With Christmas approaching, in this episode we reflect on Christian persecution in the Middle East, the historic cradle of Christianity and the birthplace of Jesus, and the very different challenges Christians face in the East versus the West.

Annika sits down with Father Benedict Kiely, a Catholic priest who has devoted his ministry to serving Christian communities in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. 

Nasarean, his non-profit to help Christians in the Middle East is here.:

The Chinese Communist Party's re-translation of John:8 is here.

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Religious commitments can be a powerful engine for progressive social change. In A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford UP, 2023), Raúl E. Zegarra examines the process of articulation of religious beliefs and political concerns that takes place in religious organizing and activism. Focusing on the example of Latin American liberation theology and the work of Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, Zegarra shows how liberation theology advocates have been able to produce a new balance between faith and politics that advances an agenda of progressive social change without reducing politics to faith or faith to politics.

Drawing from theologian David Tracy's method of critical correlation, the book focuses on key historical, philosophical, and theological shifts that have allowed liberation theologians to produce a new interpretation of the relationship between faith and politics in the Christian tradition, especially when issues of social justice are at stake. The book further approaches liberation theology's contributions to theorizing social justice through an unconventional path: a critical dialogue with the work of philosopher John Rawls. This dialogue, as Zegarra contends, allows us to see more clearly the contributions of liberation theology to the cause of progressive social change. Ultimately the book stands between "public religion" and "public reason," offering something of a blueprint for theological innovation and for how to remain committed to one's faith while respecting and defending the core values of democracy.

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In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Durmaz uses stories of saints to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages.

Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity (T&T Clark, 2023) is a natural outgrowth from McDonald’s significant and ongoing work in the field of canon studies, which traces the development of the Christian Old and New Testaments as we know them today. Given that McDonald holds, as is now common in canon scholarship, that the biblical canon does not begin its formation until the fourth century CE, Before There Was a Bible examines the sources of authority that existed in the early, pre-canonical Christian centuries. Among these are the revered words of Jesus, early preferences for the Hebrew Scriptures that inspired Jesus’s ministry, and the different weights and values placed at times on the texts that would become accepted as part of the New Testament, the apostolic leadership of the churches, and the successors of the apostles, such as the bishops who maintained core traditions, creeds, hymnody, lectionaries, and other checks and balances on the spiritual sources for their churches. McDonald joined the New Books Network to discuss all these topics and more from his career in New Testament scholarship.

Lee Martin McDonald (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1976) is President Emeritus at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, where he taught New Testament Studies for many years, and was also president of the Institute for Biblical Research from 2006 to 2012. He has written or edited 35 books over a career that spans back to the 1980s, and his most recent work is Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2023).

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) 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, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Quaker theologian Richard J. Foster and charismatic pastor Brenda Quinn talk with me about Foster’s new book (which Quinn worked on with him), Learning Humility: A Year of Searching for a Vanishing Virtue (InterVarsity Press, 2022). Foster explains why we should and how we can cultivate this greatest of virtues. He also tells me about his Quaker foundations, his investigation of Lakota history and culture, and what he has learned from fire—something we have in common.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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The pill has rocked our society to its core: but have we fully examined all its repercussions? Influential author and essayist Mary Eberstadt thinks we've only scratched the surface; in her most recent book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited (Ignatius Press, 2023) she argues that the papal encyclical Humane Vitae predicted our deep loneliness and other modern woes.

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic information center in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. 

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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The remarkable, and permanently influential, papal history known as the Liber pontificalis shaped perceptions and the memory of Rome, the popes, and the many-layered past of both city and papacy within western Europe. In Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Rosamond McKitterick offers a new analysis of this extraordinary combination of historical reconstruction, deliberate selection and political use of fiction, to illuminate the history of the early popes and their relationship with Rome. She examines the content, context, and transmission of the text, and the complex relationships between the reality, representation, and reception of authority that it reflects.

The Liber pontificalis presented Rome as a holy city of Christian saints and martyrs, as the bishops of Rome established their visible power in buildings, and it articulated the popes' spiritual and ministerial role, accommodated within their Roman imperial inheritance. Drawing on wide-ranging and interdisciplinary international research, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy offers pioneering insights into the evolution of this extraordinary source, and its significance for the history of early medieval Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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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On Theology: Herman Bavinck's Academic Orations (Brill, 2020) presents four previously untranslated works by Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), here introduced and translated by Bruce Pass. These four speeches offer important insights into Bavinck's conceptualization of the discipline of theology, its place in the modern university, and the relation in which theology stands to religion. In the introductory essay, Bruce R. Pass draws attention to the way these speeches shed light on the development of Bavinck's thought across his tenure at the Kampen Theological School and the Free University of Amsterdam as well as the complex relationship in which Bavinck's thought stands to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is an important and unique contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on and translation work of the late 19th and early 20th Dutch NeoCalvinist movement.

Bruce Pass is a senior honorary research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published numerous articles on Bavinck and modern theology. For the interested listener, Bruce Pass has been on the podcast before to talk about his book The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2020).

Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales.

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Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing what she called "Do Everything" reform, Willard became a central figure in international movements in support of prohibition, women's suffrage, and Christian socialism. A devout Methodist, Willard helped to shape predominant religious currents of the late nineteenth century and was an important figure in the rise of the social gospel movement in American Protestantism.

The first biography of Frances Willard to be published in over thirty-five years, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard (Oxford UP, 2022) explores Willard's life, her contributions as a reformer, and her broader legacy as a women's rights activist in the United States. In addition to chronicling Willard's life, historian Christopher H. Evans examines how Willard crafted a distinctive culture of women's leadership, emphasizing the importance of religious faith for understanding Willard's successes as a social reformer. Despite her enormous fame during her lifetime, Evans investigates the reasons why Willard's legacy has been eclipsed by subsequent generations of feminist reformers and assesses her importance for our time. 

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, Wisconsin, wrote a statement in his diocesan journal, the Madison Catholic Herald about the German Synodal Way. The German Bishops, in defiance of Pope Francis, have been promoting same sex unions and the ordination of women and transgender persons. I ask Bishop Hying what is going on and how these matters should be handled: is there a correct way for the brother bishops to disagree on social issues as they listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit to guide them and our Church in this time of accelerating change?

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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