New Books in Religion

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation of Dalits (those subordinated populations once called untouchables). In The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (Columbia University Press, 2014) Rupa Viswanath unpacks the creation and application of this so called “problem.”The interview explores the ways in which land, labour and ritual combined in producing the Pariah and the affect Protestant missionaries had in reshaping Pariah-ness, as well as the role of the colonial state and changes in house site ownership among other issues. Amazingly rich in detail and theoretically dynamic throughout, the book is relevant to numerous discussions in present day India and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scene of the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s while engaging her own devout spirituality at the same time. Coritas journey into printmaking took her beyond the confines of the college to the world of the most famous artists and designers in Los Angeles including Charles Eames, John Cage, Edward Kienholz, and Tony Duquette. She interacted with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other members of Los Angeles literary avant-garde. Clad in her nuns habit, Corita was more than a picturesque observer of the scene, however. Her highly refined silkscreens combining word and image with meticulously placed colors transformed the medium. She culled subject matter from the ideas of thinkers and social commentators ranging from Goethe to Isaiah, to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and radical priest and soul mate Daniel Berrigen. Corita’s students, many of whose voices color Dammann’s carefully researched book, were beneficiaries of Corita’s aesthetic and intellectual explorations. As we reconsider the life of Corita Kent, we are confronted, in the quiet yet powerful manner of the artist herself, with a woman whose contributions to the radical forms of the 1960s are immense. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hill. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Caroline Winterer is the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale University Press, 2016) gives us a glimpse into how eighteenth-century Americans, as the “first prophets of tomorrow,” thought of enlightenment, what it meant and how to achieve it. For centuries, enlightenment had a religious meaning of the soul awakening to divine light; increasingly it meant using reason and empirical evidence as guides and exchanging tradition and divine revelation for a humanistic and historical view of the world. The aim was nothing short of the pursuit of happiness. Winterer challenges mid-twentieth-century Cold War conceptualization of an American Enlightenment, as largely an appropriation of European ideas. The language of enlightenment was ubiquitous among educated Americans and applied to a broad range of endeavors. She demonstrates how the encounter with Indians, the expansion of slavery, the application of political economy, and the emergence of natural religion allowed Americans to contribute to a transatlantic conversation. By placing American thinkers within a transnational and a fresh hemispheric context and by adding local particularity Winterer allows us to see the diversity of American Enlightenments. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford University Press, 2016) to study how this seminal series of translations had started a novel way of understanding religions through a comparative study of texts and how it led to the shaping of the Western understanding of Eastern faith-traditions. Molendijk critically analyzes this rise of “big science” and also discusses the problems inherent in this approach of “textualisation of religion.” He revisits the limitations of translation and questions the assumptions behind them. He also looks into the person of Max Muller, specifically his scholarly aspect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). Green sees religion as a tool for social power and explores various religious economies to determine how interpretations of Islam are negotiated and deployed. What he shows is that modern iterations of the tradition are often shaped not only by Muslims, but also Christians and Hindus. In these sites of exchange religious actors and institutions can be analyzed as entrepreneurs and firms, which effectively compete for their clientele. Religious entrepreneurial competition and innovation fostered by Muslim/Christian interactions in imperial contexts contributed to the Muslims’ adaptation of Christian missionary methods for their own proselytization purposes. Overall, Green presents a world history of Islam that disrupts assertions of the unifying power of globalization on Muslims and illustrates the generative process within these terrains of exchange. In our conversation we discussed evangelical orientalism at England’s universities, Bibles and printing in Muslim societies, language-exchange, religious entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, traditions of Hindu-Sufism, and the construction of the first mosques in Detroit and Japan. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Beginning with the Catholic doctrine of the literal, embodied presence of Christ, scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. The gods really present, in the Catholic sense, were translated into metaphors and symptoms, and into functions of the social and political. Presence became evidence of superstition, of the infantile and irrational. History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016) confronts this intellectual heritage, proposing instead a model for the study of religion that begins with humans and gods present to each other in everyday life. These intersubjective encounters are always, Robert Orsi writes, an engagement with oneself and ones world in all modalities of being. Along the way, History and Presence examines Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, relations with the dead, clerical sexual abuse, and a host of other events and encounters. Robert Orsi holds the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University in Chicago. Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What does it mean to be a Christian historian? Can there be such a thing as Christian history? In his new book, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (Baylor University Press, 2015), Jay Green of Covenant College explores these and other related questions. Dr. Green manages to both objectively present different approaches to Christian historiography while providing his own helpful evaluations of their strengths and weaknesses gained through years of study and teaching. Dr. Green’s own approach, combined with his clear writing style and the tight organization of his book means that this work is not only of interest to historians (both Christians and non-Christians) but would be perfect for classroom use by undergraduates and graduates as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The words “Buddhism” and “enlightenment” are, at least in the West, tightly connected. “Everyone” knows that the goal–or at least one of the goals–of Buddhist practice is “enlightenment.” But what the heck is “enlightenment,” exactly? It’s a tough question, but Dale S. Wright takes it on in his aptly named book What is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016). Using a kind of Zen approach (my characterization, not his), Wright doesn’t slice and dice the concept in order to come up with some Platonic ideal of “enlightenment.” You won’t find any pithy definition of the idea in the pages of this book. Rather, you’ll discover a wide-ranging exploration of “Buddhist enlightenment”–what it has meant, what it now means, and what it might and even should mean in the future. Buddhists teach that everything is changing all the time, like it or not. So it is, Wright argues, with “Buddhist enlightenment.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Rory Dickson’s Living Sufism in North America: Between Tradition and Transformation (SUNY Press, 2015) is the first monograph in English to focus on Sufism in North America. On this note, Dickson takes a risk by marking himself as a trendsetter in this emerging field, and he succeeds admirably. The book offers a fine balance of historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and theoretical frameworks, which can help inform future studies of Sufism in North America as well as Western Sufism more broadly. Although there are a few edited volumes that explore Sufism in the West, Dickson’s single-author voice gives continuity to his study and narrative in an important and unique way. One of the elephants in the room, moreover, that he tackles head on is in response to the question: What’s the relationship between Islam and Sufism? In a way, responses to this question are what produced the phenomenon of Western Sufism in the first place, and the cacophony of voices that continue to address this question animates much of Dickson’s book. He treats a number of “Islamic” as well as “non-Islamic” Sufi orders and remains in conversation with the various time periods and influences that inform his topic throughout his well-written and fascinating book; thus although he focuses on North America, the reader is frequently reminded that Europe, South Asia, and other places are also an important part of the conversation. On top of Dickson’s careful attention to detail, extensive footnotes, and thoughtful placement of excerpts from the many interviews he conducted, he writes in a very inviting and accessible manner, which will likely draw broad readership ranging from scholars of Sufism and American religion to journalists and lay readers wishing to know more about America’s layered interactions with spirituality, Islam, and religion in general. 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

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr. Carsten Schapkow looks beyond the typical model of German-Jewish assimilation in response to emancipation in German lands a failed model, according to many to uncover the paradigm that Jews in Germany really spoke, wrote, and dreamed about during the long 19th century: the history of the Iberian Sephardic Jews as their model. From popular journalists and authors such as Heinrich Graetz and Ludwig Philippson to elite academics, from scientists to philosophers, Jews in Germany imagined their future according to their understanding of Jewish life under Muslims and Christians in Spain and Portugal during the so-called Golden Age and the period of la convivencia. According to their understanding of that era in Iberia, Jews had served as cultural mediators, their language and other skills enabling Jews to benefit the majority culture. Jews integrated into the majority culture, according to this view, without sacrificing their identity. They were able to make a difference not only within Jewish history, that describes this era as a Golden Age, but also be regarded as important participants in Iberian culture, diplomacy, science, and philosophy. Dr. Schapkow draws on an impressive variety of sources to prove his point. Dr. Schapkow spoke to New Books in Jewish Studies from Germany, sharing very interesting insights into both the history of Iberian Jews and the history of German Jews offering a window onto extraordinarily engaging questions. Read this exceptional book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion