New Books in Religion

From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the l...

Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them. The book starts from a reflexive exp...

In Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, d’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. Charles Devellennes looks at the religious, social, and political thought of the first four thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Pierre Bayle, Jean Meslier, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Denis Diderot to explicitly argue for atheism as a positive philosophy. He shows how atheism evolved considerably o...

Phiroz Mehta, was a self-taught philosopher of religion who became the revered core figure of a universal religion and philosophy centred on concepts of existential freedom. Less well known than his contemporary and associate Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mehta nonetheless cultivated a significant following over some 25 years and influenced an early generation of yoga and meditation teachers and practitione...

The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, A Spiritual Revolution argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observer...

A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is...

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (including essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminis...

In Pilgrimage to the Museum: Man's Search for God through Art and Time (Sophia Institute Press, 2022), Stephen Auth takes you on a provocative and colorful journey through the history of Western art, interpreted through a lens of Christian spirituality -- appropriately so since, in Auth's view, much of Western art expresses humanity's search for God, the Divine Artist-Creator. Leaving all the art-...

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl...

The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press, 2022), Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controll...

By its very nature, the ideals of religion entail sin and failure. Judaism has its own language and framework for sin that expresses themselves both legally and philosophically. Both legal questions―circumstances where sin is permissible or mandated, the role of intention and action―as well as philosophical questions―why sin occurs and how does Judaism react to religious crisis―are considered with...

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma i...

In his new book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022), Mohamed Abdou reimagines the parameters of political Islam and the possibilities of anarchistic interpretation of Islam and Islamic interpretation of anarchism, which is conceptualized as “Anarcha-Islam.” Rooted in the hermeneutical tradition of the Qur’an, the study draws from radical Indigenous, Black, Islamic...

Michael S. Allen's book The Ocean of Inquiry: Niscaldas and the Premodern Origins of Modern Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on a single remarkable work and its place within that history: "The Ocean of Inquiry," a vernacular compendium of Advaita Vedåanta by the North Indian monk Niâscaldåas (ca. 1791 - 1863). Though not well known today, Niâscaldåas's work was once referred to by Vivekananda (h...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Th...

In 1988, Sandi and Larry Zobrest sued a suburban Tucson, Arizona, school district that had denied their hearing-impaired son a taxpayer-funded interpreter in his Roman Catholic high school. The Catalina Foothills School District argued that providing a public resource for a private, religious school created an unlawful crossover between church and state. The Zobrests, however, claimed that the dis...

We're being formed by our devices. Unpacking the soft tyranny of the digital age, Felicia Wu Song combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and theology as she considers digital practices through the lens of "liturgy" and formation. The book is called Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (IVP Academic: 2021). Exploring pathways of meanin...

In 1827 a young farmer named Joseph Smith was visited by an angel. The angel led him to a hillside where he uncovered a set of ancient gold plates written in strange characters in an ancient language. The translation of these plates became The Book of Mormon, a sacred text revered by members of the Latter-Day Saint movement, often known as Mormons. The Book of Mormon is a text with many similariti...

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient r...

Often represented as a tradition of ancient origins, Shugendō has retained a quality of mystery and nostalgia in the public imagination and scholars as the “original” champions of mountain asceticism.  In his monograph, A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi....

You’ve seen hilarious videos of the evangelicals for Trump. You might be inclined to ignore them, mock their excesses, or dismiss their threat. But the evangelical right is a force to be reckoned with, even with Trump on his way out. So, who are these evangelicals? What do they believe? For years, evangelicals have been plotting a political course, a far-right “theology” that includes Christian na...

Silvia Schwarz Linder's Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya (Routledge, 2022) is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed bet...

Since its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to a countrywide sociopolitical movement with representation in the Israeli legislature. But how did it get here? How does it differ from other Islamic movements in the region? Particularly, what ar...

After its founding in 1540 by an aristocrat turned spiritualist turned intellectual, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus—or the Jesuits—established itself as one of the most influential and successful of all religious orders. The Jesuits were important in doctrine, politics, missionary work and of course education. At times they have been out of favour in the Vatican but they have produced a...

Liz Bucar is the Director of Sacred Writes, Professor of Religion, and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. Bucar is an expert in comparative religious ethics who has published on topics ranging from gender reassignment surgery to the global politics of modest clothing. Bucar’s current book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022),...