New Books in Religion

Historians and other writers often portray the Ghost Dance religious movement and massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as endings, the final gasps of armed Native resistance and their older ways of life. This interpretation is backwards for several reasons, argues Dr. Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Professor of U.S. Western History at U.C. Davis. In his Bancroft Prize winning new book, God’s Red Son: The...

With rates of interfaith marriage steadily increasing since the middle of the twentieth century, interfaith families have become a permanent and significant feature of the religious landscape in the United States. In her recent book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Samira Mehta analyzes the depiction of int...

What does Kant have to tell us about International Relations? In Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Sean Molloy, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Kent, offers a close reading of key works by Kant to reframe our understanding of the modern world. Written in dialogue with theories of cosmopolitanism...

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. Andy and I had the real pleasure to ta...

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than scholars have previously thought. Borovaya makes her argument by focusing on the 16th-century vernacular literature of Moses Almosnino, a writer who w...

Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass the modern evangelical movement in the U.S. as it looks at the rest of the world. McAlister begins by examining the impact of the civil rights movement in the United States and the decolonization of muc...

Cyrus Ali Zargar, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, is the author of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oneworld, 2017). Zargar explores how the study of good character and the pursuit of perfection, or virtue ethics, was part of a broader discursive network that included Islamic jurisprudence, theology, philosophy...

In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. His analysis offers an innovative stance on the very study of Hinduism, and tensions between scholars and practitioners of Hin...

Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administration that provides the reader with a broad and expansive understanding of different aspects of presidential politics, political rhetoric, communicati...

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), historian of religion Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay in how they reje...

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in a war? – leads to an extended discussion of such themes as rebirth and reincarnation and the personal paths to unity with the universe through the...

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of J...

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014) explores the extent to which the great medieval Hindu thinker Rāmānuja himself loo...

From the sidelines of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s biennial conference, where she presented the inaugural keynote address of the Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars, Katherine A. Bowie, joined New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Of Beggars and Buddhas: The Politics of Humor in the Vessantara Jataka in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Bowie...

The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history, how they understood their actions to be in line with their faith, and their actions shaped both domestic politics and foreign policy. Heather Curtis’ Hol...

What do the social worlds of teenage Muslim American boys look like? What issues do they grapple with and how do they think about issues that arise in their everyday lives? In his new book Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (Princeton University Press, 2017), John O’Brien answers these questions and more. An overarching theme of the book is just how ordinary and c...

In Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, presents the first in-depth study of what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s W...

In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with high populations of Old Believers. In Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries (Indiana Univer...

In his sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of the concept of ‘Irfan in medieval, early Modern, and modern contexts. Combining a mesmerizingly layered analysis of previously unexplored manuscrip...

Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish history. In it, Professor Eliyahu Stern recontextualizes a group of Jewish thinkers who sought to understand the ways in which Jewish identity could b...

The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations, which led to the birth of fantasy and science fiction – two of today’s most popular genres. This period also gave rise to a Victorian “crisis of faith,” as the traditional Christian beliefs that had...

Zoltan Pall‘s Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a just published ethnographic investigation of the rise of Salafism among Lebanese Sunni Muslims is far more than a study of an ultra-conservative community in a country that is a patchwork of religious communities. Pall’s book is an examination of what fuels the rise of Sunni Muslim ultra-cons...

Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is an important contribution for the way in which she draws together murals, portable paintings, ritual manuscripts, and diagrams connected to the Mandala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas. Wang traces how the us...

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relation...

Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).  The essays in this volume look at a variety of topics ranging from Shaivite religious texts to biographies, novels, and dance forms to show how Hinduism cannot be understood only through texts...