New Books in Religion

One scholar famously referred to the Gospels of the New Testament as passion narratives with long introductions. Such a view, however, tends to minimize the theological importance of Jesus’ life and ministry before his death. In today’s podcast, Dr. Brandon D. Crowe will balance the scales here to discuss his recent book, The Last Adam: A Theology of the Obedient Life of Jesus in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017). Brandon Crowe is associate professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia; he received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Brandon is the author of several books, including The Message of the General Epistles in the History of Redemption: Wisdom from James, Peter, John and Jude (P&R, 2015), and The Obedient Son: Deuteronomy and Christology in the Gospel of Matthew (de Gruyter, 2012). L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work challenges perceptions and categorizations of what Jewish magic is, and what its place in the Judaism of late antiquity was. It thus promises to facilitate a reappraisal of the performative practices, the beliefs and rituals, on which Jewish life as we know it is founded. Professor Harari’s work carefully and systematically examines a wide variety of Jewish texts and artifacts, and reveals the extent to which the practice of magic is woven into Jewish ritual, thought, culture, from Late Antiquity through and beyond the Middle Ages. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, Caner Dagli, and Mohammad Rustom). The book is a remarkable achievement. The text features a complete new translation of the Quran as well as multiple complementary essays written by leading scholars of Quranic studies. The tome also includes over a million words of running commentary from Muslim exegetes across the centuries including contributions from Sunni, Shii, and Sufi schools of thought among others. This feature, in particular, showcases its encompassing and truly oceanic scope. The text proves noteworthy as well, given its intersection between confessional scholarship and Western academic approaches to Islamic studies. The text has already begun to make waves across North America and beyond and has set a new precedent as not only a translation but also a reference work on Quran. Its user-friendly organization, moreover, will make the text accessible to just about anyone as it offers levels of depth according to what the reader seeks. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.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

In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explores the admiring and at times oppositional philosophical kinship between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the France’s greatest 20th century philosophers. One fundamental aspect of the Levinas-Derrida relationship is each man’s relationship to his Jewish identity and to Jewish text and tradition. Professor Hammerschlag delves into the resonances and far-reaching effects this relationship has for religion writ large, as well as for philosophy, literature, ethics, and political theology. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When people think of the Virgin Mary in terms of American religious history, there is a tendency to focus on opposition. For instance, Catholic devotion to Mary on the one side, and Protestant critique of that devotion on the other side. However, while recognizing the real differences in Catholic and Protestant belief about Mary, in her new book, The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Dr. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, shows that such simple binaries are problematic. Through a careful study of newspaper accounts, travelogues, literature, and art, Alvarez shows how Catholics and Protestants, while differing in what they believed about Mary and how they interacted with her, utilized her in very similar ways within popular culture. For instance, ideas of the purity of womanhood and domestic queenship resonated strongly with both audiences. This fascinating study would therefore be of interest to scholars of American religion and would be appropriate in a graduate or upper-level undergraduate class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Trying to figure out what Hitler “really” thought about anything is difficult because he was–among many other things–a clever, opportunistic politician and a very prolix one at that. Over the course of his 20+ career he gave thousands of speeches, wrote two long books “explaining” (if that’s the right word) his beliefs, and offered endless monologues to his acolytes on every imaginable topic. He was always adjusting his message to his audience, the result–taken together–being a mass of contradictions. Hitler was, well, a professional dissembler. Hitler’s inconstancy is never more evident than in his talk about religion. Depending on which Hitler you pay attention to, you can find him sounding like a Christian or a Pagan, a Believer or an Atheist, a supporter of established religion and someone who wanted to obliterate it. What he said on religious topics always depended on whom he was talking to and, more generally, when he was talking. As Richard Weikart points out in his terrific book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich (Regnery History, 2016), you really have to pay close attention to context and timing if you want to uncover Hitler’s likely religious beliefs. And that’s exactly what Weikart does in Hitler’s Religion. In the effort, he destroys myths (that Hitler was a Christian of any sort) and proves what has only been suspected (that Hitler would have destroyed the established Churches had he won the war). Weikart’s prose is crystal clear and the book is wonderfully organized. This is an excellent, readable history. You should read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Beginning with a network of reformed figures that orbited around Billy Graham, from J. Howard Pew’s money to Carl Henry’s passion for cultural esteem, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014) details the early history of institutions like the magazine Christianity Today, the Evangelical Theological Society, Fuller Theological Seminary and many other academic and cultural meeting grounds for white American protestants who wanted to rehabilitate the intellectual reputation of their traditions and win souls, and the culture, for Christ. With the close of World War II, the Cold War emerging, and battles over ideology commanding center stage in the American imaginary, Christian leaders in reformed protestant denominations set out to reverse the isolationist posture of fundamentalism and actively engaged the elements of western culture they opposed. Negotiating the idea of a “Christian Worldview” into a position of cultural power that laid the groundwork for the moral majority, these champions of a new protestant attitude toward the world outside church doors exerted their first influence on their nearest neighbors: fellow protestants in Mennonite, Methodist, and Pentecostal traditions. As the questions that troubled fundamentalist thinkers made inroads in these communities as well, thoughtful leaders from many American protestant communities came to be united by the struggles that were shared across the differences in history, doctrine, and practice that had previously held them apart. With rare attention to the ways in which the central ideas behind evangelicalism shifted as they were adopted by leaders across protestant faiths, Worthen creates a remarkably clear and nuanced view of the variety of white evangelicalisms. Closing with internal critiques from scholars like Mark Noll on the ways in which history, tradition, and authority are employed in intradenominational politicking and ongoing efforts to expand the borders of evangelicalism through church growth and culture war, Apostles of Reason presents a marvelously deft and cogent intellectual history of a powerful and dynamic force in American life through the twentieth century and to the present. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflects upon wider, contemporary debates about food ethics. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado. His book Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) provides an accessible and expansive narrative of the relationship between race, religion and the American nation from the colonial age to recent times. Harvey encompasses the story of Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans and how their religious experience defined their place within the national promise of religious freedom and pluralism. He demonstrates how religion was a tool for both subjugation and resistance to racial hierarchy. More recently Muslim, against the tide of religious prejudice and racialization, have sought their place in the nation and new immigrants are changing the face American Christianity. From the Spanish-American missions in the southwest to contemporary multi-ethnic urban churches, Harvey demonstrates the unique nature of American culture and how the nation has dealt with religious and racial diversity. As a synthesis of broad scholarship, Bounds of their Habitation is a must-read for anyone venturing out to understand this distinctive American phenomenon. Here is my conversation with Paul Harvey. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specifically debates about law’s effects on religion, Schonthal challenges the widely-held idea that constitutional law, properly administered, is a useful tool for reducing conflict between and within religious communities. Drawing on unpublished and previously unexamined archival materials written in Tamil, Sinhalese, and English, Schonthal argues that in the case of Sri Lanka constitutional law has actually hardened pre-existing religious conflicts and encouraged religious actors to use the law and courts to frame a variety of legal fights in explicitly religious terms. The pyrrhic constitutionalism in the subtitle of the book is the term that Schonthal has coined to describe how, in this case, the practice of constitutional law actually exacerbates the very problems it was designed to resolve. In the first half of the book, Schonthal details the fascinating history of two of Sri Lankas most important constitutions–an initial one in 1948, and a revised version ratified in 1972–focusing specifically on the section that addresses Buddhism and religion. Many familiar with the post-independence history of Sri Lanka might interpret this section as but a product of Buddhist chauvinism and Sinhala nationalism. However, by looking at an impressive number of drafts and archival materials, Schonthal reveals that the process of drafting this religious clause was in fact a messy back-and-forth between several competing parties, including those who wanted the government to completely remove itself from religious affairs, those who wanted the government to proactively protect religious rights, and those who hoped the state would grant Buddhism a special, protected status in post-colonial Sri Lanka. He further shows that even among those who wanted Buddhism to enjoy special protection there was much disagreement about how the government should execute such protection, and to what degree the government should assume responsibilities traditionally allocated to the saṅghas elders or sometimes to the king. The second half of the book provides case studies that detail precisely how it is that constitutional law exacerbates extant conflicts within and between religious groups. After providing a number of examples of the way in which the Buddhism and religion clause created an incentive for Buddhist groups to use the courts as a space for publicly airing their grievances, Schonthal then moves on to the case of a monk who applied for a driving license but, after a long legal process, was eventually denied. Scholars of Buddhism will find this case fascinating regardless of their area or period of expertise, for this highly contentious case, which captivated the Sri Lankan media and public, gets to the heart of a perennial issue within Buddhist societies, namely the degree to which secular rulers should be involved in enforcing Buddhist monastic rules. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Schonthal looks at Buddhist anxiety over religious conversion–specifically cases of Buddhists converting to Christianity–and again argues that constitutional law has inadvertently intensified this controversy. In the interview we barely scratch the surface of the book, and listeners interested in following Schonthal’s arguments in greater detail and reading the case studies, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion