How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), O’Sullivan shares the stories of women who found agency in religious institutions as conduits ...
Mar 13, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 83
As the leader of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles during the 1980s, Father Luis Olivares brazenly defied local Catholic authorities and the federal government by publicly offering sanctuary to Central American migrants fleeing political violence and civil war, and later extending it to undocumented Mexican immigrants unable to legalize their status after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Twenty-five years after the priest’s death, Mario T. García has written the...
Feb 11, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 57
Tim Perry is adjunct professor of theology at Saint Paul University in Ottawa and at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. As the author of a number of studies of the relationship between Catholic Christianity and evangelicalism, his most recent project has been to edit a volume of essays by leading protestant theologians on one of the most important recent Popes. The Theology of Benedict XVI: A Protestant Appreciation (Lexham Press, 2019) gathers together work from contributors including...
Jan 02, 2020•31 min•Ep. 85
Giuliana Chamedes' new book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019) explores how World War I galvanized the central government of the Catholic Church to craft its own variety of internationalism, which was intended to rival both liberal and communist internationalism. From 1918 up through the mid-1960s, the Vatican’s ‘Catholic International’ made novel use of international law, public diplomacy, and new forms of communications...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 670
Fran Altvater talks about the Medieval Pilgrimage, a practice that became central to Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages and evolved into the military pilgrimages of the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Altvater is a professor of art history at the University of Hartford. Her book, Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017. Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. ...
Dec 13, 2019•34 min•Ep. 41
Ah, science fiction: Aliens? Absolutely. Robots? Of course. But why are there so many priests in space? As Jim Clarke writes in Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy (Gylphi, 2019), science fiction has had an obsession with Roman Catholicism for over a century. The religion is the genre’s dark twin as well as its dirty secret. In this first ever study of the relationship between Catholicism and science fiction, Jim Clarke explores the genre's co-dependence and an...
Nov 08, 2019•44 min•Ep. 59
Dr. Eugene Schlesinger is the author of Sacrificing the Church: Mass, Mission, and Ecumenism (Fortress Press, 2019). Gene teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. An Episcopalian systematic theologian, he is primarily engaged in Catholic theology, and specializing in ecclesiology and sacramental theology. Schlesinger, in Sacrificing the Church, writes about the intermingling of three key elements of Christian worshipping communities: the eucharist, mission and ou...
Nov 05, 2019•55 min•Ep. 82
In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford UP, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the United States wh...
Oct 23, 2019•52 min•Ep. 61
Dr. Hans Boersma is the author of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, published in 2018 by Eerdmans. He holds the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin in the United States, and previously was a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this work, Boersma introduces readers to the historic teaching of Christian theology concerning beatitude—the eschatological reality of being in t...
Oct 03, 2019•50 min•Ep. 79
Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the co...
Sep 26, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 206
harles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry's The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion (University of Notre Dame, 2019) presents a “cultural biography” of a Dutch devotional manifestation. According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later. A chapel was erected over the spot, and the citizens of Amsterdam became devoted to their “Holy Stead." From the original Eucharistic processions evolved the custo...
Jul 31, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 554
In The Politics of Religion and the Rise of Social Catholicism in Peru (1884-1935): Faith, Workers, and Race Before Liberation Theology (Brill, 2018), Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti, Associate Professor of Latin American History at the Universidad de los Andes (Chile), provides a lucid synthesis of the Catholic Church’s responses to the secularization of the State and society, whilst offering a fresh appraisal of the emergence of Social Catholicism and its contribution to social thought and developme...
Jul 23, 2019•59 min•Ep. 550
Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and L...
Jul 10, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 50
Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic ...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 68
Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. More than a scholarly intervention, Ramírez seeks to answer a very pragmatic and timely question: how and why do successful public health measures succeed? Through his surprising, nuanced, and complicated answer, Ramírez broadens our understanding of who counts as a vital actor in public health programs. W...
Jun 24, 2019•57 min•Ep. 197
The history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasion,...
Jun 03, 2019•41 min•Ep. 69
What does a typical American Catholic parish look like? Tricia Bruce, an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society, argues in her new book that America’s largest denomination is held together by the differences it contains. Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church, published by Oxford University Press (2017), offers an outstanding account of how ecclesiastical structures have changed to take account of the tensions...
Apr 24, 2019•42 min•Ep. 61
It was a delight to catch up with Kevin Ingram, professor of history at Saint Louis University, Madrid, to discuss his very impressive new book. Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad Blood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez (Palgrave, 2018) sets out to account for the experience of those Spanish Jews, perhaps one-third of the total Spanish Jewish population, who converted to Catholicism after the Reconquista. Professor Ingram’s work shows how these converts strugg...
Feb 07, 2019•35 min•Ep. 54
In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 19...
Jan 25, 2019•43 min•Ep. 61
Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), revisits the early years of Islamic civilization by looking at an oft-neglected population in the secondary literature, Syriac Christians. Weitz’s study uses marital practice from the seventh through tenth centuries to illustrate how ...
Sep 04, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York. He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place...
May 08, 2018•1 hr 3 min
In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 14, 2018•53 min
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of modernity. How did this happen? How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel traces answers to these questions in his recent book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). It tells the story ...
Mar 07, 2018•54 min
Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive c...
Feb 21, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marri...
Feb 20, 2018•57 min
Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Baylor, The Rights Turn demonstrates a transformation of American politics with the waning of Christian ...
Nov 06, 2017•28 min
A central theological and philosophical problem facing Christians is the question “How could a merciful God damn people to hell?” It is tempting to solve this issue by developing an image of God that leaves out mercy or an understanding of Christian doctrine that rejects the concept of hell. In his new book, Hell and the Mercy of God (Catholic University of America Press, 2017), Adrian Reimers takes up this challenge. In this thought-provoking work, Reimers does not simply seek to resolve this a...
Aug 26, 2017•54 min
In the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 21, 2017•56 min
Few events in English history are as familiar to people today as the English Reformation, yet the vast amount of attention it has received can distort our understanding of it. In Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2017), Peter Marshall surveys its development over the course of the 16th century in a way that refocuses on its fundamentals as a movement to reform the Catholicism of late medieval England. This Catholicism, as he explains, was not a ...
Jun 19, 2017•50 min
When is war justified? What makes a just war? These are difficult questions to answer, but particularly so for Christians, followers of Jesus, who suffered violence without responding in kind. One philosopher-theologian who wrestled with these issues was Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Gregory Reichberg, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, explores this subject in his new book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Not only does this work do an excellent job...
May 30, 2017•1 hr 17 min
