New Books in Religion

In his new book Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2014),Neilesh Bose analyses the trajectories of Muslim Bengali politics in the first half of the twentieth century.The literary and cultural history ofthe region explored in the book reveal the pointedly Bengali ideas of Pakistan that arose as an empire ended and new countries were born.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For many people, filmgoing is a moment to submerge themselves in a new world of meaning and experience a different reality. While film is prominently defined by its ‘moving images’ these alone are not usually able to fully move a viewer. Audiovisual cinema is much more compelling and music has a unique ability to produce emotive power for the viewer. In Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (Baylor University Press, 2013), Kutter Callaway, Affiliate Professor at Fuller Seminary, addresses how cinematic music uniquely opens up a space that invites the viewer to feel. Through his investigation Callaway moves beyond the tradition of textual and literary approaches to film and offers us methods for hearing images and seeing sounds. In our conversation we discuss audience reception, musical transparency, Finding Nemo, filmic narrative, music’s theological capacity, Pixar, western cultural imagination, Up, musical leitmotifs, and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that it was Buddhist theories about reality that allowed fiction to flourish in China, and ending with Stephen R. Bokenkamp’s study of celestial scripts that Daoists created in response to the appearance of Sanskrit script in China, the volume focuses primarily on the fourth to tenth centuries but addresses dynamics that were at play both before and after this six-century period. While many previous studies that address the impact of India on China do so by focusing on the Chinese transformation of Buddhism and on the degree to which Chinese Buddhism retained this or that Indian feature, this volume differs in that it looks at the influence of Indian thought (particularly religious thought and myths) beyond the confines of Buddhism proper. Meir Shahar and Bernard Faure’s respective contributions are good examples of this, as they demonstrate that some of the Indian deities and demons who came to China with Tantric Buddhism exchanged their Buddhist robes for Daoist ones, or escaped into the wider world of Chinese religious thought and practice.  Another central theme of the book is the way in which Chinese turned to Indian models for religious and political ends, or, in other cases, attempted to recreate India within China. In addition to the aforementioned scholars, the volume contains chapters by Yamabe Nobuyoshi, Ye Derong, the late John R. McRae, Robert H. Sharf, and Christine Mollier.  This book will be of particular interest to those wanting to learn more about Indian myth in East Asia, the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and symbols, the interaction between Daoism and Buddhism, the adapting of Buddhist monasticism to Chinese familial organization, Bodhidharma, the influence of Buddhism on Chinese literature, and the Chinese response to Buddhist doctrinal dilemmas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Jane Bayard Wilson and John Leighton Wilson were unlikely African missionaries, coming as they did from privileged slaveholding families in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively. Yet in 1834 they embarked on a nearly twenty-year adventure as Christian missionaries to two peoples in western Africa — the Grebo in Liberia, and the Mpongwe in present-day Gabon. Erskine Clarke‘s By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey (Basic Books, 2013) tells their story, but it also the tale of how profoundly different people in a globalizing world struggled, and sometimes succeeded, in reaching a common understanding. Even more than a model of Atlantic scholarship, By the Rivers of Water is a also a beautifully written study sure to engage readers interested in the exploding field of Atlantic history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume.  Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “What do sÅ«tras get?”  She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies.  Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sÅ«tras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second–the idea that texts can become bodies–Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sÅ«tras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sÅ«tras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon Mahāyāna sÅ«tras’ concealment of their authorship.  Indeed, certain sÅ«tras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts.  This move allowed Mahāyāna sÅ«tras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sÅ«tras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sÅ«tras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sÅ«tras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections.  In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples).  And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sÅ«tra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, Mahāyāna sÅ«tras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Islamic theology is generally understood or approached in terms of its systematic or speculative forms. In Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader (University of California Press, 2014), John Renard, Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, has produced a collection of primary sources that thinks through theological deliberation far beyond the narrow strictures of kalam. This inclusive model is both chronologically expansive and geographically diverse. Renard offers relevant passages from the Qur’an and hadith, the tafsir tradition, narrative histories, manuals of moral direction, texts from spiritual guidance, creedal statements, and political theology. All of these sources are artfully introduced leading the reader through the diversity of the Islamic tradition. In our conversation we discussed human responsibility, the nature of God, the evaluation of non-Muslim beliefs, what merits community membership, the spiritual journey, functions of poems, stories, and letters, Iblis, mercy and justice, political succession, governance, and questions of leadership, and the social consequences of theological thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers on a journey of more than 300 years, exploring how a group of eight Frenchmen were selected from the amongst the thousands of victims of a brutal seventeenth-century encounter between natives and Europeans to become celebrated martyrs. Anderson explores the details of the deaths themselves, as well as the meaning of ‘good deaths’ in Iroquois and European cultures, before turning to the saints’ afterlives, their continual remembering and reinvention in the “popular, protean collective imagination from their time to our own.” Myriad voices come together in the book’s pages, each one claiming and contesting the meaning of the Jesuits’ deaths, continually refashioning the religious and national identities bound up in the politics of martyrdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Scholars studying the history of Christianity are used to writing about different Christian traditions. But what does it mean to write from within a particular Christian tradition? How can a Christian be a historian who does academically respectable work while remaining true to his or her religious commitments? How can Christian historians contribute, as both Christians and historians, to historical scholarship? In The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom Press, 2014), Dr. Christopher Shannon and Dr. Christopher Blum explores these questions from a Catholic perspective. They argue that Catholic historians can write from within their tradition while contributing to historical inquiry by embracing a historical perspective that emphasizes the drama of human life, focuses on asking and answering questions that help us better to pursue “the good,” and understands human beings as having an eternal destiny. Shannon and Blum have provided a fascinating meditation on the historian’s craft that anyone, Catholic or not, can read and grow from. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Understanding Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), Isra Yazicioglu draws connections between an array of scholars, from different time periods and cultures, in order to make sense of miracles and miracle stories in the Qur’an. What are miracles? Why do they occur in stories? And how does the Qur’an define this complicated concept in particular ways? To address these questions and others Professor Yazicioglu gives particular attention to Ghazali (d. 1111), Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), David Hume (d. 1776), Charles Peirce (d. 1914), and Said Nursi (d. 1960), which makes for a rich and multilayered investigation into the limits and possibilities of science, epistemology, and scriptural hermeneutics. In our interview we also discuss Professor Yazicioglu’s intellectual background as a biologist in secular Turkey, turned scholar of religion and how her own social context has influenced and challenged her scholarly pursuits. Yazicioglu’s compelling and well-researched monograph will likely interest not only scholars of Islam and the Qur’an, but also philosophers as well as natural scientists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion