New Books in Religion
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New Books in Religion
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...
Recent Episodes
2610 episodes
Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in the...
Khaled A. Beydoun, "The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims" (U California Press, 2023)
In The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims (U California Press, 2023), Khaled A. Beydoun details how the American War on Terror...
Daniel Wyche, "The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation" (Columbia UP, 2025)
In The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation (Columbia UP, 2025), Daniel Wyche examines the...
Sara Ann Swenson, "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of...
Sonia Hazard, "Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the America...
Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)
All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, m...
Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish...
Christopher J. H. Wright, "The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative" (InterVarsity Press, 2025)
God's mission is to reclaim the world. The church has a designated role to play. Most Christians would agree that the Bible provides a basis for missi...
Christopher Jain Miller and Cogen Bohanec, "Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement" (SUNY Press, 2026)
The Jain tradition, with roots in ancient India but now spread across the globe, is anything but static and monolithic. In Engaged Jainism, an interdi...
Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)
Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at t...
Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derive...
Erica Brown, "Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning" (Maggid, 2023)
Ecclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." As...
Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of me...
Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bibl...
Adam S. Ferziger. "Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism" (NYU Press, 2025)
In this episode Drora Arussy speaks with historian Adam S. Ferziger about his latest book, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of I...
Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present" (Yale UP, 2023)
According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this state...
Insane for the Light (Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI)
Father Ron Rolheiser’s new book Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years, which is about how to grow old well and be fruitful, first...
Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew eds., "Buddhist Masculinities" (Columbia UP, 2023)
While early Buddhists hailed their religion's founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. Accord...
J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious...
Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear...
Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in...
Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion" (Routledge, 2023)
Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of...
Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Matthew D. McMullen, "The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
For nearly two decades, the Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (U Hawaii Press, 2024) has served as a valuable resource for students and scholars of...
David Newheiser et al., "Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new c...
Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear...
Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli, "Citifying Jesus: The Making of a Roman Religion in the Roman Empire" (Mohr Siebeck, 2024)
Religion and urban life are the most successful strategies of handling, enhancing, and capitalizing on human sociability. By integrating religious stu...
Christian Smith, "Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Is traditional American religion doomed?Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans...
Ben Wiggershaus, "The Man of Opened Eye: Ancient Near Eastern Revelatory Convention and the Balaam Cycle" (Gorgias Press, 2025)
Is it possible to read the Balaam narrative of Numbers 22-24 cohesively? Ben Wiggershaus says, “Yes,” and part of his solution is in reading the Balaa...
Deanna Ferree Womack, "Re-Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia" (Oxford UP, 2025)
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which Ameri...
Nathan McGovern, "Seeing Through Religion: An Introduction to the Study of Religion and Religions" (Routledge, 2025)
Seeing Through Religion is a cutting-edge textbook that gives students the tools to learn this valuable subject theoretically, McGovern argues that re...
Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline, "Prayer in the Ancient World Vol.1" (Brill, 2027)
Prayer in the Ancient World is the resource on prayer in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. With over 350 entries it showcases a robust selectio...
Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddh...
John Tolan, "Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2025)
A concise new narrative history of Islam that draws on the transformative insights of recent research to emphasize the diversity and dynamism of the t...
James Redfield, "Adventures of Rabah and Friends: The Talmud's Strange Tales and Their Readers" (Brown Judaic Studies, 2025)
Adventures of Rabbah & Friends offers a new reader-centered approach to some of the Talmud’s most challenging stories. The Talmud contains about two p...
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)
Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and s...
Christopher Key Chapple, "Embodied Ecology: Yoga and the Environment" (Mandala Publishing, 2025)
In Embodied Ecology: Yoga and the Environment (Mandala Publishing, 2025), Hindu Studies scholar Christopher Key Chapple explores how Hindu and Yoga t...
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity" (U California Press, 2025)
Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity (U California Press, 2025) is an open access tour-de-force study of the power of wom...
Dainy Bernstein, "Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022)
The culture of mainstream American childhood is vastly different than the culture of Orthodox Jewish childhood - which is itself a rich and varied lan...
Melanie McDonagh, "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" (Yale UP, 2025)
The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked tur...
Shawkat M. Toorawa, "The Devotional Qur'an: Beloved Surahs and Verses" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Devotional Qur'an: Beloved Surahs and Verses (Yale UP, 2025) is a beautifully curated and translated collection of the Qur'anic surahs and verses...