Episodes

  • Jonathon Stuart Wright, "Joseph and Aseneth After Antiquity: A Study in Manuscript Transmission" (de Gruyter, 2025)

    Jonathon Stuart Wright, "Joseph and Aseneth After Antiquity: A Study in Manuscript Transmission" (de Gruyter, 2025)
    Jun 30 2025
    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 sources. It considers how the redaction and translation of Joseph and Aseneth affected its interpretation, and looks at the interests of the redactors and copyists. Its findings warn against placing too much weight on details that lack such an importance in the manuscript tradition. Important contributions made in this monograph include: a detailed study of the two earliest versions, the Syriac and Armenian translations; focus on the Greek manuscripts of the three longest families (f, Mc, a); analysis of four abridged versions (family d, E, Latin 1 and so-called "early modern Greek"); the first available synoptic edition of the Greek versions of the story, including the first edition of manuscript E. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Abeneazer G. Urga et al., "Reading James Missiologically: The Missionary Motive, Message, and Methods of James" (William Carey, 2025)

    Abeneazer G. Urga et al., "Reading James Missiologically: The Missionary Motive, Message, and Methods of James" (William Carey, 2025)
    Jun 27 2025
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    56 mins
  • Wolfram H. Dressler, "For the Sake of Forests and Gods: Governing Life and Livelihood in the Philippine Uplands" (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2025)

    Wolfram H. Dressler, "For the Sake of Forests and Gods: Governing Life and Livelihood in the Philippine Uplands" (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2025)
    Jun 26 2025
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    55 mins
  • Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake" (NYU Press, 2025)
    Jun 24 2025
    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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    55 mins
  • Véronique Altglas, "Judaizing Christianity and Christian Zionism in Northern Ireland" (Routledge, 2025)

    Véronique Altglas, "Judaizing Christianity and Christian Zionism in Northern Ireland" (Routledge, 2025)
    Jun 24 2025
    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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    39 mins
  • Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Jonathan Teubner, "Charity After Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Jun 23 2025
    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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 31 mins
  • Nicholas de Lange, "Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism" (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)

    Nicholas de Lange, "Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism" (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)
    Jun 22 2025
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Eva De Clercq, Heleen De Jonckheere, and Simon Winant eds., "Literary Transcreation as a Jain Practice" (Ergon-Verlag, 2025)

    Eva De Clercq, Heleen De Jonckheere, and Simon Winant eds., "Literary Transcreation as a Jain Practice" (Ergon-Verlag, 2025)
    Jun 21 2025
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 12 mins