The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney's volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian? The book is open access at Cambridge Core.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Mark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) should appear in 2025.

Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston.

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Why did José de León Toral kill Álvaro Obregón, leader of the Mexican Revolution? So far, historians have characterized the motivations of the young Catholic militant as the fruit of fanaticism. 

Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico.

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Pete Imperial has been principal of St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Berkeley, California, a Lasallian Catholic School of 160 years and going strong. Yet only 45% of the students are Catholics (though a similar number are Protestant Christians) and some of the kids have had no religious experience at all. How does a good Catholic school infuse the souls of its charges and the secular society at large with the Gospel and the teachings of the Holy Roman Catholic Church?

Dr. Imperial has a BA from the University of California in Berkeley, an MA in history from San Francisco State University, and an EdD in Educational Administration from the University of San Francisco. In addition to running the school, he also teaches Islamic Studies, Economics, and East Asian History.

This episode is indebted to Ryan Anderson, the listener and a friend of the podcast who suggested this episode and introduced me to Peter.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes on the subject of Catholic Education:

Here is the pilgrimage with Monique and Joseph González this coming September with Inside the Vatican, and the related episodes from Almost Good Catholics:

Here is my first discussion with Pastor Brian Zahnd and the film A Hidden Life which we will be talking about in August:

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A group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price.

This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also listen to the trailer for next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Public.

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In Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Elizabeth O’Brien foregrounds the racial and religious meanings of surgery to draw important connections between historical and contemporary politics regarding fetal and maternal healthcare. She traces practices of caesarean section and coercive Christianization throughout Mexico’s colonial period; patriarchal pregnancy management during republican state formation; and tubal ligation and vaginal bifurcation in Mexico’s twentieth century Eugenics movement. Surgery and Salvation has received several awards including the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies’ Judy Ewell Award; the Latin American Studies Association 2024 Best Book Award for the Nineteenth-Century Section; and Honorable Mention for the 2024 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize (WAWH) as well as the Thomas McGann Prize (RMCLAS). O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and Latin American History at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this episode, O'Brien is interviewed by Leah Cargin (PhD candidate, University of Oklahoma).

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Christine Wohar talks about Finding Frassati: And Following His Path to Holiness (EWTN, 2021), her book about Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. The book is a biography, hagiography, and delightful conversation about the participation of the Communion of Saints in our lives and how can join hands with them in our daily lives. Like many of us, Bl. Pier Giorgio was a normal guy with a comfortable life, and he did normal fun things available to him a young wealthy, Italian a hundred years ago, like mountain climbing, Alpine skiing, studying at university, and playing pool with his friends. But he also showed extreme love for the Eucharist, care for the poor, evangelization, and chastity—so, normal, and yet extraordinary.

Not only was Bl. Pier Giorgio’s body free from corruption when it was exhumed 75 years after his death, but he also has a couple of astounding miraculous healing attributed to him through his intercession. Christine Wohar talks to me about this remarkable figure in the church and how we can follow in his footsteps.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes that we referred to in this interview:

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Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

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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During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life.

In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.

By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.

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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Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia, 2023) shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities.

Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine.

Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.

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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From his overwhelming embrace by evangelicals and other people of faith to his championing of policies and conservative judicial candidates long sought by right-wing Christians, Donald Trump’s candidacy, campaign, and presidency were empowered by believers of many stripes who employed different methods of rationalizing or Christianizing Trump and his administration. In Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era (Routledge, 2024), Hank Willenbrink examines this intersection of political power and religion through the lens of performance studies, in part via Trump’s own expressions but predominantly through mass media performances of his Christian supporters. 

From Trump’s affiliation with his “court evangelicals” and televangelists to the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy and other prophetic/apostolic movements latching onto Trump’s ascension in service of dominionistic ends, and from his support among very conservative Catholics to the “cult” of Trump that has coalesced in conspiratorial online spaces advocating QAnon beliefs, the last decade has witnessed a mainstreaming of theology and ideology ripe for an interdisciplinary analysis of the performative aspects of Trump’s faith-based support. Dr. Willenbrink joined the New Books Network to discuss all these subjects as well as Christian nationalism in the present American political climate.

Hank Willenbrink (Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. A scholar and theatre artist, Hank has published on a range of topics like Hell Houses, the playwright Naomi Iizuka, the intersections of playwriting and nature writing, and the use of music in HBO’s Girls. With his wife, Dr. Yamile Silva, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese writing. Hank’s play, The Boat in the Tiger Suit, premiered in New York and is published by Original Works Publishing. He’s developed theatrical work internationally, including at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Hank has also led several interdisciplinary, community-engaged projects that bring together students and community members of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to engage in deeper and more intentional ways through collectively created theatrical performance. Hank played in a number of questionable bands, co-founded the music blog We Listen for You, and hails from Toad Suck, Arkansas. He is currently continuing the research that he discusses on today’s podcast episode on his Substack: performingforthedon.substack.com.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) primarily hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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