New Books in World Christianity

Oct 28 2024 153 ep. 62 mins 32
New Books in World Christianity Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of world Christianity

  Arts  History  Religion & Spirituality
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Alister E. McGrath, "The Nature of Christian Doctrine: Its Origins, Development, and Function" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Oct 28 2024 41 mins  
The Nature of Christian Doctrine: Its Origins, Development, and Function (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a groundbreaking account of the origins, development, and enduring significance of Christian doctrine, explaining why it remains essential to the life of Christian communities. Noting important parallels between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine, Alister E.

Bruce Gordon, "The Bible: A Global History" (Basic Books, 2024)

Oct 19 2024 76 mins  
A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in

Boris Adjemian, "The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Oct 12 2024 70 mins  
In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The conductor, who was also Armenian, composed the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state. Drawing on this highly symbolic event, and following the history of the sma

Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)

Oct 09 2024 34 mins  
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Chri

Uroš Kovač, "The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon" (Berghahn Books, 2022)

Sep 30 2024 75 mins  
A compelling work that explores the lives and aspirations of young footballers with deep nuance and insight, The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon (Berghahn Books, 2022) shows how precarious masculinity, Pentecostal spirituality, and aspirations of prosperous futures are intertwining and interrelated in the everyday lives

Iemima Ploscariu, "Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands" (Brill, 2024)

Sep 19 2024 48 mins  
Today I talked to Iemima Ploscariu about Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands (Brill, 2024). Evangelicals in interwar Romania were a vibrant mix of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Jews, Roma, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Russians sang, prayed, and preached in their native languages. Romanian sta

Zoe Knox, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present” (Palgrave, 2018)

Aug 13 2024 34 mins  
Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often persecuted, and well-known for their proselytising efforts, they have made a substantial contribution in terms of human rights, and they count numerous famous musicians and sports sta

Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)

Jul 20 2024 87 mins  
Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World (Penn State University Press, 2019) presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construc

Gale L. Kenny, "Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire" (NYU Press, 2024)

Jun 13 2024 60 mins  
Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religio

Jonathan A. Seitz, "Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology" (U Notre Dame Press, 2024)

Jun 03 2024 62 mins  
With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went