New Books in Christian Studies

By Marshall Poe

Religion & Spirituality Christianity

What's New Books in Christian Studies about?

Interviews with Scholars of Christianity about their New Books

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New Books in Christian Studies episodes:

05.07.2024
Sean Griffin, "The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Dr. Sean Griffin's book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus (Cambridge UP, 2019), takes on the question of the source materials for the Primary Chronicle, one of the most important texts for the study of medieval Russia. Griffin argues that key portions...
05.07.2024
Lucy Barnhouse, "Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Lucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development...
04.30.2024
Markus Vinzent, "Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and...
04.27.2024
Michael Boler, "Introduction to Classical and New Testament Greek: A Unified Approach" (Catholic U of America Press, 2019)
The defining feature of this textbook is the treatment of classical and New Testament Greek as one language using primary sources. All the example sentences the students will translate are real Greek sentences, half of which are taken from classical...
04.25.2024
Making Moves (and Making Movies) in the Mission Field (with Temeko Richardson)
Temeko Ricardson grew up in the Protestant American tradition; she was a “GPK” (grand-pastor-kid) from a family of church leaders. She has been thinking about Christianity and social issues—failure to include God’s people into His Church, fractured families, homelessness—and how...
04.24.2024
Crawford Gribben, "J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024) describes the work of one of the most important and under-studied theologians in the history of Christianity. In the late 1820s, John Nelson Darby abandoned his career as a priest in...
04.23.2024
Michael Scott and Michael Collins, "Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context" (Vernon Press, 2022)
The enigma of William Shakespeare's religious beliefs has long tantalized scholars and enthusiasts alike. Vernon Press's latest publication, Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context (Vernon Press, 2022), dives deep into this mystery. The collection of essays,...
04.22.2024
John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more...
04.20.2024
James N. Neumann, "The Gospel of the Son of God: Psalm 2 and Mark's Narrative Christology" (T&T Clark, 2023)
What does it mean for the Gospel of Mark to portray Jesus as Son of God? Apparently far more than what past scholarship has recognized! James Neumann argues that Mark presents Jesus’ life from beginning to end as the actualization...
04.19.2024
Charles E. Curran, "Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian" (Georgetown UP, 2006)
Over the course of our 60th anniversary in 2024, we'll be revisiting some classic Georgetown books. First up is Loyal Dissent by Charles E. Curran. Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian (Georgetown UP, 2006) is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest...
04.17.2024
Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)
St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of...
04.13.2024
Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
In Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to...
04.13.2024
D. Clint Burnett, "Christ's Enthronement at God's Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context" (de Gruyter, 2020)
How did Psalm 110:1 become so widely used as a messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Part of the explanation may be related to the first century’s Greco-Roman political and religious context. Tune in as we speak with...
04.11.2024
Catholic in Palestine (with Fr Firas Abedrabbo)
There have been Christians in the Holy Land for two thousand years; “we are the first church,” says Father Firas Abedrabbo who is from Bethlehem and works in Ramallah. He studied law in France and speaks excellent English and spoke...
04.08.2024
Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà:...
04.06.2024
Claudio Ferlan, "The Jesuits: A Thematic History" (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023)
In The Jesuits: A Thematic History (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023), Claudio Ferlan provides an exploration of the tradition of the Society of Jesus. Instead of focusing solely on the Society’s historical milestones and changes, Ferlan traces the continuity of key Jesuit...
04.03.2024
Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)
Greg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods,...
04.03.2024
Georgia Frank, "Unfinished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They...
04.02.2024
Erin L. Durban, "The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their...
04.02.2024
Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality...
04.01.2024
Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
After two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast...
04.01.2024
Katie Barclay, "Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Caritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was...
03.28.2024
The Wood Between the Worlds (with Brian Zahnd)
For Christians, the central event in history and in universe is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. This killing of God (or deicide) is so mysterious and terrible that it’s hard to even approach: what...
03.26.2024
William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William...
03.24.2024
Brent M. Rogers, "Buffalo Bill and the Mormons" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
In this never-before-told history of Buffalo Bill and the Mormons, Brent M. Rogers presents the intersections in the epic histories of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Latter-day Saints from 1846 through 1917. In Cody's autobiography he claimed to...
03.24.2024
Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations...
03.17.2024
Keith Bodner and Benjamin J.M. Johnson, "Characters and Characterization in the Book of Judges" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Characters and characterization are a key ingredient for interpreting the Bible, and perhaps no other book in the Bible is so full of challenging and outlandish characters as the book of Judges. From Ehud, the left-handed assassin to the zany adventures...
03.13.2024
Janine Giordano Drake, "The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong. In the generation after the Civil War, few of the...
03.11.2024
Emil Hilton Saggau, "Nationalisation of the Sacred: Orthodox Historiography, Memory, and Politics in Montenegro" (Peter Lang, 2023)
The Eastern Orthodox Churches in post-communist Eastern Europe are embroiled in long-running conflicts over ownership of territory, saints, sites, nations, and history. These often violent conflicts reflect political and national rivalries, most explicitly in former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. They are...
03.04.2024
Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Jewish Annotated New Testament" (Oxford UP, 2017)
First published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford UP, 2017) was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to...
03.02.2024
David P. Gushee, "Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies" (William B. Eerdmans, 2023)
Why do some devout Christians support authoritarian leaders who threaten the very democracies that protect religious freedoms? The resounding support from evangelical and conservative Christians for strident culture hawks like Donald Trump and other far right leaders may appear surprising, but...
03.01.2024
Miracle Man (with Joe McGivney)
Lifelong alcoholic Joe McGivney drank himself into brain damage and permanent disability. The day after being placed into the assisted care he would need for rest of his life, he sprang back to full recovery, restored health—it was a medical...
02.22.2024
Jeffrey D. Long, "Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, Scientific" (MDPI Books, 2019)
What happens after you die? The book brings together fascinating theological and religious studies perspectives on a controversial yet pervasive idea: reincarnation. An estimated 1 on 5 Americans subscribe to this belief, despite their religious background. Why is this? What...
02.22.2024
Harriet Lyon, "Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination,...
02.21.2024
Safwat Marzouk, "Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015)
Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel....
02.19.2024
Gwyn McClelland, "Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives" (Routledge, 2019)
On 9th August 1945, the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Of the dead, approximately 8500 were Catholic Christians, representing over sixty percent of the community. In Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests, and Catholic Survivor Narratives (Routledge, 2019), Gwyn McClelland presents...
02.18.2024
Jonathon Lookadoo, "The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch" (Cascade Books, 2023)
The letters of Ignatius of Antioch portray Jesus in terms that are both remarkably exalted and shockingly vulnerable. Jesus is identified as God and is the sole physician and teacher who truly reveals the Father. At the same time, Jesus...
02.15.2024
Homo sapiens catholicus (with Jeremy Holmes)
Theology Professor Jeremy Holmes of Wyoming Catholic College teaches a class called “Science and Theology,” which is about the Darwin’s theory of evolution and related topics, including the problems we encounter in the fossil record and our understanding of genetic...
02.15.2024
Ed Simon, "Relic" (Bloomsbury. 2024)
Object Lessons is a Bloomsbury series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book, Relic, by Dr. Ed Simon was published in 2024. Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which...
02.13.2024
Anthony Kaldellis, "Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Though commonly used today to identify a polity that lasted for over a millennium, the label “Byzantine empire” is an anachronism imposed by more recent generations. As Anthony Kaldellis explains in Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Harvard University Press,...
02.06.2024
Clare K. Rothschild, "The Muratorian Fragment: Text, Translation, Commentary" (Mohr Siebeck, 2022)
Discovered and published in 1740 by the Ambrosian librarian Ludovico Muratori, the so-called “Muratorian Fragment” has long featured for New Testament scholars as a piece of second-century evidence for a canonical impulse in early Christianity. Challengers to this second-century dating...
02.05.2024
Angela Kim Harkins, "An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: The Book of Visions and Its Role in Moral Formation" (Equinox, 2023)
Among early Christian books abandoned at the flipside of the canonical boundary, the Shepherd of Hermas is presently undergoing an exciting renaissance of scholarly interest from multiple critical angles. Accepting that the Shepherd was broadly reckoned as a catechetical scripture...
01.29.2024
Daniel I. Block, "The Gospel According to Moses: A Commentary on Deuteronomy" (Inspirata Publishing, 2023)
For the renowned scholar, Dr. Daniel Block, Deuteronomy is the "Gospel according to Moses." Moses' farewell pastoral addresses call God's people to remember his grace in salvation, covenant relationship with him, and his revelation of a way of blessing in...
01.29.2024
Sarah Diefendorf, "The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals" (U California Press, 2023)
Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork at a megachurch, sociologist Dr. Sarah Diefendorf investigates the ways in which the evangelical church is working to grow during a time in which cultural shifts are leading young people to leave religion behind....
01.29.2024
William R. Jankowiak, "Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Angel Park is a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous community where plural marriages between one man and multiple women are common. Based on many years of in-depth ethnographic research, in Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (Columbia UP, 2023), William Jankowiak considers the...
01.25.2024
Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Renowned historian of Mormonism Richard Lyman Bushman's latest book presents a vibrant history of a sacred object that gave birth to a new religion: the gold plates Joseph Smith said he discovered in upstate New York in the 1820s. Believers hailed Smith as...
01.25.2024
Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)
As per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of the soul coincided? And what if the soul was also...
01.22.2024
Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Nicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious,...
01.18.2024
"Apocalypto" and Mel Gibson (with Jonathon Fessenden)
The 2006 Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, takes us into a decadent Maya civilization in the Yucatan on the eve of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. It could be a commentary on ancient Rome or the present-day US, but, because it is...
01.18.2024
Neall W. Pogue, "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement" (Cornell UP, 2022)
How does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious...

What's New Books in Christian Studies about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in Christian Studies episodes:

Sean Griffin, "The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Lucy Barnhouse, "Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Markus Vinzent, "Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Michael Boler, "Introduction to Classical and New Testament Greek: A Unified Approach" (Catholic U of America Press, 2019)

Making Moves (and Making Movies) in the Mission Field (with Temeko Richardson)

Crawford Gribben, "J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Michael Scott and Michael Collins, "Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context" (Vernon Press, 2022)

John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

James N. Neumann, "The Gospel of the Son of God: Psalm 2 and Mark's Narrative Christology" (T&T Clark, 2023)

Charles E. Curran, "Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian" (Georgetown UP, 2006)

Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)

Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

D. Clint Burnett, "Christ's Enthronement at God's Right Hand and Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context" (de Gruyter, 2020)

Catholic in Palestine (with Fr Firas Abedrabbo)

Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Claudio Ferlan, "The Jesuits: A Thematic History" (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023)

Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)

Georgia Frank, "Unfinished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Erin L. Durban, "The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Katie Barclay, "Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self" (Oxford UP, 2021)

The Wood Between the Worlds (with Brian Zahnd)

William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Brent M. Rogers, "Buffalo Bill and the Mormons" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Keith Bodner and Benjamin J.M. Johnson, "Characters and Characterization in the Book of Judges" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Janine Giordano Drake, "The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Emil Hilton Saggau, "Nationalisation of the Sacred: Orthodox Historiography, Memory, and Politics in Montenegro" (Peter Lang, 2023)

Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Jewish Annotated New Testament" (Oxford UP, 2017)

David P. Gushee, "Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies" (William B. Eerdmans, 2023)

Miracle Man (with Joe McGivney)

Jeffrey D. Long, "Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, Scientific" (MDPI Books, 2019)

Harriet Lyon, "Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Safwat Marzouk, "Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015)

Gwyn McClelland, "Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives" (Routledge, 2019)

Jonathon Lookadoo, "The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch" (Cascade Books, 2023)

Homo sapiens catholicus (with Jeremy Holmes)

Ed Simon, "Relic" (Bloomsbury. 2024)

Anthony Kaldellis, "Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Clare K. Rothschild, "The Muratorian Fragment: Text, Translation, Commentary" (Mohr Siebeck, 2022)

Angela Kim Harkins, "An Embodied Reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: The Book of Visions and Its Role in Moral Formation" (Equinox, 2023)

Daniel I. Block, "The Gospel According to Moses: A Commentary on Deuteronomy" (Inspirata Publishing, 2023)

Sarah Diefendorf, "The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals" (U California Press, 2023)

William R. Jankowiak, "Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)

Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)

"Apocalypto" and Mel Gibson (with Jonathon Fessenden)

Neall W. Pogue, "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement" (Cornell UP, 2022)