New Books in Religion

Anne Watts is one of the co-editors of the new book, The Collected letters of Alan Watts, released in January 2018 from New World Library. Anne Watts is a facilitator and educator who is committed to creating a world where everyone wins.  She honors each individual for the gift she or he is, and believes that love and nurturance are the most important aspects in human healing. She regularly leads workshops at the Esalen Institute and you can find her upcoming events online at www.annewatts.org.Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s Islam in Pakistan: A History(Princeton University Press, 2018) is a landmark publication in the fields of Religious Studies, modern Islam, South Asian Islam, and by far the most important and monumental contribution to date in the study of Islam in Pakistan. This book takes the reader on an intellectual roller-coaster, that through mesmerizingly layered archival work, makes visible for the first time in the Euro-American academy the religious thought of a number of previously unknown yet extremely important actors, while thoroughly complicating conventional wisdom about a number of familiar religious and political actors. As has been the hallmark of Zaman’s previous scholarship that traverses early, medieval, and modern Islam, the main strength of Islam in Pakistan also lies in the way it seamlessly moves between the close and unexpected analyses of complex religious texts and the careful historicizing of the significance and ambiguities invested in those texts and in the careers of their authors. In this book Zaman presents a detailed account of the ambiguities surrounding the relationship between multiple claimants to Islam in Pakistan. The chapters in this book examine a range of critical themes including the career and ethical commitments of modernism in Pakistan, ‘ulama’-state relations, shifting views on religious minorities, the complicated place of Sufism’s religious history, and the nuances involved in understanding jihad and militancy in Pakistan. This lucidly written book is a must-read for all students and scholars of Islam; it will also make a great text for advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars on modern Islam, South Asian Islam, and South Asian Religions.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Patrick S. McKay, an apostle of the Joint Conference of Restoration Branches, believes that the Latter Day Saint movement is fractured. But one day soon, he hopes, that will change. In his new book, Healing the Breach: Mormonism, Metaphors, and the Pieces of the Puzzle(Lulu Press, 2018), McKay has collected testimonies from various Latter Day Saints to reveal the rich tradition of similarity that exists among them. It is McKay’s intent to reunite the Latter Day Saint churches and to prove once and for all that they have more in common than previously thought.Each branch of the Latter Day Saint movement has a legacy of testimony that has been created, preserved, and transmitted since the movement’s founding, he asserts, and by revealing these testimonies, McKay hopes to promote an ecumenical ministry of healing, one that will unify the Latter Day Saint churches and encourage them to see their shared heritage. McKay’s musings are definitely worth a listen.Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts?  What role does it serve?  Join me as I speak with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British Academy, and distinguished professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University), co-editor of In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation (Routledge, 2019). This volume presents 13 fascinating studies on the role of dialogue in Indian religious tradition, all of which are touched on in the interview. This book is part of a series entitled "Dialogues in South Asian Traditions: Religion, Philosophy, Literature and History."For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

To what extent may we say that religion is a theatrical phenomenon, and that theatre is a religious experience? Can making sense of one help us make sense of the other? Join us as we dive into The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre (Routledge, 2018) with its author David V. Mason (editor-in-chief for Ecumenica: Performance and Religion and the South Asia area editor for Asian Theatre Journal) who posits an intriguing parity between theatre and religion.  Drawing heavily from Hindu aesthetic theory and Hindu religious performance, Mason examines the phenomenology of religion in an attempt to better understanding of the phenomenology of theatre, arguing that religion can show us the ways in which theatre is not fake.For information about your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/academia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael R. Cohen is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where he holds a Sizeler Professorship. He is the author of the newly published Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era from NYU Press (2017), as well as The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter's Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement from Columbia University Press (2012).  He earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University.Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Naomi Pullin, who is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK, has just published an outstanding account of Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Appearing in the prestigious series, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, the book offers the first account of the ways in which the institutionalism of one of the most controversial of the mid-seventeenth century new religious movements enhanced opportunities for its female members in the period leading up to the American war of independence. Drawing on a massive range of archival sources, Pullin reconstructs the Meetings that monitored the lives of Quaker women and which gave permissions for everything from marriage to missionary work. Paying attention to change over time, and variation across space, Pullin’s book sets a new standard in the study of early modern religious movements.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

Jewish women have consistently played a vital and significant role in American history more broadly, and American Jewish history specifically. Through a variety of different ways, from engaging in social activism, working outside the home, creating women’s organizations, or managing their households, Jewish women forged their own path and inserted themselves in the fabric of American life and history. In her new book, America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), Pamela S. Nadell tells the stories of America’s Jewish women, from the first Jewish women who arrived in the United States in 1654 to the very well-known Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the many women in between. Nadell’s study utilizes a variety of archival sources and oral histories to stitch together the rich history of America’s Jewish women.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