New Books in Religion

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing them as physical objects embedded in pragmatic, economic, and social frameworks. She provides analyses of several significant Tibetan books which usually carry Buddhist teachings including a selection of manuscripts from Dunhuang from the 1st millennium C.E., examples of illuminated manuscripts from Western and Central Tibet dating from the 15th century, and fragments of printed Tibetan Kanjurs from as early as 1410. This detailed study of bookmaking sheds new light on the books’ philosophical meanings.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of identifying and delimiting the Chinese Buddhist canon. Storch has written this work with two goals in mind, which correspond to two different audiences she is targeting. On the one hand, she aims to present the first-ever English-language overview of Chinese Buddhist bibliography, a feat she accomplishes through an examination of catalogs in their chronological order of appearance (chapters 2-5). Along the way she highlights a number of important points and developments: the way in which Sengyou (445-518) was indebted to earlier catalogs other than Daoan’s, Buddhist appropriation of the organizing principles used in catalogs of Confucian texts, the unprecedented production of catalogs of Buddhist texts during the short-lived Sui dynasty (581-618), the growth of the sutra section of the canon and simultaneous shrinking of the Vinaya section, and the reasons for the eventual decline of the catalog’s authority, to name but a few to name but a few of the issues that Storch addresses. The extraordinary number of names of people and texts appearing in these chapters would be overwhelming for readers not prepared for such detail were it not for the tables that Storch has thoughtfully included at the end of each of these four chapters, in which she lays out the contents and structure of the various catalogs discussed therein. This is in addition to a very helpful seventeen-page table appended to the end of the book that provides in table format an overview of the first five centuries of Chinese Buddhist bibliography. Storch’s second goal is to make Chinese Buddhist bibliography accessible to non-specialists. Because discussions of the Chinese Buddhist canon are written in Japanese or Chinese, or, if in a Western language, they are written for other Sinologists or scholars of Chinese Buddhism, the Chinese Buddhist canon has been consistently absent from academic treatments of canon formation and sacred scripture in comparative perspective. (Incidentally, scholarship on the corpus of Confucian classics has been more accessible, and thus this body of texts has not suffered the same fate.) Lamenting this fact, Storch hopes to make the Chinese tripikakaa “household name.” To this end, she devotes chapter 7 to a comparison of the Chinese canon and Chinese Buddhist canonical authority to the development of the New Testament and Hellenistic catalogs of texts. She considers, for example, the way in which both Chinese catalogers and those attempting to delimit the boundaries of the New Testament both attempted to verify the authenticity of a given text by verifying the authenticity of the transmitter of that text, the transmitter being the translator in the case of Chinese Buddhism and the apostle in the case of the New Testament. In this way, Storch’s book will be of great value not only to those attempting to understand the notions of canon, orthodoxy, and religious authority in the context of Chinese Buddhism (and Chinese textual culture more generally) but also to those examining these concepts in cross cultural perspective, particularly with regard to the past evaluations of sacred scripture and corpora of such texts. 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 martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, in which he tells the story of Japanese Catholics and foreign missionaries during Japan’s “Christian Century” (1549-1650). Despite being published nearly fifty years ago, this novel continues to receive attention and spark debate. Dr. Mark Dennis and Dr. Darren Middleton, both of Texas Christian University, continue the discussion in their edited volume Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel, published by Bloomsbury. Through a collection of thought-provoking essays, this anthology deals with these, and related questions, from multiple perspectives, leading to a rich discussion. This anthology also includes an afterword by Martin Scorsese on his film adaption of Silence. I hope you will enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Rick Strassman‘s first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, showcases his research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, during which he injected several volunteers with DMT as part of a government-sanctioned research project. During the trials, volunteers experienced a number of similar phenomena, such as communication with other-than-human beings, out-of-body experiences, and geometrically complex closed-eye visuals. DMT and the Soul of Prophecy complements Strassman’s first book, but it also stands on its own and gives enough context of his DMT research to make sense of his arguments about prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. The new monograph aims to further interpret the data from Strassman’s experiments in the 90s, by arguing that the notion of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling model for what happens in the DMT state. One might ask, then, if the Hebrew prophets were affected by DMT. Although it’s not possible to know for sure, and Strassman doesn’t claim that they were, he nonetheless draws significant parallels between DMT experiences and prophetic states in the Hebrew Bible. At the cross-section of biology, psychology, and religious studies, Strassman’s monograph is sure to spark provocative conversations about the relationship between religion, drugs, and the politics of research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Alicia Turner tells the story of how Burmese Buddhists reimagined their lives, their religious practice and politics in the period of 1890 to 1920, following the fall of Mandalay to the British. Whereas many histories narrate the modern anti-colonial struggle in Burma from the 1920s onwards, Turner shows how in the preceding decades Buddhists were working to navigate, explain and respond to rapidly changing conditions through familiar tropes of Buddhist decline and revival, often for new and innovative purposes, and with unfamiliar consequences. By juxtaposing the dynamic Buddhist concept of sasana with the bureaucratic colonial category of “religion” she explains how projects to bring Buddhist practice into alignment with colonial government failed and how new types of conflict emerged, and with them, new identity politics and interest groups. “Turner’s book not only contributes to the study of religious transformations in mainland Southeast Asia but makes substantial contributions to larger scholarly conversations on Buddhist modernities and comparative colonialism,” Anne Hansen writes. “It will be required reading for everyone in the growing field of Theravada Studies.” Saving Buddhism also recommends itself to anyone following what is going on in Burma, or Myanmar, today, since the “modes of mobilization and collective belonging” it describes help us to understand how people continue to act in defence of sasana there, and why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Kelly James Clark acknowledges that for many people in the contemporary West it can seem as though scientists, from Darwin and Dawkins, have succeeded in disproving religion: God is simply not a convincing scientific hypothesis. Written in a readable and fast paced style, Religion and the Sciences of Origins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) turns this idea on its head, offering multiple ways that science and religion interact and even integrate. Focusing on two major issues – the origin of the universe and the origin of species – Clark unravels the many stories and experiments that have led us to where we are today. He covers luminaries, such as Galileo and Bacon; key ideas, from Cartesian dualism to the Big Bang; and the development of new fields, including evolutionary psychology of religion and neurotheology. Drawing on his training in philosophy, Clark leads readers to contemplate big questions about the nature of morality and the existence of absolutes. He concludes by exploring similar issues in Islam and Judaism, offering new perspectives on the interaction between science and religion. Dr. Clark is in the Honors Program at Brooks College and is Senior Research Fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America, peddling was among the most prevalent of professions. It allowed those without large amounts of capital to quickly start their own businesses. Jewish men took to the roads, selling household items door to door in small towns, rural areas, mining camps and on Indian reservations. In the process, these men learned about the languages and cultures of their new homelands. At the same time, peddlers were agents of change and modernization, introducing their customers to new products, tastes and kinds of consumption, while linking rural areas to the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities. Diner’s book analyzes the symbiotic relationship that developed between Jewish peddlers and the women whose homes they entered. Their intimate interactions facilitated Jewish integration, while often upsetting racial and gender norms. Peddling changed the lives of the peddlers and their customers during a transformative moment of modern Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sophia Rose Arjana explores a variety of creative productions–including art, literature, film–in order to tell a story not about how Muslims construct their own identities but rather about how Western thinkers have constructed ideas about Muslims and monsters. To what extent are these imaginary constructs real? Is it possible for one’s imagination to create things that are more telling than what is actually real? Arjana’s monograph is compelling, in part, because of the plethora of examples she offers–from a range of cultures and time periods–to help us understand just how deeply stereotypes and fears run in the very fabric of Western imaginations. She demonstrates, in fact, that it’s not just Muslims who are portrayed in troubling ways, but also characters that seem foreign to any extent. Dracula, for example, pushes boundaries between Muslim and Jewish–and is also not quite human; in this way, Arjana draws important parallels between the historically contingent categories of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Arjana also draws on films, such as Star Wars and 300, while noting that not all Orientalist imagery is necessarily offensive, even if some of it clearly is for many people. Whether the book ultimately conveys despair or optimism about the current state of cultural affairs will likely vary from reader to reader. It remains clear, however, that Arjana meticulously and artfully portrays a long continuum of how certain types of people have seen themselves as civilized and human, precisely in relation to an inhuman or “post-human” contrast that fits somewhere in the category of Muslim monsters. Given the wide range of popular cultural icons that Arjana explores in her carefully written, rich, and provocative monograph appeals at once to fields such as literature, gender studies, art history, religious studies, and political science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Tracy Leavelle transcends these limited perspectives. Through careful research and masterful prose, Leavelle embraces and elucidates the complexities inherent in the relationships between French Catholic missionaries, mostly Jesuits, and Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through insightful explorations of the historical record, Leavelle reverses stereotypes commonly held about Christian missions, showing how missionaries also had to “convert” to native ways of thinking and that Native Americans had considerable space in which to maintain traditional identities or to develop their own ways of being Catholic. Moreover, Leavelle‘s skill as a writer makes for a book that is not only informative and thought provoking, but genuinely moving 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 idea of jihad is among the most keenly discussed yet one of the least understood concepts in Islam. In her brilliant new book Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists (University of California Press, 2013), Cabeiri Robinson, Associate Professor of International Studies and South Asian Studies at the University of Washington engages the question of what might an anthropology of jihad look like. By shifting the focus from theological and doctrinal discussions on the normative understandings and boundaries of jihad in Islam, Robinson instead asks the question of how people live with perennial violence in their midst? The focus of this book is on the Jihadists of the Kashmir region in the disputed borderlands between India and Pakistan, especially in relation to their experiences as refugees (muhajirs). By combining a riveting ethnography with meticulous historical analysis, Robinson documents the complex ways in which Kashmiri men and women navigate the interaction of violence, politics, and migration. Through a careful reading of Kashmiri Jihadist discourses on human rights, the family, and martyrdom, Robinson convincingly shows that the very categories of warrior, victim, and refugee are always fluid and subject to considerable tension and contestation. In our conversation, we talked about the relationship between the categories of Jihad and Hijra as imagined by Kashmiri Jihadists, the ethical and methodological dilemmas of an ethnographer of Jihad, the mobilization of the human rights discourse by Kashmiri militant groups to legitimate violence, and the intersections of family, sexuality, and martyrdom. All students and scholars of Islam, South Asia, and modern politics must read this fascinating book that was also recently awarded the Bernard Cohn book prize for best first book in South Asian Studies by the Association for Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion