New Books in Catholic Studies

In The Politics of Religion and the Rise of Social Catholicism in Peru (1884-1935): Faith, Workers, and Race Before Liberation Theology (Brill, 2018), Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti, Associate Professor of Latin American History at the Universidad de los Andes (Chile), provides a lucid synthesis of the Catholic Church’s responses to the secularization of the State and society, whilst offering a fresh appraisal of the emergence of Social Catholicism and its contribution to social thought and development of civil society in post-independence Peru. Making use of diverse historical sources, Cubas Ramacciotti provides a comprehensive view of a reformist yet anti-revolutionary trend within the Peruvian Church that, decades before the emergence of Liberation Theology and under divergent intellectual paradigms, developed an active agenda that addressed the new social problems of the country, including those of urban workers, and of indigenous populations.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic readers disobeyed the book rules of their church in a vast apostasy that raised personal desire and conscience over communal responsibility and doctrine. This disobedience sparked a dramatic contest between lay readers and their priests over proper book behavior that played out in homes, schools, libraries, parish meeting halls, even church confessionals. The clergy lost this contest in a fundamental reordering of cultural power that helped usher in contemporary Catholicism.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. More than a scholarly intervention, Ramírez seeks to answer a very pragmatic and timely question: how and why do successful public health measures succeed? Through his surprising, nuanced, and complicated answer, Ramírez broadens our understanding of who counts as a vital actor in public health programs. Whereas historians have long thought of enlightened reform in the terms of absolutist monarchical power, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018)cracks the nut to find within a effervescent world of competitive and cooperative medical cultures. Through careful analyses of the Royal Vaccination Campaign of the early 19th century as well as prior public methods of responding to epidemic disease, Ramírez demonstrates a consistent pattern of mutual exchange and influence between professional communities and lay populations, both indigenous and not. Refreshingly, he also reassesses the role of the Catholic Church: despite common assumptions of an inherent antipathy between science and religion (especially Catholicism), we see here the integral role of religious ideas, practices, rituals, personnel, and political power in the implementation of modern public health initiatives. The resulting picture of negotiation, conciliation, and experimentation is essential reading for both historians of public health, science, and Latin America, as well as readers in the medical humanities generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasion, world war, and revolution, The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church (Palgrave, 2016) reveals the ways in which very significant cultural changes in Chinese society were reflected in an indigenous congregation as it gradually discovered its own identity.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does a typical American Catholic parish look like? Tricia Bruce, an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society, argues in her new book that America’s largest denomination is held together by the differences it contains. Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church, published by Oxford University Press (2017), offers an outstanding account of how ecclesiastical structures have changed to take account of the tensions that can exist when “mobile people encounter immobile infrastructure.” Existing alongside the more familiar territorial and national parish structures, personal parishes allow believers with similar ethnic, linguistic, political or liturgical preferences to gather together. But does this represent a concession to the congregational impulse of American Protestantism, or to the market created by religious competition? Are personal parishes a symbol of the success or failure of American Catholicism? Do they represent new forms of segregation, and do they allow the hierarchy to control dissent? Tricia Bruce’s Parish and Place offers a distinctive and compelling analysis of the structures that may determine the future of the American Catholic church.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a delight to catch up with Kevin Ingram, professor of history at Saint Louis University, Madrid, to discuss his very impressive new book. Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad Blood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez (Palgrave, 2018) sets out to account for the experience of those Spanish Jews, perhaps one-third of the total Spanish Jewish population, who converted to Catholicism after the Reconquista. Professor Ingram’s work shows how these converts struggled to assimilate into mainstream Spanish society, and how laws were passed to ensure that only those who could demonstrate “pure blood” could enter the highest echelons of Spanish life. But conversos found other ways to participate in community, identifying with the cause of virtue that was popularised in Renaissance humanism, developing new mystical strains of religious practice, and participating in the many competing agendas for religious reform. Conversos exercised a much greater influence on the Spanish golden age than a great deal of historical writing has noticed. An outstanding study of its subject, Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain looks to be advancing an agenda-setting argument.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 1970s; the ways in which some advocates of liberalized abortion access displayed hostility to the disabled; the current backlash against women’s reproductive rights in Europe fueled in part by activists presenting themselves as anti-eugenics and pro-disability; and the impressive advances in disability rights inspired by submerged, contrapuntal strands within psychoanalysis and Christianity alike. An outstanding contribution to the histories of religion, sexuality, and disability rights, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in post-1945 Europe.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shaped Holiday and her music. Fessenden takes the reader through Holiday’s short but full life by placing it within the contexts of Catholicism, black vernacular music, Jazz compositions, and the culture of American celebrity. She shows how race, gender, and religious conditions guided her sound and formed the prism through which her genius shone. In our conversation we discussed Holiday’s early Catholic formation, the Jewishness of the American songbook, Afro-Protestant notions of redemption, confessional performance, the eclectic religious orbits of her jazz contemporaries, Strange Fruit and the vigilante faith of some Southerners, the cinematic representation of a musician’s life, and the mytho-poetic nature of Holiday’s iconicity.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), revisits the early years of Islamic civilization by looking at an oft-neglected population in the secondary literature, Syriac Christians. Weitz’s study uses marital practice from the seventh through tenth centuries to illustrate how Islamic law influenced the development of Christian law and the role religious authorities –that is the Christian bishops– had to play in it. We talk through polygamy, confessional boundaries, and what households meant now and then; Weitz also fills us in on what the growing field of Syriac studies looks like, how it is changing, and how a scholar of the medieval Middle East gets their sources.Lev Weitz is an historian of the Islamic Middle East. He is an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, in the Department of History; he also directs the Islamic World Studies program at Catholic University. For academic year 2018-19, he will be a fellow of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He did his PhD at Princeton University at the Department of Near Easter Studies. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices