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  • Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    2026/03/21
    In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe’s Noah, in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous 2014 film, or other recent derivations, the biblical narrative has become a lightning rod for gathering environmental anxieties. However, Philip C. Almond’s masterful exploration of Western cultural history uncovers a far more complex Noah than is commonly recognised: not just the father of humanity but also the first shipbuilder, navigator, zookeeper, farmer, grape grower, and wine maker. Noah’s pivotal significance is revealed as much in his forgotten secular as in his religious receptions, and their major impact on such disciplines as geology, geography, biology, and zoology. While Noah’s many interpretations over two millennia might seem to offer a common message of hope, the author’s sober conclusion to Noah and the Flood in Western Thought (Cambridge UP, 2025) is that deliverance now lies not in divine but rather in human hands. Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. A noted authority in the history of religion and of ideas, he has written many books on subjects as diverse as God, the Devil, the afterlife, witchcraft and witches, Adam and Eve, heaven and hell in Enlightenment England, and early modern demonic possession. His recent works include The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2023), and The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), all published by Cambridge University Press. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Twitter: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    50 分
  • Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China

    Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China
    2026/03/20
    What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis. Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström is a guest researcher at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is a social anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    28 分
  • Ewa Debicka-Borek and Ofer Peres, "Routes, Patterns, Ideologies: Navigating Sacred Sites in India" (HASP, 2025)

    Ewa Debicka-Borek and Ofer Peres, "Routes, Patterns, Ideologies: Navigating Sacred Sites in India" (HASP, 2025)
    2026/03/19
    Hindu sacred geographies are shaped by interwoven webs of myth, ritual, and pilgrimage. Routes, Patterns, Ideologies: Navigating Sacred Sites in India (HASP, 2025) brings together essays that offer in-depth explorations of Hindu sacred spaces, focusing on the relationships between sites as a crucial dimension of their theological and social significance. Drawing on textual analysis, visual studies, and ethnographic insights, the contributors to this volume illuminate the patterns and mechanisms that link sacred sites into dynamic networks, demonstrating how sacrality is continually negotiated through evolving cultural, political, and theological landscapes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    45 分
  • Daniel McClellan, "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025)

    Daniel McClellan, "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025)
    2026/03/18
    The Bible is arguably the world’s most influential book, but do we really know what it says? Every day across social media and in homes, businesses, and public spaces, people try to cut debate short by claiming that "the Bible says so!" However, they commonly disagree about what it actually does and doesn't say, particularly when it comes to socially significant issues. For instance, does the Bible say we should be on the lookout for an antichrist associated with the number 666? Does it say women shouldn’t wear revealing clothing? Does it say it’s okay to hit your kids?In The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025), Dan McClellan leverages his popular "data over dogma" approach, and his years of experience in the academy and on social media, to lay out in clear and accessible ways what the data indicate the Bible does and doesn't say about issues ranging from homosexuality, abortion, and slavery to monotheism, inspiration, and even God's wife. The Bible Says So is an invaluable resource for our fractious times. Interviewees: Dan McClellan is an award-winning public scholar of the Bible. He has over one million followers on social media and is a host on the Data Over Dogma Podcast. Dan received his PhD from the University of Exeter and is currently an honorary fellow at Birmingham University's Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 時間 2 分
  • John Oakes, "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without" (Avid Reader, 2024)

    John Oakes, "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without" (Avid Reader, 2024)
    2026/03/15
    With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—essential to many religions and wellness routines. Whether for philosophical, political, or health-related reasons, fasting marks a departure from daily routine. Based on extensive historical, scientific, and cultural research and reporting, John Oakes The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and the Promise of Doing Without (Avid Reader Press, 2024) illuminates the numerous facets of this act of self-deprivation. John interviews doctors, spiritual leaders, activists, and others who guide him through this practice—and embarks on fasts of his own—to deliver a book that supplies anyone curious about fasting with profound new understanding, appreciation, and inspiration. In recent years, fasting has become increasingly popular for a variety of reasons—from weight loss to detoxing, to the faithful who fast in prayer, to seekers pursuing mindfulness, to activists using hunger strikes as protest. Notable fasters include Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Cesar Chavez, and a long list of others who have drawn on its power over the ages and across borders and cultures. The Fast looks at the complex science behind the jaw-dropping biological changes that occur inside the body when we fast. Metabolic switching can prompt repair and renewal down to the molecular level, providing benefits for those suffering from obesity and diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and more. Longer fasts can both reinvigorate the immune system and protect it against damage. Beyond the physical experience, fasting can be a great collective unifier, and it has been adopted by religions and political movements all over the world for millennia. Fasting is central to holy seasons and days such as Lent (Christianity), Ramadan (Islam), Yom Kippur (Judaism), Uposatha (Buddhism), and Ekadashi (Hinduism). On an individual level, devout ascetics who master self-deprivation to an extreme are believed to be closer to the divine, ascending to enlightenment or even sainthood. Fasting reminds us of the virtues of holding back, of not consuming all that we can. “Broad in scope and rich in insight” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), this book shows us that fasting is about much more than food: it is about taking control of your life in new and empowering ways and reconsidering your place in the world. John Oakes is the publisher of The Evergreen Review and the editor at large of OR Books. The Fast is his first book. Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an administrative staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    55 分
  • Manuela Ceballos, "Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2025)

    Manuela Ceballos, "Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2025)
    2026/03/13
    Manuela Ceballos’ new book Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2025) engages with the life and legacies of two sixteenth-century saints; the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa of Avila) and the Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ridwan al-Januwi. The book draws from rich Arabic and Spanish sources that moves us between Morocco and Iberia. In the process, we learn that these saints both descent from families of converts and as such blood and bodily pollution operated as material and metaphoric symbols to define their identities. Through this generative comparison, we see how constructions of blood and dung circulate across these varied but entangled temporal geographies to constitute notions of impurity and purity, such as in the case of the deathly hemorrhaging experienced by Teresa. In end though blood is used to set different boundaries around religious or racial identities, and even at times gender norms. As such, the discourses that are utilized for such argumentations are not stable, and so blood and how it is deployed is not the same across the stories of these two saints and their enduring legacies nor does it refract power consistently. This book will be of interest to those who think about embodiment, material culture, the early modern Mediterranean world, and Christian-Muslim mysticism. Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 時間 8 分
  • Jon Stobart, "Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Jon Stobart, "Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    2026/03/11
    An innovative approach in the field of material culture and consumption studies, Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Jon Stobart looks at the houses, consumption and lifestyle of Church of England clergy in the long 18th century, linking moral debates and popular representations of the clergy to the material culture of their houses and their motivations as consumers.By focusing on ethical and moral dimensions of consumer practices, it challenges established readings of consumption in the long 18th century as an essentially secular process in which goods were markers of wealth, status and taste, by bringing the clergyman into the frame – their lives, their habits and their homes.Cross-disciplinary in its approach, combining material culture and religious and social history and sitting at the intersection of these fields, Life in the Georgian Parsonage fills a significant gap, enhancing in important ways our knowledge of this group as a crucial but understudied set of 18th-century consumers, while also contributing to understanding the parish clergy of England in the context of 18th-century society and culture. Bringing together a wide range of source material – from probate inventories to personal account books, satirical prints to sermons, diaries to designs for parsonages – the author reconstructs the material lives and household arrangements of the Georgian clergy in glorious detail. Examining the parish clergy over this period of profound social and religious change through the lens of consumption, and consumption through the lives of these clergymen, has a transformative impact both on these areas of enquiry and on our understanding of English society in the 18th century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    51 分
  • Elliot B. Hanowski, "Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023)

    Elliot B. Hanowski, "Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023)
    2026/03/09
    In recent surveys, one in four Canadians say they have no religion. A century ago, Canada was widely considered to be a Christian nation, and the vast majority of Canadians claimed they were devoutly religious. But some were determined to resist. In the 1920s and ’30s, groups of militant unbelievers formed across Canada to push back against the dominance of religion. Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada by Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), explores both anti-religious activism and the organized opposition unbelievers faced from Christian Canada during the interwar period. Despite Christianity’s prominence, anti-religious ideas were propagated by lectures in theatres, through newspapers, and out on the streets. Secularist groups in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver actively tried to win people away from religious belief. Looking at interwar controversies around religion, Hanowski shows how unbelievers were able to use these conflicts to get their skeptical message across to the public. Challenging the stereotype of Canada as a tolerant, secular nation, Towards a Godless Dominion returns to a time when intolerant forms of Christianity ruled a country that was considered more religious than the United States. Dr. Elliot Hanowski is an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba with a doctorate in Canadian history and one of the founders of the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism. His research focuses specifically on the history of unbelief in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 時間 14 分