New Books in Religion

Sex scandals are ubiquitous in American politics. In Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Leslie Dorrough Smith examines the dynamics of political sex scandals and the rhetorical strategies employed by politicians that enable them to successfully withstand a public sex scandal. Through an examination of some of the most sensatio...

In this interview, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discusses her first book, Holiness and Transgression Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth, with Rachel Adelman. Translated by Eugene Matansky and published by Academic Studies Press in 2017, it was originally written in Hebrew as Kedeshot ukedoshot: Imahot hamashiah bamythos hayehudi (2014).  The book engages with the female dynasty leading up to the...

Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (Oxford University Press) explores the worship world of Mount Govardhan: located in the Braj region of India, the mountain is considered an embodied form of the Hindu deity Krishna. Above and beyond providing insight into the fascinating religious practices surrounding worship of Mount Govardhan, Haberman probes the pa...

In this interview, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Christopher Key Chapple of Loyola Marymount University about his outlook, teaching philosophy, and new developments in the field – his Master of Arts in Yoga Studies in particular. Stay tuned for Part II where we will focus on Chris’ scholarship, in particular his new book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhi...

Youthful arrogance. Hipster alienation. A lot of reading. A lot of drinking. Struggles to adjust to a land radically different from the one that one has left in youth. Intense wrestling with nearly every major intellectual trend of the last few decades (from hardcore Marxism to intersectionality) to a searing admission of one’s own seeming worthlessness, and, finally, redemption in the Catholic fa...

In this interview, we talk to Takashi Miura, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, about his book Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). The book examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603...

The exodus—the story of God leading his chosen people out of slavery in Egypt—stands as a pivotal event in the Old Testament. But if you listen closely, you will hear echoes of this story of redemption all throughout God’s Word. Using music as a of metaphor, the authors of Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture (Crossway) point us to the recurring theme of the exodus thro...

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly r...

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Candi K. Cann, editor of the new collection, Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky). Dying to Eat is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examine the role of food in rituals surrounding death and dying from around the globe. Cann, who identifies herself as a death studies s...

In his new book Hard-Fighting Soldiers: A History of African American Churches of Christ (University of Tennessee Press, 2019), Edward J. Robinson provides a comprehensive look at the church’s improbable development against a backdrop of African American oppression. The journey begins with a lesser known preacher, F. F. Carson, in many ways a forerunner in the struggles and triumphs awaiting the p...

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envisi...

What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one? The ancient Indian mythological figure Viśvāmitra accomplishes just this, transforming himself from a king into a Brahmin by cultivation of ascetic power. The book, Crossing the Lines of Caste, examines legends of the irascible Viśvāmitra as occurring in Sanskrit and vernacular texts, oral performances, and visual media to sh...

Why are the myths of the Indian Great Goddess, Durgā, found in the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa framed by myths glorifying the Sun, Sūrya? And why do these glorifications mirror each other in both content and form? In exploring these questions, this book argues for an ideological ecosystem at work in the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa privileging worldly (pravṛtti) values, of which Indian kings, the Goddess (Devī), the S...

Attachment theory is a popular lens through which psychologists have examined human development and interpersonal dynamics. In Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View (Guilford Press, 2020), Pehr Granqvist uses that lens to examine the psychology of religion and spirituality. He focuses on the connections between early caregiving experiences, attachment patterns, and individual diffe...

In this talk, Rachel Adelman engages Mara Benjamin in a conversation about her most recent book, The Obligated Self—Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Indiana University Press, 2018). Benjamin contends that the physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful but largely unexplored terrain for feminists. Attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent n...

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty...

Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In God is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020), Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological conversation with the work of “contextual theologians,” exploring how the combination of Pacific Islands’ culture and Christianity shapes theolo...

In this episode, we talk with Michael Gubser about the pioneering art historian Alois Riegl, one of Eisler’s teachers in Vienna and a major influence on his thought. Then we look at Eisler’s first work on the history of religions, World Mantle and Heavenly Canopy, a massive two-volume study of ancient cosmology published in 1910. In the second half, we turn to Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studi...

Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whose vitality reveals itself in her devotees' rapidly changing encounters with local and far from local players, powers, and ideas. These include invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and more...

Derek R. Sainsbury's, Storming the Nation: The Unknown Contributions of Joseph Smith’s Political Missionaries (BYU RSC, 2020), uncovers the significant but previously unknown contributions of the electioneers who advocated for Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential campaign. The focus is the cadre of more than six hundred political missionaries—who they were before the campaign, their activities and exp...

In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to the feelings of ordinary men and women―so often left out of the history of atheism. Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this l...

Philip A. Craig’s new book on John Owen, the premier puritan theologian, demonstrates how carefully his subject tracked the influence of antinomianism in his writing. Craig’s book roots Owen’s ideas of conversion in Augustine and Calvin. The Bond of Grace and Duty in the Soteriology of John Owen (Founders Press, 2020) shows how the seventeenth-century divine argued for “preparation for grace” – th...

Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens is a Visiting Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her first book is titled Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home (University of Alabama Press, 2019). In it, Dr. Løvdal Stephens shows how Dr. James Dobson—child psychologist, author, radio personality, and founder of the Christian conserva...

Every great book has a great backstory. In Joe Geisner’s new edited work, Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books (Signature Books, 2020), well-known historians describe their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past, offering an unprecedented glimpse into why they wrote these important works. Writing Mormon History is a must-read for anyone in...

"Every morning of my life in the past few years I would wake with the thought, I’m a murderer. I have no right to enjoy life.” Evan Pederick speaking to psychiatrist William Barclay in prison about what lead him to confess to the Hilton bombing. In 1978, Evan Pederick, a naive 22-year-old in the thrall of a radical religious movement, Ananda Marga, placed an enormous bomb outside Sydney's Hilton H...