New Books in Religion

During the early twentieth century, Yemeni Jews operated within a legal structure that defined them as dhimmi, that is, non-Muslims living as a protected population under the sovereignty of an Islamic state. In exchange for the payment of a poll tax, the jizya, and the acknowledged of supremacy of Islam, their lives and property were to be inviolable. Although this framework burdened Jews with some legal disadvantages, for example a Muslim’s witness testimony was worth double that of a Jew’s in court, it allowed for the integration of Jews into Yemen’s complex hierarchical social structure, and not always at the bottom of that structure. Mark S. Wagner’s book Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen (Indiana University Press, 2015) examines how Jews negotiated this Islamic legal system, both in shariah courts and in extralegal settings. Wagner employs numerous Arabic and Hebrew sources, particularly the memoirs of prominent Yemeni Jews such as Salim Said al-Jamal, Salih al-Zahiri, Salim Mansurah, and others, and the primary document collections they have preserved. Through their first-hand accounts, anecdotes, and archives, Wagner interrogates how the Yemeni Jewish elite understood its social and political position in Yemen. These men used their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic law, and their status as intermediaries between the state authorities and the Jewish community, to preserve their own positions and to benefit other members of the Jewish community. Wagner’s work deepens our understanding of Muslim-Jewish relations in Yemen and the place of non-Muslims in Islamic law in general. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also consider whether theism provides a good reason for the pervasiveness of religious belief across human societies across time, and argue that the seemingly obvious conclusion that a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs debunks these beliefs is not at all obvious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice At fourteen, young Shulem Deen, a Hassid in Boro Park, New York, lost his loving father. How was he to deal with the enormous gap in his life that his father’s early death left? He embraced -and was embraced by – a pious spiritual community, the Skverer Hassidim, who had their own town, New Square, New York. In this discreet town of approximately 12,000, only 30 miles north of New York city, the Skverer Hassidim could control everything, or nearly so. So began Deen’s immersion in the life of the Skverer Hassidim, an Eastern European Hassidic group transplanted to the New World — without change! For a time, Deen’s new life worked. He studied, married, had children—but this thinking, questioning young man soon learned that there was no room for questions that challenged accepted norms of the community. How he navigated the need to be honest with himself with the demands of family he loved makes for a page-turning memoir. This well-written book takes the reader through little-known aspects of a Hassidic community, both its strengths and vulnerabilities. At once a wealth of psychological, sociological, and just plain interesting episodes as Deen grows and matures, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2015) rewards the reader with distinctive insights into the ultra-religious world of the Hassidim. Shulem Deen’s popular memoir about his life in an insular Hassidic community breaks new ground, written as it is from a male perspective. Having left New Square, Deen founded and edits Unpious, Voices of the Hassidic Friend, an online journal. He is on the board of Footsteps, an important New York-based group that helps people who choose to transition out of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world. Shulem writes for The Forward, Tabletmag, and other publications. His memoir has been hailed in newspapers and magazines as diverse as The Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. He speaks regularly to audiences in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere about his life and memoir. Read this compelling account of a young man’s immersion in an embracing spiritual community and his struggle to be true to himself and his loved ones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eighteenth century, The Life of the Buddha (or more fully rendered, The Life of the Lord Victor Shakyamuni, Ornament of One Thousand Lamps for the Fortunate Eon) takes the form of twelve major life episodes that collectively provide a “blueprint for an ideal Buddhist life,” as readers follow the Bodhisattva from early pages teaching the gods in the heavenly realm of Tushita, to a descent to the human realm and birth into the world as a prince, his education and general frolicking, his escape from the palace and vanquishing of a demon army, his eventual enlightenment and Buddhahood, and ultimately his death. Tenzin Chogyel, a prominent leader in the Drukpa Kagyu school of Buddhism in Bhutan during the golden age of Bhutanese literature, intended to tell a good story, and tell a good story he did. The account is by turns gripping and exceptionally moving, with a particularly affecting scene toward the end of the work as the Buddha’s son Rahula comes to term with his father’s impending death. The translation is thoughtful and quite beautiful, with the sentences likely to remind a careful reader of the rhythm and pacing of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The book will make an excellent addition to undergraduate syllabi in a wide range of courses (listen to the interview for details!) at all levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,’ is not a new one. In Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014), Marion Holmes Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, traces the juristic debates around women’s mosque attendance. Katz outlines the various arguments, caveats, and positions of legal scholars in the major schools of law and demonstrates that despite some differing opinions there was generally a downward progression towards gendered exclusion in mosques.   were engaged in at the mosque, the time of day, the permission of their husbands or guardians, attire, and the multitude of conditions that needed to be met. Later interpreters feared women’s presence in the mosque because they argued it stirred sexual temptation. Katz pairs these legal discourses with evidence of women’s social practice in the Middle East and North Africa from the earliest historical accounts through the Ottoman period. In our conversation we discuss types of mosque actdivities, Mamluk Cairo, women’s educational participation, the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the transmission of knowledge, European travelers accounts of Muslim women, night prayers, mosque construction, debates about the mosque in Mecca, and modern developments in legal discussions during the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kevin O’Neill‘s fascinating book Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) traces the efforts of multi-million dollar programs aimed at state security through gang prevention in Guatemala. O’Neill is most interested in the ways that Christianity and ideas about piety, salvation, redemption, and transformation guide and shape a variety of programs in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and, perhaps surprisingly, reality television and call centers. This is a finely hewn multi-sited ethnography as well as a moving account of the life of a single former gang member. At its core is a tension between the critique of programs that range from the absurd to the tragic, and a recognition that without those programs, former gang members in Guatemala would be relegated to the barest of bare lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the millennialist faith of the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches, this careful ethnography calls into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern societies. It asks, how do the fishermen of Gamrie experience life as both modern and enchanted? Joseph Webster is Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. The Anthropology of Protestantism comes out in paperback in June 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scientists have begun to mark out new ground for robust conversation. Tom McLeish‘s book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes this conversation to new heights. Locating the impulse for science in much biblical literature, particularly the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, he shows how one might understand science as a theological endeavor. Rather than a paradigm of “science and theology,” he posits a “theology of science,” an interrelationship that not only gives us new eyes with which to read the history of science more coherently but also yields a renewed appreciation for science as part of a “ministry of reconciliation” with the natural world and the causes of human suffering. Tom McLeish is Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University. He studied for his first degree and PhD in polymer physics at the University of Cambridge and in 1987 became a lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield. In 1993 he took the chair in polymer physics at the University of Leeds. He took up his current position in Durham in 2008. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society. He is also involved in science communication with the public via radio, television, and school lectures, discussing topics ranging from the physics of slime to the interaction of faith and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Dealing with moral issues in a fair and balanced way is never easy. This is especially true since many contemporary moral questions are of such a highly personal nature. However, in his book An Introduction to Catholic Ethics Since Vatican II (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Andrew Kim does an excellent job of sensitively introducing the Catholic Church’s teachings on moral issues and the reasoning behind them. Through his deep knowledge of Catholic moral theology and an ability to explain difficult concepts through easy-to-understand metaphors, Dr. Kim has written a rich and thought-provoking book that will be useful for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of Catholic ethics, as well as for those who have to teach it to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Studies on the subject of women’s participation in religious and intellectual life in Islam have been few.Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013)byAsma Sayeed, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, is a much needed addition to the fields of early and classical Islamic history, the study of hadith and its transmission, and women’s studies. Professor Sayeed leads readers through nine centuries, from the seventhto sixteenth century CE, of religious, social, and intellectual history of women’s participation as transmitters of hadith, the words and actions of Muhammad. Women’s participation within this area was not static, but ebbed and flowed throughout history as demonstrated in this book’s four chapters. Women were critical in the dissemination of hadith in the first century of Islam. As the study of hadith became more specialized from the fourthto tenthcentury, women were marginalized as transmitters which Sayeed validates through biographical dictionaries and chronicles as well as quantitative data from chains of transmissions, isnads, from numerous hadith collections. By the tenthcentury, the canonization of hadith was by and large complete. This ushered in a new phase in which women again became important actors in the reception and propagation of hadith. This period would last until the end of the Mamluk period and the rise of Ottomans in the sixteenthcentury, but this second decline would be for different reasons. Throughout each phase of this history, Professor Sayeed provides case studies on different women to further her argument on the participation of women, even at the least active moments, as propagators of hadith. Professor Sayeed has brought new understanding of women’s intellectual lives in the history of Islam and has opened the door for further inquiry into this subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion