 2021) offers a fresh introduction to the Maharshi's life and teachings, intending to situate him within the non-dualistic traditions of Hinduism. It also del...

The Greco-Egyptian syncretistic god Serapis was used by the 3rd century BCE Ptolemaic pharaohs to impose Greek cultural hegemony and consolidate political power. The Alexandrian Serapeum, sometimes referred to as The Great Library of Alexandria’s “daughter library,” may be seen as an archetype for institutions where religion and secular knowledge come together for the reproduction of ideologies. T...

This cultural history of humility reveals this lost virtue as a secret defense against arrogance and incivility. History demonstrates that when the virtue of humility is cast aside, excessive individualism follows. A person who lacks humility is at risk of developing a deceptive sense of certitude and at worst denies basic human rights, respect, and dignity to anyone they identify as the enemy. Ch...

Dr Pierce Salguero talks with Rev. Nathan Jishin Michon, a postdoctoral fellow at Ryukoku University and an ordained priest in the Shingon Buddhist tradition. Our conversation touches on diverse Buddhist healing rituals and the role of light in Shingon practice and cosmology. We discuss the playfulness and innovation in modern Japanese Buddhism, and the rise of chaplaincy after the 3.11 tsunami an...

Julian Goodare and Martha McGill's edited volume The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester UP, 2023) is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 150...

Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (NYU Press, 2023), the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Dr. Monteith argues that this early dru...

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention. These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minoritie...

Tom Boomershine, one of the pioneers of performance criticism for biblical texts, joined the New Books Network to discuss the publication of First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his essays dating back to 1981. On this episode, we discuss his life and career in scholarship, his conviction that the New Testament...

In Life without God: An Outsider's Look at Atheism (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rik Peels explores atheism from a new perspective that aims to go beyond the highly polarized debate about arguments for and against God's existence. Since our beliefs about the most important things in life are not usually based on arguments, we should look beyond atheistic arguments and explore what truly motivates the athe...