Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Karma Ben-Johanan presents a revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue. A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never b...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 26
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•44 min•Ep. 185
In A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kathleen Sprows Cummings asks what drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest for an American saint? A home-grown saint, she argues, would serve as a mediator between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their ide...
Dec 17, 2022•43 min•Ep. 25
Mary Channen Caldwell in her new book Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press 2022) opens up new avenues for investigation by centering the refrain as an area of focus in which to analyze Latin songs through the Middle Ages. Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book r...
Dec 07, 2022•32 min•Ep. 174
Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine. A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. J...
Dec 07, 2022•46 min•Ep. 24
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Henni Alava, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, on her fascinating new book published by Bloomsbury as part of the New Directions in Anthropology of Christianity book series: Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion (Bloomsbury, 2022). Alava's work sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic field...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 150
Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, who called him a “prophet and a peasant.” He helped the homeless on the Bowery, founded the Joe Hill House of H...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 23
Russell McCutcheon shares his views on the academic study of religion, and the path ahead for religion graduates and the field itself. McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama and a contributor to the Religious Studies Project podcast. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...
Nov 28, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 237
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•43 min•Ep. 218
Aidan Enright holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University Belfast and is an Associate Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer in History at Leeds Beckett University, where he teaches Modern British History and he is also a Teacher of Social Sciences at University of Bradford International College. In this interview, he discusses his first book, Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts, 2022) This book uncovers th...
Nov 24, 2022•30 min•Ep. 31
In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counterna...
Nov 17, 2022•56 min•Ep. 22
In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptio...
Nov 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 180
The T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long (T&T Clark: 2020), provides a wide-ranging survey and analysis of the Christian Church. This foundational text explores the scriptural foundations of ecclesiology, historical and confessional aspects of the topic, contemporary and topical themes. Compiled and written by leading scholars in the field, this accessible volume covers a range of key topics in the context of their development and importance in each ...
Nov 08, 2022•29 min•Ep. 212
Anna von der Goltz’s The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective—that of center-right student activists. Based on oral history as well as new archival sources, The Other ‘68ers examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of West German students who identified with the long-governing political movement known as Christian Democracy. Writing these activists back into the history of...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 143
What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, ...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 27
The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and government pensions. Their political allies used the fabricated plot as a tool to undermine the minist...
Oct 31, 2022•47 min•Ep. 15
Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture (Cornell UP, 2022), Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the tor...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 18
The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over. Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions...
Oct 21, 2022•56 min•Ep. 14
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular...
Oct 20, 2022•49 min•Ep. 229
In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire have often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of anti-racism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights. In The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (U California Press, 2021), we gain acces...
Oct 20, 2022•56 min•Ep. 101
Christianity is now a majority-global South religion, with more believers living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America than in Europe and North America. However, most Americans have little exposure to Christians around the world. In addition, the United States is still the country that sends the most international missionaries. While many American churches support missionaries overseas, they may not understand the beliefs, practices, histories, and challenges Christians' experience abroad. Gina Zur...
Oct 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 16
In this episode of the Queer Voices podcast, John Marszalek interviews author John D’Emilio, one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history, about his memoir, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Duke UP, 2022) At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? ...
Oct 12, 2022•48 min•Ep. 44
Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780–1850 (U Toronto Press, 2021) by Dr. S. Karly Kehoe explores how the agency of Scottish and Irish Catholics redefined understandings of Britishness and British imperial identity in colonial landscapes. In highlighting the relationship of Scottish and Irish Catholics with the British Empire, Dr. S. Karly Kehoe starts an important and timely debate about Britain’s colonizer constituencies. The colonies of Nova Scotia...
Oct 07, 2022•56 min•Ep. 21
Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton ...
Oct 05, 2022•57 min•Ep. 12
When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World ...
Sep 30, 2022•50 min•Ep. 12
One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territor...
Sep 30, 2022•58 min•Ep. 20
The intricacies of imperialism and colonialism within the context of the Bible are nuanced and varied. Understanding the legacy of European Imperialism requires careful reflection of the Bible’s affinity with the empire and concentration of power. In this episode of Humanities Matter, Dr. Steed Vernyl Davidson, author of Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective (Brill, 2017) elaborates on the ambiguities of the Bible as an anti-imperial tool and his work in tracing the evolution of ...
Sep 27, 2022•24 min•Ep. 65
Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geog...
Sep 22, 2022•35 min•Ep. 90
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 175
Joe Drape is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen and American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise. His book Black Maestro was the inaugural winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award. Today we talked about his book The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith. Le...
Sep 16, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 187
