In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience and grace (which includes really listening) to people we disagree with and regard as eccentric. So why not talk it over on Almost Good Catholics? Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio. Kevin Vallier’s personal website. Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled. Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna. “What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today.Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of "reading" inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane—the Yankee Clipper—took off from New York and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. In her new book, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper (Oxford UP, 2023), author Brooke L. Blower traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. This vivid narrative captures the dramatic stories of these seven people and, through them, the impact of Americans’ global connections before and during World War II. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the U.S. war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper’s passengers—among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export-salesman, a Broadway star, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy—upend conventional American narratives about World War II. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of U.S. history and global connections during the “American Century.”Brooke L. Blower is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University.James Kates is a Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.Lawrence Goldman was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught British and American History for three decades in Oxford, where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College, and Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-2014. Latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His publications include books on Victorian social science and the history of workers' education, and a biography of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. He is now Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

In World of Worldly Gods: The Persistence and Transformation of Shamanic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan (Oxford UP, 2023), Kelzang T. Tashi offers the first comprehensive examination of the tenacity of Shamanic Bon practices, as they are lived and contested in the presence of an invalidating force: Buddhism. Through a rich ethnography of Goleng and nearby villages in central Bhutan, Tashi investigates why people, despite shifting contexts, continue to practice and engage with Bon, a religious practice that has survived over a millennium of impatience from a dominant Buddhist ecclesiastical structure. Against the backdrop of long-standing debates around practices unsystematically identified as 'bon', this book reframes the often stale and scholastic debates by providing a clear and succinct statement on how these practices should be conceived in the region.Tashi argues that the reasons for the tenacity of Bon practices and beliefs amid censures by the Buddhist priests are manifold and complex. While a significant reason for the persistence of Bon is the recency of formal Buddhist institutions in Goleng, he demonstrates that Bon beliefs are so deeply embedded in village social life that some Buddhists paradoxically feel it necessary to reach some kind of accommodation with Bon priests. Through an analysis of the relationship between Shamanic Bon and Buddhism, and the contemporary dynamics of Bhutanese society, this book tackles the longstanding concern of anthropology: cultural persistence and change. It discusses the mutual accommodation and attempted amalgamation of Buddhism and Bon, and offers fresh perspectives on the central distinguishing features of Great and Little Traditions.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting–with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship–even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The region of northeast India has long posed a challenge for its leaders, both local and national. Geographically isolated from the rest of India due to partition and the awkward placement of what eventually becomes Bangladesh, the region soon features countless ethnic groups demanding authority and autonomy in the newly independent India—at times, through violent resistance—and a heavy-handed national administration quite willing to impose martial law to get things under control.Journalist Samrat Choudhury writes about this region in his latest book, Northeast India: A Political History (Oxford UP, 2023). Samrat talks about the region’s eight states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim, and their experience under first the British, and then newly-independent India.Samrat is a journalist and former newspaper editor who has written for major papers and magazines in Britain, the US, Asia and Europe. He has edited anthologies, contributed to academic publications, and authored books including novel The Urban Jungle (Penguin Books India: 2011) and travelog The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra (HarperCollins: 2021).Today, Samrat and I talk about this region’s sometimes messy history, its experience with insurgencies and the tough government reaction, and touch briefly on what’s happening in Manipur today.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Northeast India. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Does it matter if judges are nice to each other? The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary (Oxford UP, 2023)argues that how judges interact with each other has an important effect at every stage of their judicial process. Previously, scholars have explained judicial behavior in terms of the law, the ideological attitudes of the judges, external and internal constraints, and the background characteristics of the judges, such as gender, race, or prior professional experiences. The Elevator Effect builds on previous research in political science, political psychology, and linguistics to present the first comprehensive examination of the importance of interpersonal relationships among the judges for judicial decision-making and legal development. Hazelton, Hinkle, and Nelson argue that collegiality affects nearly every aspect of judicial behavior. More frequent interpersonal contact among judges diminishes the role of ideology to the point where it is both “substantively and statistically imperceptible.” The book also shows that collegiality affects both the language judges use when they disagree with each other and the precedents that they choose to support their arguments. The podcast covers the rich findings of the book – and also provides some interesting insights for graduate students who are thinking about collaborative research Dr. Morgan L.W. Hazelton, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Law (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University. She studies how features of court systems influence the decisions that both litigants and judges make. Dr. Rachael K. Hinkle, J.D. and Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo. Her research agenda focuses on judicial politics with particular attention to gleaning insights into legal development from the content of judicial opinions through the use of computational text analytic techniques. Dr. Michael J. Nelson, PhD, is a professor of Political Science at Penn State University. Michael Nelson is Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He studies judicial politics, especially public attitudes toward law and courts, judicial behavior, and the politics of court reform. Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West, argues that both of these narratives flatten out what was actually a much more complicated story. Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford UP, 2022), Aron zooms in on several moments of contingency in the Western past, moments when people of often radically different backgrounds came together to build community, or at least lived peacefully, despite their differences. Although these moments eventually fell apart, Aron argues that they show that the past was unwritten until it came to pass, and that our own uncertain future is the same. Peace and Friendship offers important lessons about the power of history and contingency, and underscores the unsettled nature of human events and our capacity for overcoming even our deepest differences.

Twenty years ago, it seemed Traditionalism was an esoteric and irrelevant set of beliefs. Since then, powerful people sympathetic to its ideas have overturned that perception. In the US, Russia, and Brazil powerful presidential advisers have drawn on traditionalism to disastrous effect – the Trump presidency and the war in Ukraine both owe something to traditionalism. Mark Sedgwick has written Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Oxford UP, 2023) and he has been thinking where Traditionalism – or post Traditionalism - goes now. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.