New Books in Religion

In his new book, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality (Baker Academic, 2019), renowned scholar Michael Gorman examines the important Pauline theme of participation in Christ, a topic of great interest in New Testament circles and one that is central to Paul's theology and spirituality.Building on his previous work on the topic, Gorman carefully examines participation in Christ in Paul's letters. His book explores this theme across the letters and includes in-depth studies of key texts such as Galatians 2, 2 Corinthians 5, and Philippians 2. Gorman also explores the contemporary significance of participating in Christ for Christian life and ministry, arguing that it has wide implications for the life of the believer.Throughout the book, Gorman insightfully unpacks the many theological, spiritual, and pastoral dimensions of participation in Christ and shows its close connection to such related themes as cruciformity, resurrection, justification, theosis, mission, and apocalyptic.Dr. Michael J. Gorman is the Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary's Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland. He formerly served as dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's. Gorman is the author of numerous books, including Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, Inhabiting the cruciform God, Scripture and Its Interpretation, and Elements of Biblical Exegesis.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Millions of tourists visit Holocaust museums and memorials every year. Holocaust tourism is a thriving industry and plays a crucial role in Holocaust memorialization and remembrance. However, Holocaust tourism is not without criticism. Some argue that sightseeing at sites of genocide is cringeworthy, offensive, inappropriate, and superficial. In Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (NYU Press, 2018), Daniel Reynolds examines the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, its implication on Holocaust remembrance, and what we can learn from tourists taking selfies at Auschwitz. Postcards from Auschwitz transports the reader to a variety of museums and memorial sites around the world to unpack the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism.Daniel Reynolds is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in Department of German Studies at Grinnell College.Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers foster an ethics of care in the Himalayan communities of Ladakh. She explores the way these relations are changing due to climate change, the growth of the wage economy at the expense of traditional agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and increased military presence resulting from Ladakh's status as a border area. This book will be of interest to those who are interested in the anthropology of ethics, ethics in Buddhist communities, and the anthropology of climate change.Kate Hartmann is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. Her work explores issues of perception and materiality in Tibetan pilgrimage literature, and she can be reached at chartmann@fas.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Since the fall of the Indonesian New Order regime in 1998 there has been a steady rise of Islamic popular culture in the nation. Muslim consumers and producers have cultivated a mediated domain where they can encounter commercial entertainment though the prism of spiritual reflection and piety. In Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Alicia Izharuddin, Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate at Harvard Divinity School, explores the development of the Islamic film genre with a specific focus on gender representation. Indonesian cinema throughout the New Order era focused on Muslim characters, both men and women, frequently framing them in nationalistic ideals. But after the record success of 2008’s film, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), the viewing preferences of Indonesian Muslim audiences were met with a slew of Islamically themed films. These often contained the repetition of formulaic tropes and symbols deemed Islamic in order to sell out the box office. In our conversation we discussed the characteristics of the film Islami genre, the importance of gender analysis and feminist methodologies, the role of women as actors and filmmakers, idealized masculinities, the public piety of celebrity actresses, producing a “Good Muslim”/ “Bad Muslim” narrative dichotomy, films about the famous Wali Songo saints, and mediated public Islamic values in contemporary Indonesia.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of genuine engagement on the personal, cultural, and political levels -- but also as a person at times deeply affected by loss, dislocation, and marginalization.David Gottlieb earned his PhD, studying under Professor Mendes-Flohr in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in 2018. He teaches at Spertus Institute in Chicago, and is the author of the forthcoming Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ah, science fiction: Aliens? Absolutely. Robots? Of course. But why are there so many priests in space? As Jim Clarke writes in Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy (Gylphi, 2019), science fiction has had an obsession with Roman Catholicism for over a century. The religion is the genre’s dark twin as well as its dirty secret. In this first ever study of the relationship between Catholicism and science fiction, Jim Clarke explores the genre's co-dependence and antagonism with the largest sect of Christianity. Tracking its origins all the way back to the pamphlet wars of the Enlightenment and speculative fiction's Gothic origins, Clarke unveils a story of robot Popes, Jesuit missions to the stars, first contact between aliens and the Inquisition, and rewritings of the Reformation. Featuring close readings of over fifty SF texts, he examines how the genre’s greatest invention might just be the imaginary Catholicism it repeatedly and obsessively depicts, a faux Catholicism at odds with the religion's own intriguing interest in both science and the possibility of alien life.Jim Clarke is Senior Lecturer and Course Director of English and Journalism at Coventry University, where he lectures on Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess, and has written extensively on JG Ballard, Doctor Who, and Iain M Banks. He is principal investigator on the “Ponying the Slovos” project, which investigates invented languages in translation.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). This book opens up an entirely new field for the study of early modern women’s writing, but it also pushes beyond other scholarly conventions to prompt new discussions about the purpose and performance of catechising, the character of household religion and its relationship to education and particularly the teaching of literacy, as well as the capacity of women to create systems of doctrine, with sometimes surprising sources and results. But the book raises other questions as well, not least why it is that the recovery of early modern religion, and particularly the religion of early modern women, so often takes place within literature departments. Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England is a major statement in early modern religious history, and a ground-breaking work in the recovery of early modern women’s voices.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In the absence of any real certainty about the nature and intention of the early sources that tell us the story of the early Islamic period, how can we use them? What sort of methodological approaches may we deploy to elucidate the meanings of texts, often similar in their core elements, but with divergent perspectives and intentions that cut across a range of genres? In The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Najam Haider, Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard, follows his two earlier books on Shi'ism with an exploration of the link between early Islamic historical writing and Late Antique and Classic Rhetoric. Najam seeks not to supplant positivist approaches to history with his new methodology, but rather to ask new kinds of questions relating to intention, meaning, and community.Aaron Hagler is an assistant professor of history at Troy University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dr. Eugene Schlesinger is the author of Sacrificing the Church: Mass, Mission, and Ecumenism (Fortress Press, 2019). Gene teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. An Episcopalian systematic theologian, he is primarily engaged in Catholic theology, and specializing in ecclesiology and sacramental theology.Schlesinger, in Sacrificing the Church, writes about the intermingling of three key elements of Christian worshipping communities: the eucharist, mission and outreach to the wider world, and the unity between Christian faith traditions. These three aspects of Church life form three major vignettes in the book, highlighting the importance of each as necessary to one another. One cannot have the Mass, the “sending out,” without mission, and one cannot have “one body in Christ” unless ecumenism is carried out.Schlesinger’s work is ultimately constructive—though willing to critique injustice, infighting, or insularity within Church walls, his arguments coalesce around eschatology, the perfection of all things in Christ’s “here and not yet” work of uniting all things to himself.Will Sipling is a fellow of the Department of Catholic Studies and the Thomas J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). Will previously studied for a master’s degree at Dallas Theological Seminary, writing a thesis on sacramental and liturgical theology. His research interests include asceticism and monasticism, ecumenism, and Anglicanism. You can follow his work at williamsipling.com or at @WSipling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion