New Books in Religion

As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation’s public institutions, especially its prisons, hospitals and military. In her newest book, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Winnifred F. Sullivan offers a comprehensive study of contemporary chaplaincy, paying particular attention to how it sits at the intersection of law, government regulation, and spiritual care. She shows how much this ubiquitous but often invisible institution can tell us about religion in the US today, and moreover the role that law plays in structuring American ideas about, and experience of, religion. Winnifred F. Sullivan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Affiliate Professor in the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University Bloomington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic legitimization of knowledge in emerging European modernities. Here, the discursive entanglements of professional and participant explanations of modern practices shaped and solidified those realities. Key figures in the history of the field of Religious Studies, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, played instrumental roles in legitimizing the authority of mysticism, goddess worship, and shamanism. Ultimately, what we discover is that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are not so much distinctive spheres but elastic systems that arise within the particular circumstances of secular modernity. In our conversation we discussed discursive approaches to the study of religion, the Theosophical Society, marginalized forms of knowledge, the occult sciences, Jewish mysticism, secularization, nature-focused spiritualities, experiential knowledge, pagan religious practices, and ‘modern’ science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Old Testament is often maligned as an outmoded and even dangerous text. Best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, and Derrick Jensen are prime examples of those who find the Old Testament to be problematic to modern sensibilities. In his new book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor UP, 2014), Iain W. Provan counters that such easy and popular readings misunderstand the Old Testament. He opposes modern misconceptions of the Old Testament by addressing ten fundamental questions that the biblical text should–and according to Provan does–answer: questions such as “Who is God?” and “Why do evil and suffering mark the world?” By focusing on Genesis and drawing on other Old Testament and extra-biblical sources, Seriously Dangerous Religion constructs a more plausible reading. As it turns out, Provan argues, the Old Testament is far more dangerous than modern critics even suppose. Since 1997, Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a co-author, with V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman, of A Biblical History of Israel (John Knox Press, 2003), and the author of Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was (Baylor University Press, 2013). Provan received his MA in Medieval history and archaeology from Glasgow University, his BA in theology from London Bible College, and his PhD from Cambridge University. His academic teaching career has taken him to King’s College London, the University of Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. Provan is an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland; a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Recent years have witnessed a spate of journalistic and popular writings on the looming threat to civilization that lurks in traditional Islamic seminaries or madrasas that litter the physical and intellectual landscape of the Muslim world. In his riveting new book What is a Madrasa? (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of History and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, challenges such sensationalist stereotypical narratives by providing a nuanced and richly textured account of the place and importance of Madrasas in Islam both historically and in the contemporary moment. Rather than approaching madrasas from a policy studies viewpoint as institutions requiring reform and modernization, this book instead examines madrasas on their own terms with a view of highlighting their internal complexities and tensions. Focused primarily on the madrasas of South Asia, what makes this book particularly remarkable is the way it brings together the intellectual histories and traditions that define madrasa education and the everyday practices in madrasa life today. The reader of this book travels through an arcade of the seminal texts, scholars, and sites that have shaped the madrasa as an institution and its curricula over the last several centuries. But moreover, this book also provides readers intimate portraits of daily life at madrasas through the eyes of students who study there, thus bringing into view the rhythms of everyday practices that punctuate the lives of madrasa students, and the hopes, anxieties, and aspirations that irrigate their religious and social imaginaries. In our conversation, in addition to discussing these themes, we also talked about Professor Moosa’s own journey as a teenager in the madrasas of South Asia to the corridors of the American academy. Written in an exceptionally lucid fashion, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of Muslim traditions of knowledge and education. It will also be particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on Muslim intellectual thought, education, and Islam in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Joyce B. Flueckiger‘s new bookWhen the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess (Indiana University Press, 2013) is a rich and colorful analysis of the goddess Gangamma’s festival and her devotees. During the festival men take on female guises, whilst women intensify the rituals that they perform throughout the year. The books explores the excess of the goddess and the lives of those who bear her.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In a liberal democracy, citizens share political power as equals. This means that they must decide laws and policies collectively. Yet they disagree about fundamental questions regarding the value, purpose, and meaning of life. What role should their convictions concerning these matters play in their public activity as citizens? According to familiar answers, citizens must bracket or constrain the role that their religious convictions plays in their public lives. But many religious citizens find this unacceptable. Some of these hold that their religious views should determine law and policy. But that, too, looks unacceptable. In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge, 2014), Kevin Vallier develops a novel view of the role of religious conviction and reasoning in liberal democracy. On his view, religious citizens will rarely need to constrain the role that their religious convictions play in their public activities. However, Vallier also contends that public officials and institutions cannot determine public policy solely on the basis of religious reasons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Blood. It is more than a thing and more than a metaphor. It is an effective concept, an element, with which, and through which, Christianity becomes what it is. Western Christianity – if there is such a thing as “Christianity” singular – embodies a deep hemophilia (a love of blood) and even a hematology (a theology of blood) that divides Christianity from itself: theology from medicine, finance from politics, religion from race, among many other permutations. This is the claim of Gil Anidjar, Professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His recent book, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a wide-ranging, challenging monograph that is both searing and poetic, taking the reader on a journey through biblical texts, medieval controversies, and contemporary critical theory. It asks what Anidjar calls “the Christian Question” in order to destabilize taken for granted assumptions about the naturalness of certain categories related to blood and contextualize them instead within the particular history of post-Medieval Christianity. 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 book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misunderstood by both Sinhala nationalists, who have appropriated him for their own political ends, and scholars, who have portrayed Dharmapala primarily as a social reformer and a Sinhala chauvinist. Making extensive use of theJournal of the Mahabodhi Society,effectively a forum for the expression of Dharmapala’s own opinions, and the entirety of Dharmapala’s meticulous diaries, which cover a forty-year period, Kemper asserts that Dharmapala was above all a religious seeker–a world renouncer who at times sought to emulate the life of the Buddha. Central to Kemper’s study of Dharmapala are the diametrically opposed themes of universalism and nationalism.While Dharmapala was realistic in so far as he understood that the various Buddhist sects and orders could not be united due to sectarian, ethnic, and caste and class-related divisions, his Buddhist identity was in no way based on his own Sinhala identity, and his life was organized around three universalisms: an Asian Buddhist universalism, the universalism of Theosophy, and the universalism of the British imperium.He spent most of his adult life living outside of Sri Lanka and at various times imagined and hoped to be reborn in India, Japan, Switzerland, and England. Dharmapala devoted much of his life to establishing Buddhist control of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, India, which had been the legal property of a Saivite monastic order since the early eighteenth century and had since come to be thoroughly incorporated into a Hindu pilgrimage route. His interest in the temple was in part a result of his own efforts to follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, but was also his attempt to establish a geographical point of focus for Buddhists–a Buddhist Mecca, if you will–around which Buddhists could rally and come together. He looked to many sources of potential support, including the Bengali elite, Japan, the Thai royal family, and British government officials in India, but in the end failed to achieve his aim. In contrast to previous depictions of Dharmapala as a Protestant Buddhist who encouraged the laicization of Buddhism, Kemper shows that Dharmapala was if anything an ascetic at heart who believed celibacy was a prerequisite for soteriological progress and participation in Buddhist work (sasana), who emphasized meditation, and whose spiritual aspirations are visible from a very early age.Kemper also shows that the influence of Theosophy on Dharmapala’s interpretation of Buddhism and thought more broadly did not end with his formal break with the American Colonel Olcott and the Theosophical Society in 1905, but continued to the end of his life, a fact obscured by Sinhala nationalistic portrayals of him. At some 500 pages,Rescued from the Nationincludes detailed discussions of many contemporaneous figures, movements, and trends. These include Japanese institutional interest in India, Japanese nationalism, and the struggles of Japanese Buddhism in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration; the World Parliament of Religions that took place in Chicago in 1893 and the emergence of the category of “world religion”; the Bengali Renaissance and associated figures such as Swami Vivekananda; Western interest in Buddhism and Indian religion; and South Asian resistance to British colonial governance. In this way, this book will be of great value to those interested in Asian religions and modernity, Buddhist and Hindu revival movements, Asian nationalisms, and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Most world religions textbooks follow a structure and conceptual framework that mirrors the modern discourse of world religions as distinct entities reducible to certain defining characteristics. In his provocative and brilliant new book Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History (University of California Press, 2015), James Laine, Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College challenges this dominant paradigm of world religions textbooks by showcasing an approach that instead focuses on the interaction of religion and power across time and space. At once ambitious and lucid, Meta-Religion narrates the story of the complex intersection of religion and politics in multiple moments, places, and traditions. A hallmark of this book is the way it engages the religious and political history of Islam and Muslim societies in conversation with other religious traditions. What emerges from this exercise is a rich and fascinating picture of the complicated and at times conflicting ways in which religiously diverse and plural societies have been managed through particular political arrangements and ideologies in different historical moments. In our conversation we talked about the idea of meta-religion, different varieties of meta-religion in India, Rome, and China, the marginalization of Islam and Muslim history in Euro-American world historical periodizations, Meta-Religion in Muslim history, Akbar and his experimentation with meta-religion, and meta-religion in the modern and contemporary context. This book will be of great interest to specialists in Islamic Studies and other scholars of religion and religious history; it will also make an excellent text for courses on Islam and world history, Introduction to Religion, and on theories and methods in Religious Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

People living in the modern west generally have no problem criticizing religiously-justified violence. It’s therefore always interesting when I discuss John Brown, a man who legitimized anti-slavery violence Biblically. My most recent batch of students sought to resolve this tension by declaring John Brown to be “crazy but right.” In his new book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford University Press, 2014), Ted A. Smith unravels the tensions that led to my students’ ambiguous conclusion. By providing a profound ethical meditation on Brown and his fellow raiders to challenge how people, particularly Americans, think about morality; the relationship between religion, the state, and violence; and to the possibilities of judgment and redemption, Smith illustrates how an ethical and philosophical reading of history can help us to better understand the world we live in, what we should do, and of the importance of going beyond just what we ought to do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion