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New Books in Religion

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

religion & spirituality

All Episodes

69:40

Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/07/05

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. The man most recognized for the movement’s success is the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah.While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendencies

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74:43

Wang Yi, Hannah Nation ed., "Faithful Disobedience:...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/07/05

In this important body of theology, key writings from the Chinese house church movement have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English speakers. The documents in Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement (IVP Academic, 2022) give readers an inside look at how the unregistered churches of China have endured despite government pressure and cultural marginalization. Wang Yi, the primary writer, is the pastor of a house church in Chengdu,

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38:48

Richard K. Payne and Glen A. Hayes eds., "The Oxford...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/07/03

Since the earliest encounters between tantric traditions and Western scholars of religion, tantra has posed a challenge. The representation of tantra, whether in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Tibet, or Japan, has tended to emphasize the antinomian, decadent aspects, which, as attention-grabbing as they were for audiences in the West, created a one-dimensional understanding, and hampered the academic study of the field for more than a century. Additionally, the Western perspective on religion has been

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61:30

Michael Marmur, "Living The Letters: An Alphabet of...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/07/02

Today, most Jewish thinkers have turned away from theology. And if they do, they look into one narrow window into the subject, writing a treatise into topics like the problem of evil or the nature of Jewish chosenness. Not so with today's guest, Michael Marmur. In his newest work, Living The Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Marmur explores dozens of the most pressing theological and philosophical issues in Judaism from the nature of Torah to the place of

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63:34

Jonathon Stuart Wright, "Joseph and Aseneth After...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/30

Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission.This study returns to the

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56:06

Abeneazer G. Urga et al., "Reading James...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/27

While books on a New Testament theology of mission abound, most of them focus on tried-and-true Scripture passages from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles while ignoring the contribution of the General Epistles. Reading James Missiologically: The Missionary Motive, Message, and Methods of James (William Carey, 2025) addresses this gap in missiological and biblical scholarship. Eighteen scholars and practitioners from a variety of nations and cultural backgrounds give a global perspective to

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54:30

Wolfram H. Dressler, "For the Sake of Forests and...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/26

For the Sake of Forests and Gods: Governing Life and Livelihood in the Philippine Uplands (Cornell University Press, 2025) examines the impacts of religious and environmental non-governmental actors on the lives of highlanders on Palawan Island, the Philippines. The absence of the state in Palawan's mountainous regions have meant that these non-governmental actors have been able to increasingly assume governmental authority. Wolfram H. Dressler explores these actors' emergence, goals, and practices

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39:04

Véronique Altglas, "Judaizing Christianity and...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/24

Véronique Altglas holds a PhD from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and has served as a as a lecturer in sociology at Queen’s University Belfast since 2009.Dr. Altglas’ publications include two monographs: Le nouvel hindouisme occidental (CNRS, 2005); and From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage (Oxford University Press, 2014), for which she won the book award of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion in 2017. She is also the editor of a

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55:12

Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse:...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/24

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect

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90:45

Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine:...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/23

Jonathan Teubner, Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West (Oxford UP, 2025) Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine is an exploration of why the Augustinian tradition’s attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conceit at the heart of the book is that the concrete practices of love or

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65:27

Nicholas de Lange, "Japheth in the Tents of Shem:...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/22

Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism (Mohr Siebeck, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of the reception and transmission of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages. It is the fruit of some 40 years' research by Nicholas de Lange, who has collected most of the evidence himself, mainly from previously unpublished manuscript sources, such as Cairo Genizah fragments. Byzantine Judaism was exceptional in possessing an unbroken tradition of Biblical

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72:12

Eva De Clercq, Heleen De Jonckheere, and Simon Winant...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/21

A vast corpus of Jain texts lies unexamined in manuscript libraries, several of them new versions of earlier works. Though the prevalence of literary transcreation in Jain communities is striking, it is by no means a practice exclusive to them. The field of South Asian Studies has increasingly dealt with the creative engagement of authors with an authoritative literary object. Although these studies have brought to the fore important conclusions, the Jains as a literary community have remained

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39:33

Omneya Ayad, "Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/20

Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s Understanding of the Divine Word (Routledge, 2023) explores the role of divine love in the Quranic commentary of the Moroccan Sufi scholar Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība (d. 1224/1809). Through close textual analysis of Ibn ʿAjība’s exegesis al-Baḥr al-madīd—The Abundant Ocean—and drawing on his other Sufi writings the book illuminates the scholar’s theory of divine love, drawn from his scholarly antecedents, to elucidate its role and the scholar’s impact on the wider field

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54:58

Candace Lukasik, "Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/18

Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide attention, leading to a series of efforts from US politicians, think tanks, and NGOs to re-channel their efforts into “saving” these Middle Eastern Christians

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38:37

Isaac Portilla, "Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/17

Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India: Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, the Hari-Hara Mystery, and the Hindu-Christian Encounter (Routledge, 2025) is a research inquiry in interfaith studies that uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address vexing issues arising in the study of mysticism and enlightened sages.This book raises the following questions: If all human beings have access to mystical consciousness, and some do access it, how is it that only a few become luminary

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65:37

Mark Somos, Matthew Cleary, Pablo Dufour, Edward...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/17

The Unseen History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2025) locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History provides fundamental data for reconstructing the impact of IBP across time and space. The authors, Dr. Mark

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127:54

Brook Ziporyn, "Experiments in Mystical Atheism:...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/16

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond, (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing

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70:55

Gregory N. Evon, "Salvaging Buddhism to Save...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/16

Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) (Cambria Press, 2023) is a fascinating book that sits at the intersection of Buddhist studies and premodern Korean literary history. Gregory N. Evon’s book unfolds in two parts: the first charts the history of the place, position, and status of Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea, charting how Buddhism went from being outright attacked to grudgingly tolerated. The second part looks at how this background and court intrigue led the Chosŏn

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34:58

Patrick McCartney, "Authenticity, Legitimacy and the...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/05

This book is a sociological study of knowledge and knowers and explores the production and perceived value of 'yogic knowledge', how distinction is curated, and how access to this knowledge is gained. The book focuses on the organization Shanti Mandir (SM) in India, a new religious movement, which was founded in 1987 by Swami Nityananda Saraswati. By identifying the structuring forces of the guru's discourse, and focusing on the marketing strategies and subsequent exchanges of capital and affective

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45:23

Simon Stjernholm, "Sensing Islam: Engaging and...

New Books in Religion ·

2025/06/03

Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembrance of God) informs sensorial experiences of the divine, particularly intimate ones, while the discussion on meditating on Muhammad considers the bodily

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2,070 results

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