New Books in Big Ideas

Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger 2015). Using real-life examples along with academically rooted studies, the authors attempt to answer the question, “Does the student who goes to college and graduates but has outstanding student debt achieve similar financial outcomes to the student who graduates from college without student debt?” Co-author Melinda Lewis joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. You can also find the authors on Twitter at @melindaklewis and Dr. Elliott’s organization at @AssetsEducation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic legitimization of knowledge in emerging European modernities. Here, the discursive entanglements of professional and participant explanations of modern practices shaped and solidified those realities. Key figures in the history of the field of Religious Studies, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, played instrumental roles in legitimizing the authority of mysticism, goddess worship, and shamanism. Ultimately, what we discover is that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are not so much distinctive spheres but elastic systems that arise within the particular circumstances of secular modernity. In our conversation we discussed discursive approaches to the study of religion, the Theosophical Society, marginalized forms of knowledge, the occult sciences, Jewish mysticism, secularization, nature-focused spiritualities, experiential knowledge, pagan religious practices, and ‘modern’ science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Old Testament is often maligned as an outmoded and even dangerous text. Best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, and Derrick Jensen are prime examples of those who find the Old Testament to be problematic to modern sensibilities. In his new book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor UP, 2014), Iain W. Provan counters that such easy and popular readings misunderstand the Old Testament. He opposes modern misconceptions of the Old Testament by addressing ten fundamental questions that the biblical text should–and according to Provan does–answer: questions such as “Who is God?” and “Why do evil and suffering mark the world?” By focusing on Genesis and drawing on other Old Testament and extra-biblical sources, Seriously Dangerous Religion constructs a more plausible reading. As it turns out, Provan argues, the Old Testament is far more dangerous than modern critics even suppose. Since 1997, Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a co-author, with V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman, of A Biblical History of Israel (John Knox Press, 2003), and the author of Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was (Baylor University Press, 2013). Provan received his MA in Medieval history and archaeology from Glasgow University, his BA in theology from London Bible College, and his PhD from Cambridge University. His academic teaching career has taken him to King’s College London, the University of Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. Provan is an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland; a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Most world religions textbooks follow a structure and conceptual framework that mirrors the modern discourse of world religions as distinct entities reducible to certain defining characteristics. In his provocative and brilliant new book Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History (University of California Press, 2015), James Laine, Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College challenges this dominant paradigm of world religions textbooks by showcasing an approach that instead focuses on the interaction of religion and power across time and space. At once ambitious and lucid, Meta-Religion narrates the story of the complex intersection of religion and politics in multiple moments, places, and traditions. A hallmark of this book is the way it engages the religious and political history of Islam and Muslim societies in conversation with other religious traditions. What emerges from this exercise is a rich and fascinating picture of the complicated and at times conflicting ways in which religiously diverse and plural societies have been managed through particular political arrangements and ideologies in different historical moments. In our conversation we talked about the idea of meta-religion, different varieties of meta-religion in India, Rome, and China, the marginalization of Islam and Muslim history in Euro-American world historical periodizations, Meta-Religion in Muslim history, Akbar and his experimentation with meta-religion, and meta-religion in the modern and contemporary context. This book will be of great interest to specialists in Islamic Studies and other scholars of religion and religious history; it will also make an excellent text for courses on Islam and world history, Introduction to Religion, and on theories and methods in Religious Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership. For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following aspects of the book: * How hedonic psychology measures human happiness and some of the things these studies have revealed * The author’s new approach to evaluating laws called “well-being analysis” * Ways the new data on happiness has revealed a need to rethink criminal punishment * What the future holds for happiness research Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made… Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not.  And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real imperialism there; a lot of bloody war, but no imperialism as such. Germany is free and prosperous. Russia is not free and not prosperous. Why is that? In their impressive and refreshing bookThe Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier argue that it’s not so much imperialism that impedes development, but style of governance and, especially, time. If autocratic governments do nothing buttake rents, thesocieties they rule will not develop, not ever, no matter how long or hard the governmentstry to development them. If they are even semi-popular and pro-trade, they will develop, though it will take a very, very long time. There’s no magic built. You can’t simply import democracy and capitalism and hope for a rapid transitionto freedom and prosperity.The process of development takes centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great thoughtfulness and beauty. Growing out of a traveling art exhibit of the same name, The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a collection of works that explore three major questions: “Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide?” “What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are enlisted in the schemes of biotechnology and the dreams of biocapitalism?” “…In the aftermath of disasters…what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?” Pioneering a style of collaboration inspired by Michel de Certeau’s notion of “poaching,” the contributions to the volume span essays on bioart and matsutake worlds, recipes for human-milk cheese and acorn mush, ruminations on the production of assmilk soap and on the nature and importance of hope, considerations of the brittlestar and the art of Patricia Piccinini, and much more. This is a volume that I will be returning to, recommending, and assigning for years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas