Outstanding Academic Titles 2021: Religion

Posted on January 28, 2022 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2020 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week we highlight titles related to religion and religious studies.

1. Four views on the axiology of theism: what difference does God make?
ed. by Kirk Lougheed Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

This specialized but accessible volume addresses a recently defined topic in the philosophy of religion. The question of God’s existence prompted a longstanding philosophical debate, but scholars have also begun to address the axiology, or value, of God’s existence—that is, whether one should even want God to exist. Lougheed (Univ. of Pretoria, South Africa) assembled four scholars (all men) of varying seniority, affording each the chance to offer his own argument and respond to commentaries from the other three participants. Essays address a wide range of concerns, from the existence of possible worlds to skepticism and naturalism to—probably most productively for future scholarship—the expansion of axiology from theism to pantheism. View on Amazon

2. Migration and the making of global Christianity
Hanciles, Jehu. Eerdmans, 2021

This volume is a companion to Hanciles’s Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (CH, Jun’09, 46-5552). After dissecting how “migrant” embraces traders, pilgrims, women relocating for royal marriages, captives, slaves, Crusaders, and a host of others, Hanciles (Emory Univ.) shows how such ordinary migrants carried the Christian message into Europe beyond the Roman Empire long before the church organized institutional missionary endeavors. Especially significant was how such migration planted a Nestorian understanding of Christianity in China and other Asian regions thanks to trade and travel along the Silk Road. These unwitting migrant ambassadors for Christianity interacted with local cultures, often creating a pluralistic ethos and sometimes fusing Christian belief and practice with local religious expression. When missionaries arrived, Christianity was already flourishing in many places, although in some, early migrant Christianities did not survive. Hanciles provides a compelling rethinking of how Christianity spread through the known world prior to 1500, and of the diversity within Christianity. He convincingly argues that migration is the key to understanding Christian expansion, analyzing alternative interpretations as appropriate. View on Amazon

3. Reinventing religion: beyond belief and scepticism
Moore, Peter. Reaktion Books, 2020

This is the most clear-eyed, level-headed interrogation or “reconstruction” of the proper way to study religion this reviewer has read. In this book, Moore (formerly, religious studies, Univ. of Kent, UK), who previously published the extraordinarily thought-provoking Where Are the Dead? Exploring the Idea of an Embodied Afterlife (2017), flips many taken-for-granted notions about religion on their heads, offering readers enticingly novel views of what religion is all about. Moore begins with why it is important to launch into a book on religion without a firm definition of religion and continues with provocative investigations of religions as sets of “ideas, practices, experiences and institutions,” what he considers the four basic “dimensions of religion.” He examines religion as a complex, evolving assemblage of constructions—social, historical, individual, and accidental in origin—that together produce what is known as religion. View on Amazon

4. The Jewish body : a history
Jütte, Robert. tr. by Elizabeth Bredeck Pennsylvania, 2021

This is a masterful study of all aspects of the notion of the “Jewish body” across the millennia, from biblical to modern times. In his important opening chapter, “The Biological Body,” Jütte (director emer., Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation) reviews the standard subjects of body stereotypes, e.g., the “Jewish nose,” “Jewish lips,” “skin color,” “beards,” and “hair color,” along with the infamous notion of the “Jewish smell.” He then progresses to central issues of sexuality and gender, including the unequal treatment of the sexes, the repercussive topic of circumcision, the stereotype of the “effeminate Jew,” and homosexuality, prostitution, and virginity. Jütte also analyzes medical and health issues, which have again become a crucial issue due to COVID-19 and myths spreading over the internet about Jews causing this pandemic. In addition he considers Jewish traditions regarding pain, visits to the doctor’s office, the obligation of visiting the sick, and the stereotypes that these subjects have engendered.
View on Amazon

5. White evangelical racism: the politics of morality in America
Butler, Anthea D. North Carolina, 2021

“Evangelicals are not naïve individuals who were taken advantage of by a slick New York real estate mogul and reality TV star. They were [Donald Trump’s] accomplices.” Thus writes Butler (religion, Univ. of Pennsylvania) in the introduction to White Evangelical Racism. After leading with the current political divide Butler unpacks the ways in which Eevangelicalism has been complicit in that division. She traces Evangelicalism’s rhetoric on race from its roots in the 19th century to the present. She looks at how Scripture was used to support slavery, evangelical Christians’ participation in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Evangelicals’ opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, race as a key factor in evangelical organizing around the rise of the religious right, and Evangelicals’ engagement with Islam in the post-9/11 period. Butler concludes that “Evangelicals … have a problem. That problem is racism” (p. 137). Evangelicals will object, but Butler’s review of the ways in which it can be seen as leading to the election of Donald Trump makes clear that there is a profound problem, one that has led a number of Evangelicals (David Gushee calls them “conscientious objectors”) to leave the movement. View on Amazon.

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