New Books in Religion

In The Right To Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anylan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University, demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism. Looking at novelists, philosophers, filmmakers and politica...

Dominant social norms and expectations shape how individuals and their public activities are understood. In Roman antiquity, various shifts influenced the production and dissolution of prejudices towards certain types of occupations. In Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the Unive...

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture? Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analy...

In contemporary South Asia, the question of Muslim origins emerges in school textbooks, political dialogues, or at tourist or pilgrimage cites. The repeated narrative revolves around the foreign Muslim leader, Muhammad bin Qasim, and his conquest of Sind in the year 712. Manan Ahmed Asif, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, provides a critical interrogation of this narrative in...

The daughter of the emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia successfully navigated the tumultuous politics of the late Roman Empire to rule as regent for her son Valentinian III. In Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Joyce Salisbury details the extent of this accomplishment by situating it within the context of her time...

Were the sacrifices of the Old Testament effectual? The book of Hebrews offers a critique of the Levitical cult and the sacrifices of the old covenant, even while explaining Christ’s new covenant sacrifice by comparison to them. Yet, if the Levitical sacrifices were ineffectual, then why use them as a paradigm for the work of Christ? Here to tackle that question is Benjamin J. Ribbens in his recen...

The work of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), one of Judaism’s great philosophers and defenders, has nonetheless defied easy categorization or definitive depiction. While advocating for the granting of full rights to the Jews of Germany, Mendelssohn also was cast in the role of defender of the faith and advocate for continued obedience to what he termed “ceremonial law” or “divine legislation.” In hi...

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in...

What does it mean to interpret the Qur’an? What kinds of literary genres have produced and continue to produce such inquiry? Is tafsir only a line-by-line commentary or could it be something broader, blended with genres of law, storytelling, or translation? Whose authority counts and why? Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (Oxford University Press, 2015) a...

Mainstream readings of Numbers have tended to see the book as a haphazard junkyard of material that connects Genesis—Leviticus with Deuteronomy and Joshua, composed at a late stage in the history of ancient Israel. By contrast, Pekka Pitkanen reads Numbers as part of a wider work of Genesis—Joshua, a carefully crafted programmatic settler colonial document for a new society in Canaanite highlands...

In the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, the role that personality (particularly that of M...

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction with nonwhite, non-Christian peoples, and that their experiences have had a profound impact on the development of religious and philosophical thinking in Europe itself, while Christianity has left an indeli...

In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life and work of one of the most influential figures in the history of Musar, the Jewish discipline for ethical development. Simḥah Zissel (1824-1898), also known as the Alter of Kelm, uniquely combined traditional Talmud study, contemplative exercises, Mus...

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting new book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017), Sarah Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion at Evergreen State College, offers a...

The idea that there is some unholy connection between Nazism and occultism has a lengthy history. It long predates 1933, when the National Socialist party took power in Germany. But what’s behind that idea? Some top-ranking members of the party were deeply engaged with the occult, perhaps most notably Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler. Was Nazi occultism just a predilection of a handful of Nazi eli...

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in northern Ethiopia. Focusing on the juxtaposition of culture, religion and medicine, Hannig turns the heroic narrative of surgery on its head to expose the realities of life for women tre...

In mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed...

In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Israel Studies, at Northwestern University, plumbs the worldview and theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Jewish Pietists, who flourished in the Rhine Valley and in Regensburg in the 12th and 13th centuries...

In his new book, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York University Press, 2017), Sociologist Erik Love provides a historical and current snapshot of civil rights issues surrounding people from the “middle east” in America. Much like other racial and ethnic categorizations, Middle Eastern is a term that does not fit quite right and is also so broad it is vague, but the concept is used widely...

Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendent of the Oneida community, teaches writing at the University of Southern California. Her book Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (Picador Press, 2016) is an insightful and beautifully written history of the nineteenth-century Oneida community. Begun in 1848 by the religious visionary John Humphrey Noyes and his followers, Oneida became an experiment...

For the first time in human history, a significant percentage of the world’s population no longer believes in God. While its true that some societies are even seeing nonbelievers outnumber believers, it is extremely unlikely that we will see a total collapse of religion in the foreseeable future. This is why, according to Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, countries across the globe must learn to carefully ma...

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema? William Elison, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor at the University of Washington, and Andy Rotma...

Few events in English history are as familiar to people today as the English Reformation, yet the vast amount of attention it has received can distort our understanding of it. In Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2017), Peter Marshall surveys its development over the course of the 16th century in a way that refocuses on its fundamentals as a movem...

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the Bolshevik revolution. Sloin has written a social history at the grassroots level of Jewi...

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and a member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought. Bilgrami’s research spans issues in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Moral Philosophy, and Political Philosophy. His most recent book is titled Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard 2014). And he is the author of the forthcoming book, Wha...