Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics? In...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 205
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals...
Jan 03, 2023•44 min•Ep. 1293
What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace? Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy: L...
Dec 29, 2022•42 min•Ep. 115
In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American identities--forcibly transported Irish, Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Irish--into American histories and representations of race. Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding...
Dec 26, 2022•43 min•Ep. 36
James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses (Oxford UP, 2022), with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allu...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 199
In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first women’s shelter in West Berlin in 1976 and a broadly successful campaign that changed legal and soci...
Dec 20, 2022•56 min•Ep. 43
Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. Richard B. Miller identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, and then offers an alternative framework for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Shadowing these various methodologies, h...
Dec 20, 2022•43 min•Ep. 185
What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative ...
Dec 20, 2022•34 min•Ep. 126
Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become mo...
Dec 17, 2022•57 min•Ep. 53
How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies? In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expe...
Dec 14, 2022•30 min•Ep. 107
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. T...
Dec 13, 2022•39 min•Ep. 46
Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'. At the centre o...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 180
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own Devices Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona. You’ll hear about: Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author The design of the research projec...
Dec 09, 2022•52 min•Ep. 3
In The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jay Michaelson explores the religious philosophy of the mercurial eighteenth-century figure Jacob Frank, who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, Michaelson challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Fr...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 332
Societies that are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies face a daunting question: should they punish the representatives of the ancien regime or let bygones be bygones? In her interview, Professor Ruti Teitel talks both about these choices and more broadly about transitional justice as a field. Her book, Transitional Justice , published in year 2000 with Oxford University Press, takes this question to a new level with an interdisciplinary approach that c...
Dec 04, 2022•58 min•Ep. 40
In Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India (Oxford UP, 2021), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own...
Dec 01, 2022•50 min•Ep. 225
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should Th...
Nov 25, 2022•52 min•Ep. 40
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred...
Nov 25, 2022•42 min•Ep. 218
In Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women's Representation in Congress (Oxford UP, 2022), Catherine N. Wineinger argues that to truly understand the evolution of women's congressional representation, it is necessary to move beyond an analysis of legislative behavior and toward an analysis of intraparty gender dynamics. Unlike previous research on women in Congress, Wineinger focuses exclusively on the experiences of Republican congresswomen to uncover some of the gendered im...
Nov 24, 2022•43 min•Ep. 217
Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses have offered us a unique opportunity--a chance to see authors and editors in conversation with each other and themselves about the state and nature of Genocide Studies. Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford University Press, 2022) emerged out of an effort to update and slim down their earlier, larger volume The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies . In the just more than a decade between the two, the field has pushed forward in a variety of directions. Moses and Bloxham have ...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 170
On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese govern...
Nov 22, 2022•54 min•Ep. 123
Robert J. Savage is a professor in the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the University’s Irish Studies program for close to twenty years. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Galway. Savage’s publications explore contemporary Irish and British history and include The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015) short liste...
Nov 21, 2022•33 min•Ep. 30
The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has selected sections of this Sanskrit text which cover debates over the existence of prime matter, God, and an immaterial soul, as well as controversies around the cause and effect, karma , and Jain perspectivalism. Within these chapters, through a translation of the verses of the...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 300
How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford UP, 2020), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years fro...
Nov 18, 2022•45 min•Ep. 122
As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. Sweet Fuel: A ...
Nov 18, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 135
Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explore...
Nov 17, 2022•56 min•Ep. 222
Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evo...
Nov 16, 2022•30 min•Ep. 215
When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them h...
Nov 15, 2022•46 min•Ep. 335
Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international version...
Nov 14, 2022•32 min•Ep. 200
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives ...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 44
