Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Religion

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to religion

Posted on April 3, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on religion. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. The problem of the Christian master: Augustine in the afterlife of slavery
Elia, Matthew. Yale, 2024

Elia (St. Louis Univ.) examines the Christian master in Augustine’s theology and political thought, focusing on Book 19 of The City of God, in which Augustine relates political authority to the master/slave relationship. Elia shifts the question from slavery as a natural condition to the metaphor of the master’s house, a three-level hierarchy: God–good master–slave. The Christian master is subordinated to God and oriented toward restoring good order by punishment if necessary. Awkward as it is, master language is central to Augustine’s theological project, and this adds complexity to contemporary political scholars’ use of Augustine for democracy. Black and feminist thinkers provide a guide for recalibrating master language by pointing to the instability of the master’s self-identity as a choice of absence, introduced in the displacement of the order of God by taking what is not one’s own. Jesus reverses this condition by taking on “the form of a slave” and demonstrating the obedience of God-in-flesh in the nothingness of the servant’s place through crucifixion—the Roman slave-punishment—thus reestablishing community with God from the human condition affected by sin. View on Amazon

2. CoronAsur: Asian religions in the Covidian age
ed. by Emily Zoe Hertzman et al Hawai’i, 2023

This is a fabulous collection. The book’s wide-ranging scope and its impressive essays by a group of international contributors make it one of the definitive volumes on the COVID-19 pandemic. But though the volume focuses on Asian religions and culture—it takes its title from a creature of the same name depicting the virus itself and created in the form of a traditional Hindu demon—the essays also explicate the virus and responses universally. The beginning essays consider deities, rituals, myths, remedies, and the reinvention and renewal of traditional beliefs. These are followed by essays on educational preventions and media responses, with special emphasis on distancing and how to preform cultural and religious actions and rituals in a new way. The other essays consider how to reconfigure sacred spaces and how the populations were affected. This book evolved from the CoronAsur blog created by the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. “Bacteria, viruses, ghosts, holy spirits. A number of invisible entities spill from nonhuman to human, betraying the precariousness and porousness of the boundaries separating them.” View on Amazon

3. Vodou en vogue: fashioning Black divinities in Haiti and the United States
Nwokocha, Eziaku Atuama. North Carolina, 2023

This innovative book centers on fashion and dress among female Vodou practitioners, focusing on fashion’s significance within religious ritual, material aesthetics, and embodiment by spirits. With 15 stunning color plates and 12 black-and-white illustrations, the volume effectively links bodily adornment and the formation of religious belief. In conducting her research, Nwokocha (Miami Univ.) spent time accompanying Vodou practitioners to fabric stores in the Boston area. Her central question: What do Vodou spirits (lwa) want? She concludes that, above all, Vodou spirits want to be associated with aesthetically pleasing words, actions, and dress. Nwokocha amply illustrates how the lwa shape the lives of their devotees through the physical presentation of style and adornment, correctly emphasizing that lwa care very much about how their worshipers look. The book focuses on a single manbo, Marie Maude—a Haitian mental health clinician living in the US—who sponsors Vodou ceremonies in both Jacmel, Haiti, and Mattapan, MA. This valuable corrective to past scholarship, which presented Vodou as a religion defined by poverty, shows that participants in Manbo Maude’s Mattapan ceremonies are middle class. View on Amazon

4. Slavery in early Christianity Glancy, Jennifer A. Fortress, 2024

This expanded edition of Glancy’s influential monograph includes an afterword in which she reflects on her original research and the changes in early Christian studies since the publication of her book’s first edition (CH, Jan’03, 40-2733). The argument remains unchanged: early Christian literature, both the canonical New Testament and other texts, does more to reinforce than challenge slavery in the Roman Mediterranean. Each chapter contains the word “body” in some form, which functions as both an acknowledgement that Roman law regularly referred to slaves as bodies and as a reference point for the primary status marker of Roman slavery; namely, that slaves had no control over their bodies. The first chapter, “Bodies and Souls,” provides legal, social, and rhetorical context for Roman slavery. Chapter 2, “Body Work,” focuses on slavery and the Pauline texts and churches, and chapter 3, “Body Language,” addresses how early Christian theology “reinscribes” slave society. In chapter 4, “Parabolic Bodies,” Glancy (Le Moyne College) contextualizes the canonical Jesus’s frequent evocation of slavery. The final chapter, “Moral Bodies,” explores the extent to which early Christianity aligned more with slaveholder morality than slave morality. View on Amazon.

5. Across the worlds of Islam: Muslim identities, beliefs, and practices from Asia to America ed. by Edward E. Curtis IV Columbia, 2023

Any inquiry into the faith of Islam immediately refers to an Arab center of power and control, supposedly evidenced by a list of beliefs and practices. Often, lived Islam in all of its cultural diversity is not acknowledged unless the inquirer is willing to journey into actual spaces where Muslims live. Curtis (Indiana Univ.) assembles 10 essays by scholars whose research spans some of these practices and thought, which the Arab center of power has labeled either hetero-Islamic or un-Islamic. Readers will also find articles that probe that Arab center and question its presumed authenticity of scholarship beyond the Quran itself. Other contributors look at what marginalization means when the Muslim community is a minority population. In one chapter, Curtis even investigates the Nation of Islam on its own historical terms within the context of the US. Critical in this collection is a concern for what is not considered in the study of Islam, exemplified by Henry Brill’s fascinating chapter on writing Mongol history and Alevi poetry. When professors have encountered the presumed center and the unexplored margins of Islam, the question becomes what and how to teach students. View on Amazon.

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