Episodes
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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 James’s call to action among the poor. Their writing aims to inspire the church toward holistic engagement with the world as “doers of the word, not hearers only.” Reading James Missiologically is part of a series that includes Reading Hebrews Missiologically, Reading 1 Peter Missiologically, soon-to-be-released Reading Revelation Missiologically and other projected volumes.
Dave Broucek is a lifelong student of and participant in the global mission of the church. He values research into the lesser-understood aspects of mission (singular) and missions (plural) as well as scholarship that addresses the big questions of mission theory and practice.
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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 in Palawan to reveal their influence on regulating agricultural cultivation, forests, customary objects, healthcare, and value systems.
Using a relational approach and based on more than two decades of experience in Palawan, Dressler explains the causes and consequences of converging religious and environmental nongovernmental reforms in indigenous upland spaces. The book aims to provoke us to critically reflect on the political consequences non-governmental actors have on upland peoples negotiating challenges of late capitalism, and advocates for indigenous communities to be able to do so on their own terms.
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Episodes manquant?
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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 four-volume reader, Religion and Globalization: Critical Concepts in Social Studies (Routledge, 2010). Her
In this interview, she discusses her new book, Judaizing Christianity and Christian Zionism in Northern Ireland, recently published with Routledge.
This book explores the contemporary Judaization of evangelical Christianity through the ethnography of a Messianic congregation in Northern Ireland. A constellation of Messianic "congregations" have expanded worldwide over recent years, combining Jewish liturgy, symbols, and artifacts with prophecies about the End Times and the return of Jesus. Increasingly recognized as a legitimate subdivision within evangelicalism, the Messianic movement has facilitated a popularization of Jewish practices and symbolism beyond its own congregations. The author considers: What insights do these congregations offer about the deregulation of religions? Is there any logic to the combinations of Christian and Jewish sources in Messianic beliefs and practices? How can we understand this fascination with Jews and Judaism? Finally, what is the political significance of Messianic relationship with Jewish people, the state of Israel, and Christian Zionism? The book will be of particular interest to scholars of the sociology and anthropology of religion, religion and politics, and Jewish-Christian relations.
Judaizing Christianity and Christian Zionism in Northern Ireland. For God, Israel and Ulster is published with Routledge
Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University
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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. As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025), psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom. Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.
Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com
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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 charity—almsgiving, works of mercy, good works—can tell us much about how religious leaders attempted to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts with some startling reversions, attempting to expand the community and incorporate others. The first part probes the ways Augustine’s understanding of love is put into practice and how this understanding informs a tradition of political action inspired by Christian concepts of love and enacted through practices of charity. In a second, more expansive part, the book turns to the ways in which the Benedictine tradition as illustrated by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux receives this vision, invigorates it with new visions of care and leadership, and puts it into practice in radically different contexts from those of Augustine’s age. At the heart of Charity after Augustine is an attempt to find a non-idealized vision of love that can inform thick, meaningful relations within a community that are not diluted by the inclusion of others
New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review
Jonathan D. Teubner is a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. This book is something of a sequel to his first, Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition.
Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston
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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 translation in its own language that can be traced back to antiquity. This work sheds light not only on Byzantine Jewish life and thought, but also on such subjects as the spread of Rabbinic Judaism in Europe, the Karaite movement, the ancient Greek translations, particularly Akylas/Aquila, as well as the relationship between Jewish and Christian transmission of the Greek Bible. An appendix traces the use of such translations down to the 19th century.
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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 absent from these discussions. This volume addresses this gap, highlighting the influential role of Jain authors in the multilingual literary world of South Asia.
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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 of Quranic scholarship. This close analysis is supplemented by a comparative approach focusing on several other eminent and influential Sufi commentaries.
What is displayed is that Ibn ʿAjība’s exegesis connected theoretical works on the concept of divine love to their practical application, a breakthrough in Sufi literature. The study situates Ibn ‘Ajība’s thought in theological and historical perspective, engaging with his mystical approach which integrates his theory of divine love with other Sufi doctrines in an accessible manner. As such, the Moroccan scholar’s work left an indelible impact on future generations of Quranic exegetes within North Africa and across the Islamic world.
Love in Sufi Literature makes important contributions to the study of Sufism, Islam in North Africa, and late pre-modern Islamic intellectual history.
Omneya Ayad is Assistant Professor of Sufi Studies at Üsküdar University in Istanbul, Türkiye.
Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa, focused on issues in Sufism, theology, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.
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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 from Muslims. The increased targeting of Copts has also contributed to the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” particularly among American evangelicals, which embraces the idea that Christians around the globe are currently being persecuted more than any other time in history.
Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, 2025) examines how American religious imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom. Transnational Copts have navigated the sociopolitical conditions in Egypt and the global consequences of the US “war on terror” by translating their suffering into the ambiguous forms of religious and political visibility. Candace Lukasik argues that the commingling of American conservatives and Copts has shaped a new kind of Christian kinship in blood, operating through a double movement between glorification and racialization. Occupying a position between threat and victim, Copts from the Middle East have been subject to anti-terror surveillance in the US even as they have leveraged their roles as “persecuted Christians.” Through Lukasik’s careful examination of the everyday processes shaping Coptic communal formation, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how ideologies of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.
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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 sages, displaying extraordinary power? What is the ethical responsibility of such sages? And how is the encounter among sages/mystics of different traditions contributing to the harmonious unfolding of religious diversity? The author provides original answers and a renewed vision of Hinduism through the lens of two of the most loved and admired sages of modern India—Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo.
This book is a blueprint for transformative research on religion: it envisions an innovative method—integrative hermeneutical phenomenology—contributing to the development of interfaith mysticism. Bringing to the fore key themes such as Self-realization, the Hari-Hara mystery, and Mystic Fire, the author shows the importance of mystical experience in the understanding of the religious “Other” and the future of religion.
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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 Somos, Dr. Matthew Cleary, Dr. Pablo Dufour, Dr. Edward Jones Corredera, and Dr. Emanuele Salerno, also examined annotations that thousands of owners and readers have left in IBP copies over four centuries, offering original insights into the development of international law.Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis has been commonly regarded as the foundation of modern international law since its first appearance in 1625. Most major international law scholars have engaged with IBP, often owning and richly annotating their own copies. At key moments - including the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, the fall of Napoleon, and the end of both world wars - IBP was reissued with new commentaries by multinational projects devoted to restarting the international order. Despite the enormous literature on IBP's reception and influence, we cannot fully understand its impact without uncovering the history of IBP as a physical object, with hundreds of thousands of unpublished annotations arguing or agreeing with the text, updating and adapting its contents.Approaching Grotius' seminal work as a physical vehicle of the author's, the publishers', owners', and readers' engagement, The Unseen History radically expands and revises our understanding not only of IBP, but also of the academic discipline and lived practice of modern international law over the last four centuries. In addition to delving into the first nine editions' printing history, descriptive bibliography, and both Grotius' and the publishers' marketing and donation strategies, the book explores Grotius' subsequent impact on pro-slavery and abolitionist litigation as a case study of how the census' original findings can be applied to specific areas of reception.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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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 official Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692) — someone typically thought of as a stalwart Neo-Confucian — to find value in Buddhism, so much so that he wove into his novel Lady Sa’s Journey to the South (Sassi namjŏng-gi 謝氏南征記) the idea that Buddhism might even hold the key to save Confucianism.
Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea should be of interest to those interested in the history of Buddhism, Chosŏn Korea, and premodern literature. It should particularly appeal to readers who might be more familiar with Kim Manjung’s more well-known work, A Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong 九雲夢). For such readers in particular, this book offers a new and more complex way to think about this author — and the place of Buddhism in early modern Korea.
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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 reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism.In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today.You can download the supplementary materials here.
Other works recommended by Brook Ziporyn in this Interview
Mercedes Valmisa, All Things Act, Oxford UP.
Jana S. Rošker, Chinese Philosophy in Transcultural Contexts, Bloomsbury Academics
Gregory Scott Moss, Absolute Dialetheism, forthcoming. But for a taste of a similar argument in a book chapter format, please check here.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Whiat is Intelligence? Penguin Random House
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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 emotions, this monograph documents what the legitimate yogic identity promoted by SM is within the context of the transglobal yoga industry. A highly original and incisive portrait of an Indian devotional community with strong transnational connections, this book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Indian religion and yoga.
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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 aspects of Prophet Muhammad, such as his saliva, urine, and sweat that influence mawlid literatures and ritual performance of them within Sufi communities like the Naqshbandi-Haqqanis. Though rituals emerging from embodied understandings of holy figures are not without some tension, as we learn throughout the book but especially during the discussion on graves. Here the interred bodies of Sufi saints are caught up in debates around the permissibility of shrine visitation, a topic that comes up amongst lectures given by Swedish Muslim leaders. Overall, then, through analysis of Danish and Swedish podcast materials, ritual practices, such as devotion to the Prophet Muhammad and Sufi saints, we understand more about the sonic and pious dimensions of Islam and the Muslim authorial voices and listening that shapes them. This book will be of interest to those who work on sound studies, material culture, Sufism and Islam in Europe.
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Kathleen Miller talks about her new edited volume, Doctrine and Disease in British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press, 2025). In the sixteenth century, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious beliefs as well as the colonial agendas they were often ensnared in.This interdisciplinary volume follows the contours of illness, epidemics, and cures in the early modern British and Spanish Empires as these were understood in religious terms. Each chapter of this volume centers on a key moment during this period of remarkable upheaval, including Jesuit co-optation of Indigenous knowledge in Peru, the Catholic Church's dissemination of the smallpox vaccine across the Spanish Empire, Puritan collective fasting during smallpox outbreaks, and the practice of eating dirt as Obeah resistance among enslaved people in Jamaica. Throughout, the contributors explore how the porous geographical borders of the transatlantic world meant medicine and religion were translated through and against each other, over and over again. Residing at the nexus between two largely discrete areas of inquiry, this collection provides significant insight into the numerous points of juncture between medicine and religion in the Atlantic world. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Matthew James Crawford, Rana A. Hogarth, Crawford Gribben, Philippa Koch, Allyson M. Poska, Catherine Reedy, and Rebecca Totaro.
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A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother heeding a command at all, something Dr. Brafman terms “reasons for” vs “reasons of” the commandments. In his newest book, Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Brafman looks closely at the second of these questions. After considering answers from some of the most important Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Joseph Soloveitchik, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Eliezer Berkovits, Dr. Brafman introduces his own system of thought. For him, the reasons for the commandments depend on a number of factors. We don’t follow them blindly. And they don’t always have to adhere to perfect and pure reason. Instead they are, to use a term he employs throughout is book, “constructed” based on any number of factors including our relationship with God and the norms that exist within our society. In conversation with some of the most important secular legal theorist and philosophers of the past 100 years, Dr Brafman charts a new course in Jewish theology, both defending and reimagining the place of our obligation to halakhah, Jewish law, for the 21st century.
Professor Yonatan Brafman is Associate Professor of Modern Judaism in the Department of Religion, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)
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Siam had been dealing with Christian missionaries for centuries, but from the 1830s a new wave of Protestant missionaries began to work in Siam, just as the European imperial powers were encroaching on Southeast Asia. They brought with them modern science and technology, which was of interest to the Siamese elite, but at the same time they challenged Siam’s official Theravada Buddhist religious tradition. Coincidentally, a reform movement in Siamese Buddhism got underway in the 1830s, led by Prince, later King, Mongkut (r.1851-68), then still a monk. The missionaries were largely unsuccessful in converting Thais to Christianity, but to what extent did the new Protestant Christianity influence the Buddhist reform movement?
This is the question that Sven Trakulhun seeks to answer in his new book, Confronting Christianity: The Protestant Mission and the Buddhist Reform Movement in Nineteenth-Century Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2024).
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Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through its expressions in biblical-themed musical dramas, their literary sources, and the intellectual debates surrounding the works. Adi’s research and teaching concentrate on the interrelations between music, literature, and philosophy in the German and German Jewish traditions. She has published essays on topics ranging from the music philosophies of Theodor Adorno and Vladimir Jankélévitch, the role of Wagner’s music in Thomas Mann’s literature, and the language philosophy of Walter Benjamin, to the treatment of memory culture in the poetry and social critical writings of contemporary German-Jewish activist Max Czollek.
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