Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises.

In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory--it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked.

Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Harvard UP, 2021), she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society.

Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.

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A conversation with Fr. Bogdan Bucur and Dr. Razvan Porumb

This publication represents the officially authorized translation of The Journal of Joy (SVS Press, 2025), carefully rendered to uphold the integrity of the original text in Romanian.

The ethos Steinhardt recommends to Christians is that of an aristocrat minus the stiff upper lip and aloofness, a style molded by kindness, calm, good manners, respect for the dignity of others, and thus for one's own dignity. Christ Himself, he emphasizes, always possessed ‘knightly’ traits: He is discreet, respectful; He knocks on the door and waits, never discouraged by a refusal; He is not suspicious but trusts, not greedy but gives abundantly; He forgives easily and completely; He is attentive and polite (‘Friend,’ He says to Judas, whose betrayal He knows well). In Him, there is no moralism or legalism, but rather the ability to discern in every person, beyond sin, the person that God calls and enables to love. Beyond totalitarianism, which is the fascination with power and death, and beyond market society, which holds up profit as its only god … If the journal of this resistance opens up for the future, it does so precisely because it is a Journal of Joy.

Olivier Clément, from the Preface to the French edition of the Journal of Joy

This is the Journal of Joy, a joy founded on the Resurrection, unconquerable by the manifest powers of death. Now at last available in English, its joy can help transform the petty anxieties that beset us.

Archpriest Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus, Durham University

Translation by Paul Boboc, revised by Peter Andronache, with further revisions and explanatory notes by Peter Andronache, Bogdan G. Bucur, Nicolae Drăgușin, Brenda Mikitish, and Răzvan Porumb. Foreword by Răzvan Porumb.

About the Author:

Nicu Steinhardt, known in his later monastic years as Father Nicolae de la Rohia, was born in 1912 near Bucharest to Jewish parents. A refined scholar who had established himself as one of the most erudite voices of his generation, he was imprisoned by the repressive communist regime in 1960. Steinhardt asked to be baptized in his cell—“illicitly”—and eventually found profound joy amid the suffering and despair of the prison. After an extraordinary experience of Christ, the intense happiness accompanying him perpetually transfigured the cruel and gloomy surroundings into a luminous world permeated by God’s love and grace—which is why writing the Journal in the early 1970s was essential, even in the knowledge it would be banned by the communists. Nicolae Steinhardt, then a monk at Rohia, passed away in March 1989, nine months before the 1989 December Revolution toppled the communist dictatorship.

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In this episode, Raj Balkaran speaks with Karen Pechilis, Jarrod Whitaker, and Valerie Stoker about A Cultural History of Hinduism (Bloomsbury, 2024), a landmark six-volume series that traces Hindu traditions from the ancient world to the present. Each volume is organized around eight core themes—Sources of Authority; Body and Mind; Social Organization; Identity and Difference; Politics and Power; Arts and Visual Culture; Lineages and Exemplars; and Global Contexts—allowing readers to compare developments across historical periods. Covering the Ancient, Classical, Post-Classical, Empires, Late Colonial, and Independence eras, the series brings together leading voices in Hindu studies.

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On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city’s chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.
To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn’t going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York’s Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman’s The Chief Rabbi's Funeral (U Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath.

Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning historian and biographer with a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton University and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in the podcast:

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Today, host Prof. Pierce Salguero sits down with Susannah Deane, a scholar of Tibetan medicine, Buddhism, and psychiatry. Together, we delve into her work on Tibetan concepts of "wind disorders" and Tantric practice gone wrong. Along the way, we talk about losing control of spirits, becoming a deity, and how Tibetans choose between religious and medical specialists when spiritual practice goes off the rails.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. Also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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Vatican journalist Colleen Dulle discusses her new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, a memoir of the last seven years. In 2018, she started for the Jesuit Review, America Magazine, and that was when all of the terrible revelations of sexual abuse scandals, lies and coverups, about [former cardinal, later defrocked] Theodore McCarrick became the main story, then [former nuncio, later excommunicated] Carlo Maria Viganò’s schismatic campaign, then Jean Vanier, then Marco Rupnik. Each betrayal shook our faith. “One woe doth tread upon another's heel, / So fast they'll follow,” says Gertrude in Hamlet, learning of Ophelia’s death. Colleen talks about these and the fractured body of the Church, a “crisis of community” as well, among other topics. It’s a personal and raw discussion. But these fiery trials might be the proving crucible that has made her faith stronger, wrestling with God, as Jacob did, and throwing plates in honest anger, as Pope Francis recommended.

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An urgent exploration of how antisemitism has shaped Jewish identity and how Jews can reclaim their tradition, by the celebrated White House speechwriter and author of the critically acclaimed Here All Along.

At thirty-six, Sarah Hurwitz was a typical lapsed Jew. On a whim, she attended an introduction to Judaism class and was astonished by what she discovered: thousands of years of wisdom from her ancestors about what it means to be human. That class sparked a journey of discovery that transformed her life.

Years later, as Hurwitz wrestled with what it means to be Jewish at a time of rising antisemitism, she wondered: Where had the Judaism she discovered as an adult been all her life? Why hadn’t she seen the beauty and depth of her tradition in those dull synagogue services and Hebrew school classes she’d endured as a kid? And why had her Jewish identity consisted of a series of caveats and apologies: I’m Jewish, but not that Jewish . . . I’m just a cultural Jew . . . I’m just like everyone else but with a fun ethnic twist—a dash of neurosis, a touch of gallows humor—a little different, but not in a way that would make anyone uncomfortable.

Seeking answers, she went back through time to discover how hateful myths about Jewish power, depravity, and conspiracy have worn a neural groove deep into the world’s psyche, shaping not just how others think about Jews, but how Jews think about themselves. She soon realized that the Jewish identity she’d thought was freely chosen was actually the result of thousands of years of antisemitism and two centuries of Jews erasing parts of themselves and their tradition in the hope of being accepted and safe.

In As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us (HarperOne, 2025), Hurwitz documents her quest to take back her Jewish identity, how she stripped away the layers of antisemitic lies that made her recoil from her own birthright and unearthed the treasures of Jewish tradition. With antisemitism raging worldwide, Hurwitz’s defiant account of reclaiming the Jewish story and learning to live as a Jew, without apology, has never been timelier or more necessary.

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In a world where faith and reason are perceived as enemies, this book describes them as companions. Readers of Immigrant on Earth: A Philosopher on the Road to Emmaus (Wipf and Stock, 2025) are invited to travel into the souls of ordinary people and the minds of philosophers and theologians, experience the meekness coming from faith, or attempt to decipher complicated philosophical concepts. This is a book that reveals the human condition of being immigrants: people who apply for entry into the souls of those they encounter.

This is a deeply personal and honest book: it reads like a spiritual, philosophical and theological journal. Octavian Gabor weaves every reading, teaching, music, encounter into a personal spiritual tapestry that helps him span the prosaic, the every day and the sublime. He helps us look deeper into human relationships and into the hidden recesses of reality in order to discern the unseen presence of God.

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Jamal J. Elias' new book After Rumi: The Mevlevis & Their World (Harvard UP, 2025) takes us on a historical journey through the development of the Mevlevi community after Jalaluddin Rumi’s passing in 1273. He frames the Mevlevis as an “emotional community” that is anchored in affective engagements with Rumi and his Masnavi. The book is organized around three major historical moments, the first is centered around Ulu ‘Arif Chelebi, Rumi’s grandson, the second after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the final chapters focus on the career of Isma‘il Anqaravi (d. 1631). Through close readings of biographies and various manuscripts, Elias paints a rich and complex metahistory of significant intellectual, metaphysical, political, social, and cultural factors that have defined the Mevlevi community. For instance, aspects such as charismatic leadership and the role of the Masnavi remain vital and also shifting factors for the Mevlevi community, as we see in the commentaries on the Masnavi written by Anqaravi. Throughout the book we learn how notions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are unstable categories, especially in relation to antinomian tendencies, the place of women in the Mevlevi communities, and the shifting significance and use of Persian in literary productions. This book will be of interest to those who read and write on Sufism, Anatolian, Ottoman, and Turkish history and Rumi and the Mevlevis.

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About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway, which connects the distant rural shrine with urban Pakistan. Now, an increasingly confident minority Hindu community has claimed Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. In Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan (Oxford UP, 2018) Jürgen Schaflechner studies literary sources in Hindi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu alongside extensive ethnographical research at the shrine, examining the political and cultural influences at work at the temple and tracking the remote desert shrine's rapid ascent to its current status as the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. Schaflechner introduces the unique character of this place of pilgrimage and shows its modern importance not only for Hindus, but also for Muslims and Sindhi nationalists. Ultimately, this is an investigation of the Pakistani Hindu community's beliefs and practices at their largest place of worship in the Islamic Republic today--a topic of increasing importance to Pakistan's contemporary society.

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