PODCAST

New Books in Catholic Studies

New Books Network

Interviews with scholars of Catholicism about their new books

arts books

All Episodes

45:11

Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade:...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/10/16

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.Rewriting the

55:07

Kathryn Hurlock, "Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/10/14

This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion - they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. In Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World (Profile, 2025) Professor Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage through nineteen sacred sites - from the temples of Jerusalem to the banks of the Ganges, by way of

31:50

Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/10/13

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book

58:48

Colleen Dulle, "Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/10/06

Vatican journalist Colleen Dulle discusses her new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, a memoir of the last seven years. In 2018, she started for the Jesuit Review, America Magazine, and that was when all of the terrible revelations of sexual abuse scandals, lies and coverups, about [former cardinal, later defrocked] Theodore McCarrick became the main story, then [former nuncio, later excommunicated] Carlo Maria Viganò’s schismatic campaign, then Jean Vanier,

54:16

Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/09/12

From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring themselves from the Protestant authorities. Their strategies of concealment, deception, and misdirection frustrated colonial census takers, and their presence has likewise eluded historians of religion, who have portrayed Catholics as isolated dots in an otherwise vast Protestant expanse.Pushing against this long-standing narrative, in A Common Grave:

56:13

Steve Tibble, "Assassins and Templars: A Battle in...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/09/09

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of

44:57

Cup Overflowing: How Christians Should Think about Wine

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/09/08

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows,” wrote King David in Psalm 23. The overflowing cup is the image that Gisela Kreglinger uses when talking about the abundance and extravagance of God’s provision for His children. Gisela Kreglinger is the daughter of winemakers and grew up on a vineyard and winery in Franconia, Germany, where her family has been crafting wine for many generations. She has a couple of master’s degrees in

55:32

Paul Mariani, "The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/09/06

Paul Mariani has spent fifty years writing poetry that celebrates the vibrant sacramentality of life in the twilight of Modernity, and writing the lives of some of our greatest modern poets. In this interview, Paul reflects on his vocation as poet, scholar, and biographer, drawing especially from his most recent books of poetry—All That Will Be New (Slant, 2022) and Ordinary Time (Slant, 2020)—and his prose work, The Mystery of It All (Paraclete Press, 2019). Our conversation explores Paul’s

62:15

Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven:...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/08/31

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of

34:47

David de Boer, "The Early Modern Dutch Press in an...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/08/15

David de Boer returns to the podcast to talk to Jana Byars about his first book, The Early Modern Dutch Press in the Age of Religious Persecution (Oxford UP, 2023). This book is available open source here. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat

62:34

Charly Coleman, "The Spirit of French Capitalism:...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/08/15

Charly Coleman's latest book, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021) is at once a history of ideas, the economy, religion, and material culture. Pursuing the imbrication of the economy and theology with respect to both worldly and spiritual value and wealth, the book explores the emergence and development of a specifically Catholic ethic of capitalism particular to the French context in the century and more leading up to the

65:23

Guidance about the Transgender Question

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/08/10

The authors and editors of a new edited volume, Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders, represent a tremendous knowledge and experience in theology, philosophy, history, and social politics, and apply it to help us sort how to think about and talk about the recent wave of transgenderism in society and especially among young people. Often clothed in terms of compassion and acceptance, transgender advocates encourage young people to

38:34

Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/27

Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an

59:14

Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/19

During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as noncombatants, but many would know intense combat nonetheless. Without weapons training, they ran through the infantry lines, answering the desperate call, "Medic!" Many displayed exemplary heroism even at the cost of their lives. With the end of the draft, we will never see their like again.Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten

38:15

Allan Doig, "A History of the Church through its...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/19

A History of the Church through its Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Allan Doig takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the

57:42

Pope Leo XIV (with Christopher White)

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/15

Vatican Reporter Christopher White has just written book about Pope Leo XIV, our new Holy Father, an American, an Augustinian, from Chicago, from Perú; it’s a biography, but it also places Pope Leo in the Context of the Second Vatican Council, the legacy of Leo XIII and especially his predecessor Pope Francis and the synodal church of the last few years, and that was a show to which Chris White had court side front row season tickets and plenty of good stories about, some of which he shares today on

64:36

Jürgen Buchenau and David S. Dalton,...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/11

Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1940 examines anti-Catholic leaders and movements during the Mexican Revolution, an era that resulted in a constitution denying the Church political rights. Anti-Catholic Mexicans recognized a common enemy in a politically active Church in a predominantly Catholic nation. Many books have elucidated the popular roots and diversity of Roman Catholicism in Mexico, but the perspective of the Church’s adversaries has remained much less understood.This

36:26

John Eldevik, "Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/06

Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and its Manuscript Contexts by John EldevikDuring the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a

73:00

Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

2025/07/06

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted

90:45

Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine:...

New Books in Catholic Studies ·

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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