New Books in Religion

A multimedia collection dedicated to John D. Smith on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, edited by Wendy J. Phillips Rodríguez and Simon Brodbeck.

Open Access here

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In Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (Atmosphere Press, 2026), Anthony Flood traces Sellers's journey from Baptist pastor to independent Bible teacher, a man whose pursuit of the truth cost him his pulpit, his home, and his standing among the so-called "orthodox."

Consecrating his life to "rightly dividing the Word of Truth," Sellers followed Scripture beyond the boundaries of inherited doctrine. What he learned about baptism made it impossible for him to remain a Baptist. Over time, traditional teachings about the soul, "born again," "the Lord's Supper," eternal life, and hell also fell before...

Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’s Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context.

This lecture by Jan Grabowski will examine the phenomenon of Holocaust distortion in Poland within a broader comparative European framework. It explores how historical narratives about the Holocaust are reshaped, minimized, or selectively reinterpreted in public discourse, politics, edu...

Today I sit down with Brendan Graham Dempsey, Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he thinks about human meaning-making systems. It’s rare that I have someone on the pod who doesn’t specialize in Asian traditions, but I thought a conversation with Brendan might help crystalize some of the ideas we’ve been discussing so far this season. We talk about what kind of spirituality is possible after postmodernism, the advantages of an integrative worldview, and how to decide which perspective should win out over others when they’re in conflict. In our conversation, it is ap...

In this episode of the Books for Better Understanding series from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson hosts Jonathan A. Anderson and James Elkins for a discussion of Anderson's new book, The Invisibility Of Religion In Contemporary Art (U Notre Dame Press, 2025). Order your copy here

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What happens when a devout imam and a secular Jewish former federal prosecutor decide to talk about the things that divide them rather than the things they share? In I Am the Other: Debating the Role of Islam in a Divided America (Liminal Space Publications, 2025), Imam Azhar Subedar and Robert Gary offer an unusual model of dialogue. It is not a search for common ground but a sustained, candid engagement with disagreement. Their collaboration began when Gary, attending one of Subedar’s talks at a Florida church, asked a deliberately provocative question about a difficult Qur’anic passage. Subedar answ...

Mediating God: Muhammad Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in 20th century Egypt (Oxford UP, 2025) is a fascinating and compelling intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996).  Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by...

When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise of Nazism. But as the persecution of Jews escalated during the Occupation, every bishop in France maintained a deafening silence. In fact, the Church stood publicly alongside Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Even when bishops famously broke silence to protest the deportation of Jews in 1942—a moment long remembered as one of moral awake...

In Pursuit of the Inconceivable: An Investigation of Metaphysics and Mysticism (Essentia Books, 2025) is a compelling exploration of fundamental questions about existence, reality, and the meaning of life that challenges the traditional scepticism of Western thought. It presents evidence for a systematic, comprehensive, and fundamental world-theory, and places the reader in a position to judge its merits and plausibility for themselves.

Peter G. Jones explains the ongoing failure of Western philosophers to comprehend metaphysics as a consequence of not engaging with the only world-theory that survives analysis, the one endorsed by the writers of the Indian Upanishads, the B...

From the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Zohar, this is the untold story behind our enduring fascination with lost and found religious texts The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found, were discovered in a cave by a shepherd and his goat. This story is mostly true, and it is not the first such tale about long-lost books. Legend has it that the Zohar--the foundational text of Jewish Kabbalah--was lost for centuries before being discovered in a cave by a farmer, who sold it to spice merchants as packing material. It was only when...

At the time of the conquest of Mexico, the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco (1560s) recorded the deaths of two Mexica ritual specialists. During the tumultuous events of the times, Quauhnochtli (a telpochcalli specialist) and Quauhcoatl (a calmecac specialist) died protecting the temple of Huitzilopochtli and his bundled embodiment in the neighborhood of Huitznahuac. 

In Incense and Performance: The Lives of Mexica Ritual Specialists (U Arizona Press, 2026), Dr. Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry reconstructs the lives and labors of the two specialists, articulated through Nahuatl-language texts, material culture from neighborhood and temple spaces, and the academic study of...

What can shared sacred sites tell us about religious coexistence in South Asia? Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot joins Shreya Urvashi to discuss Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia: Negotiating Coexistence and Belonging (Hurst, 2026), co-edited with Laurent Gayer, Aminah Mohammad-Arif, and Grégoire Schlemmer. The book examines shrines, pilgrimage sites, and other sacred spaces across South Asia where people from different religious communities continue to worship, make offerings, and participate in overlapping devotional practices.

Christophe and Shreya discuss why “shared” does not necessarily mean harmonious, the book’s idea of coexistence as a “tensile equilibrium,” and what everyday religious p...

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Maklī became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the "spirit of protestation." Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows...

In Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas W. Barton examines how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. In tracing the intricate developmental histories of a cluster of competitive neighboring bishoprics, Dr. Barton reveals how rival factions fought over new territory by asserting that it belonged to their foundations according to ancient precedent. Wielding self-interested, manipulated recollections of the organization of the Visigothic church that had predated the eighth-century Muslim conquest did more than f...

Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order to be read had first to be sold.

The Bible is the most published text in history and the story of its publication in the English language is extraordinary. Published on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s groundbreaking printed translation of the New Testament, this book traces the evolution of the English Bible from 1525 to the much celebrated King James version of...

Drora interviewed Dr. Eveyln Maria Dean-Olmsted about her book, Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans: The Pragmatics of Diaspora (Brill, 2025), published by Brill in 2026. Dr. Dean-Olmsted is a linguistic anthropologist who lived with the Jewish community in Mexico City for a time to research this book. The community includes four distinct groups: Ashkenazi, Aleppans, Damascenes, and Ottoman Sephardim. She explained how these communities formed in the early 20th century following migration from the Ottoman Empire and later Syria and Lebanon, with each group maintaining separate institutions for social and religious purposes. Evelyn noted that while these communities were...

The claim to moderate or modernist Islam in Indonesia is particularly contentious today, as these labels participate in the global politics of identity for Muslims past and present. Who gets to claim to be representative of an Islam that is modernist, progressive, or tolerant? What constitutes a traditionalist Islamic orientation? And why and for whom do these distinctions matter? In her new book Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Verena Meyer raises these questions in an ethnographic study of two major Indonesian Muslim organizations based in Yogyakarta: the Muhammadiyya and the...

When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (U Chicago Press, 2026), legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 bankruptcy every year. 

Drawing on case studies of six Black churches and one white church, and 150 interviews with church leaders, members, and attorneys, Foohey finds answers in a...

Despite the long tradition of exploring the Tantric temple culture of Nampūtiri Brahmins within Tantric studies, the Śākta stream remains under-researched. The Cultural Heritage of Śākta Tantric Communities in India: Goddesses and Magicians in the Holy Groves of Kerala (Routledge, 2026) therefore enriches understanding of these largely neglected sampradāyas (spiritual traditions), bringing them to the attention of the wider academic community and ultimately shedding light on Śākta communities often marginalised in the discourses on mainstream Asian religions.

Forming one of the richest surviving religious-philosophical traditions of South Asia, Kerala Śākta Tantra is a complex ritualistic system that evolv...

What if you could experience the opening chapters of the Torah as a graphic novel—without losing the depth, complexity, or ambiguity of the original text? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with writer and creator Jordan B. Gorfinkel to discuss The Koren Magerman Tanakh Graphic Novel: Bereshit, Volume 1: The Beginning (Koren Publishers, 2026), a visually stunning reimagining of Genesis.

From the first light of Creation through Eden, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, the book brings the opening chapters of Bereshit to life in an entirely new way. But this is more than an il...

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U Notre Dame 2026) explores the rich vast textual archive of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi, a South Asian Muslim theologian and Sufi. Mian’s deep and careful reading of Thanavi’s diverse genres of texts, such as letters, and those composed by his disciples, such as hagiographies and councils, captures the complex colonial era in which Thanavi and his students lived, but more importantly highlights how Thanavi’s Sufi community inhabited realities counter to their modern context, namely those of ethical practices and matters of the soul and heart...

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press. 

Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first. 

In this book, anthropologist Ga...

Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania...

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijingor Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for...

Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Medieval Jewish history with research focusing on book culture, readers, and reading practices in medieval Europe and beyond. In The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art (Bodleian Library, 2023) she discusses the text of the 24 canonized books of the Bible that is paired with David Kimchi's grammatical treatise “Sefer Miklol”. Katrin discussed the Kennecott Bible, a medieval Hebrew manuscript that contains unique illustrations and Masoretic text annotations. She explained that the manuscript draws inspiration from various sources including the Severa Bible and playing cards from the Rhineland and Netherlands, with some illustrations depict...

God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2024)is the first book to apply Bavinck's theological anthropology to contemporary theological issues. Sutanto provides a sustained close reading of Herman Bavinck's contributions to theological anthropology and positions him in conversation with current and historical dialogues on embodiment, revelation, affect theory, phenomenology, the cognitive science of religion, ethics, race, covenant, and the beatific vision. Dr. Gray Sutanto explores the holistic character of Bavinck's vision of humanity, suggesting ways in which his theological anthropology cuts across several potential binaries in contemporary discourse, between affect and reason, body and soul, animality and...

What happens when you read the weekly Torah portion alongside the strange, fascinating, and sometimes uncomfortable story of modern Jewish history? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Rabbi David Bashevkin to discuss I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha (Maggid, 2026), a book that turns Shabbat reading into an intellectual journey through the Jewish past.

Bashevkin takes familiar Torah stories and places them in surprising conversation with the events and ideas that have shaped modern Jewish life. Noah’s ark leads to the Industrial Revolution. The biblical census opens a window onto...

Today I’m speaking with David Bentley Hart about his book, A Gathering of Leaves: Extravagances and Ephemera, from the University of Notre Dame Press. David is a multi-faceted scholar who has contributed to the fields of philosophy, religious studies, and baseball, among others. The volume we will be discussing today is a collection of essays mostly originating from his website, Leaves in the Wind. The essays span a wide array of ideas, jumping from Ty Cobb’s undeserved reputation to the merits and deficiencies of writers like Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Cormac McCarthy. David also considers contemporary poli...

Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrative tradition. The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations (Brill, 2026) studies one such narrative, known as the Dharmaparīkṣā ('Examination of Religion'), which has intrigued audiences for its ridiculing critique of Brahmanical beliefs and authority.

This book is the first to examine six versions of the story in classical and vernacular languages and from different periods together as a tradition of adaptations. Revealing the adaptive practices Jain authors applied as literary and...

Peter Dominic Martino is a trial lawyer, law professor, former CEO, and former nuclear submarine officer. He serves as Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and is a co-founder of Honos Law PLLC. He studied in Annapolis and later Georgetown Law, served in the Navy, and in the Department of Homeland Security, and practices law in New York City. His new book from Sophia Press is Resurrection on Trial: A Judicial Inquiry into the Christian Claim of the Resurrection of Jesus (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), and he walks me through the evidence for our foundational belief—as he says...

The old story in the academy was that as science and technology progressed, western society would grow more secular while the supernatural would disappear permanently from the public square. But nowadays re-enchantment is the new byword, from renewed public interest in traditional forms of religion to weirder phenomenon like ufology and psychedelics entering mainstream culture. However, the academy has been slow to catch up with this wider sea change.

So various scholars of religion have been putting forward new arguments for the legitimate study of the supernatural. One of these is Dale Allison, who is my guest...

From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East (Pegasus, 2026) unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: a Byzantine renegade, a crusader princess, a Turkish matriarch, a young Arab nobleman, a Syriac archbishop, Saladin's leading commander, and the vizier of Egypt. Between them, information, tec...

Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu. 

In his last, profoundly innovative work Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, D. R. Nagaraj (1954-1998) engages with the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu, whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and thus resisted analysis. Nagaraj situates Allama in three intellectual contexts: the medieval philosophical world built around the worship of Shiva; the pan-Indian bhakti tradition; and, most broadly, Indian mystical thought. This framework enables a reconstruction of Allama through the poet's engagement with fellow poet-spiritualists (vachanakaras) such as Basava, as wel...

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America

In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did no...

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America—and its churches—for the sins of slavery and race prejudice. It has long been assumed that apocalypticism is antithetical to social reform. Yet in Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery...

Mahatma Gandhi was an anticolonial activist, lawyer, and politician. Less famously, but no less importantly, he was also a back-to-the-land farmer, a founder of communes, and a seeker of utopia. Living with Gandhi: Experiments in Utopia tells the story of everyday life at four of Gandhi's communities in India and South Africa. It explores who lived at each community alongside Gandhi, the experiments they undertook in the shared pursuit of universal wellbeing, and the connections that were forged between daily life and larger socio-political issues such as racial inequality, caste reform, and anticolonial activism. The need to simplify life an...

Since the beginning of European colonization, the sun-drenched land of California has always attracted dreamers and schemers. Whether it was Spanish missionaries, Russian fur traders, or American argonauts, the myth - or perhaps brand - of California has long been a place here one's wildest dreams can come true. Starting in the late nineteenth century and accelerating in the twentieth, that myth also attracted a wide array of starry eyed spiritualists. In Golden States: How California Religion Went from Cautionary Tale to Global Brand (U California Press, 2024), Cal State Long Beach history professor Eileen Luhr explains how and why...

In my conversation with Prof. Emmanuel Y. Lartey about his new book, Spiritual Care in African Religious Cultures: Sacred Wisdom for the Care of Persons in an Intercultural World, published by Georgetown University Press in 2026.

Our conversation highlighted the importance of taking African religious worlds seriously, not merely as objects of academic study but as rich sources of knowledge about care, healing, suffering, community, spirituality, and human flourishing.

Prof. Lartey’s work challenges long-standing stereotypes that have often shaped the study of African religions. The book highlights the depth and diversity of African spiritual traditions, inc...