This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Anne is a wise and wonderful woman, a literature professor who has taught all over he world in universities and colleges and also prisons. She my mother-in-law, the mother of my wife and the grandmother of my children; I’ve known her for twenty years and during this time she has been working on the book we are talking about today. Its working title is God with Us, that is of course: Emmanuel.

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

• Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross?
• David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 39: Why a Savior? The Theology of Sacrifice and Redemption
• Fr Chris Alar on Almost Good Catholics, episode 61: Master Craftsman, Broken Tools: Why God Works Through Us, Hears Intercessory Prayers, and Grants Divine MercyJesus: Undercover Boss or God with Us? (Anne Blackwill)

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Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland.

What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. “The ground beneath our feet goes unnoticed for the most part. Yet it guides our steps and shapes our identity in many ways. We obey or disregard markings that indicate where to cross the road, stand back from the edge of the platform, or position ourselves on a sports pitch…Differencing convention in homes and places of worship remind us that our own treatment of the surface is culturally constructed."

Dr. Donkin argues that “In the Middle Ages too, the surface of the ground conveyed information to those who stood on it, prompted physical and imaginative responses, and marked out individual and groups in accordance with the values and concerns of the time. Indeed, in some respects, it played a greater role today in articulating space and identity, especially within ecclesiastical settings…. This book focuses on Medieval interaction with holy ground, within and beyond the church interior, asking how these shaped both place and people.”

By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Dr. Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.

Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Dr. Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her current research focuses on cleaning gilded wooden frames using gels.

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Three professors from Sacred Heart University in Connecticut talk it over with me on Almost Good Catholics. They are theologian Dan Rober, chair of Catholic Studies, author of Recognizing the Gift: Toward a Renewed Theology of Nature and Grace, English professor Michelle Loris, founder and previous chair of Catholic Studies, also founder of the universities core seminars program, and Charlie Gillespie, director the university’s Pioneer Journeys program, himself an expert on St. Augustine; his new book is about the theater, God on Broadway.

• Pope Leo’s State of the World Address on January 9, 2026 (and transcript)
• the statement (also here) by the three cardinals (NPR article, and America article)
• Sacred Heart University: Catholic Studies Department.

An episode of Almost Good Catholics on the same theme:

• Fr David Hollenbach, SJ on Almost Good Catholics, episode 99: Human Rights in a Divided World: Catholicism as a Living Tradition.

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Drawing on a range of evidence, including sermons, liturgical prayers, and archaeological evidence, Dr. An explores how the languages monastics spoke, the socioeconomic settings they inhabited, and the visual spaces in which they prayed came together to shape their emotional horizons. By investigating emotions as practices embedded in the languages, cultures, and sensorial environments of late antiquity, this book offers new insights into the spiritual world of Christian monasteries.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Dr. Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.

Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Dr. Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds—from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Father Ron grew up in on a farm on Cactus Lake, Saskatchawan, on the Canadian prairie. He joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1966 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1972; he has many degrees in theology and philosophy including a doctorate from the University of Louvain in 1983. He started writing a column, In Exile, over forty years ago, and has also written (by my count) sixteen books. He has been Provincial Superior of his order, worked in its administration in Rome for six years, and taught theology in a number of august institutions. He still goes home to Cactus Lake, especially for Christmas.

We recorded this episode on December 9, 2025, the Feast of Our Lady of Gudalupe, and Juan Diego, and also the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This will be our Christmas episode too and the last episode of 2025 and the first of the new liturgical year, so in keeping with our tradition I will play some Christmas Carols from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster band with whom I was singing these carols last week. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. God bless you!

• Father Ron Rolheiser’s website, which includes his books and his column.
• Father Ron’s new book, Insane for the Light (2025), at Penguin and at Amazon.
• Josh and Margot’s Christmas Carols on Soundcloud.

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

• Joseph Pearce on Almost Good Catholics, episode 10: What about Hell? CS Lewis and Theology of the Afterlife.
• Fr Chris Alar on Almost Good Catholics, episode 61: Master Craftsman, Broken Tools: Why God Works Through Us, Hears Intercessory Prayers, and Grants Divine Mercy
• Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 107: Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter

And our discussion about Our Lady of Guadalupe on Almost Good Catholics:

• Joseph González and Monique González on Almost Good Catholics, episode 74: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth: How the Flower World Bloomed into History in 1531

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• Juan Domínguez’s book, Knight, Monk, King, Prophet, on Amazon.
• Juan Domínguez: ‘Simple Men’ on Substack.
• Juan’s description of the book on Substack.
• Juan Domínguez with Steven Caswell on Missio Dei.

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In Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century (Yale UP, 2025), Melanie McDonagh examines the lives of these notable converts from the perspective of their faith. For the Decadent circle of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde—who converted on his deathbed—artists such as Gwen John and David Jones, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, and novelists including G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark, Catholicism offered stability in increasingly febrile times. McDonagh explores their lives and influences, the reaction to their conversions, and the priests who initiated them into their faith.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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What I admire most about his method how the GFA uses missionaries from these countries so that it is not an outside imposition but a local initiative, compatriot to compatriot, neighbor to neighbor.

• The GFA World website.
• The Revolution in Missions book (free).

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This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America Press, 2023) contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation duty in Germany and Japan as well as the Second World War, with a new historical introduction by University of Scranton Professor Sean Brennan.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Dr. Thomas Smith, is grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presents numerous new manuscript witnesses. The book argues that some of the letters are post hoc “inventions”, composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary “reality”, it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary “confections”, they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers  is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors  to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour.

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• Colleen’s new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter (2025)
• Colleen’s writing at America magazine.
• Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 16: Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution
• Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics.
• Father Chris Alar on Almost Good Catholics, episode 61: Master Craftsman, Broken Tools: Why God Works Through Us, Hears Intercessory Prayers, and Grants Divine Mercy

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Pushing against this long-standing narrative, in A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America (UNC Press, 2025) Dr. Susan Juster provides the first comprehensive look at the lived experience of Catholics—whether Irish, African, French, or English—in colonial America. She reveals a vibrant community that, although often forced to conceal itself, maintained a rich sacramental life saturated with traditional devotional objects and structured by familiar rituals. As Dr. Juster shows, the unique pressures of colonial existence forced Catholics to adapt and transform these religious practices. By following the faithful into their homes and private chapels as they married, christened infants, buried loved ones, and prayed for their souls, Juster uncovers a confluence of European, African, and Indigenous spiritual traditions produced by American colonialism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Gisela Kreglinger is the daughter of winemakers and grew up on a vineyard and winery in Franconia, Germany, where her family has been crafting wine for many generations. She has a couple of master’s degrees in biblical studies from Regent College and a PhD in historical theology from the University of St. Andrews.

She has written three books—Cup Overflowing, The Spirituality of Wine, The Soul of Wine—

and most recently she is the co-author of a Bible Study Series called Wine in the Word which is the topic of our discussion today. She’s a Lutheran scholar but I think this is a topic where we Catholics agree with her 100%.

• Gisela Kreglinger’s website, The Spirituality of Wine
• Wine in the Word Bible Study website.
• Wine in the Word Episode 1 on YouTube.
• Books by Gisela Kreglinger

An episode of Almost Good Catholics about the film Babette’s Feast which we also talked about in this episode:

• Sr. Maria Catherine, OP on Almost Good Catholics, episode 55: You Set a Table Before Me: The Teenage Witch who Became a Dominican Sister.

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In this interview, Paul reflects on his vocation as poet, scholar, and biographer, drawing especially from his most recent books of poetry—All That Will Be New (Slant, 2022) and Ordinary Time (Slant, 2020)—and his prose work, The Mystery of It All (Paraclete Press, 2019). Our conversation explores Paul’s Catholic upbringing and scholarly formation, the poets who have shaped his imagination—most notably Gerard Manley Hopkins—the vocation of the Catholic poet, and what it means to live deeply as a person of wonder and imagination. 

Paul Mariani is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College.

Nathan H. Phillips is a podcast host on the New Books Network and lives in South Bend, Indiana.

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Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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In its six chapters, the book examines the Eucharist, John Law's system, speculation and debt, usury, consumption, luxury, and more. By the time this reader reached the epilogue, it became clear that The Spirit of French Capitalism is both a history of the Age of Enlightenment and a genealogy/prehistory of the commodity fetishism elaborated by Marx and Marxist thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Faith in infinite wealth creation, obsessive consumption, pleasure, abundance, and enchantment are as much a part of the history of capitalism as scarcity, regulation, and restraint. Provocative and complicated, the book will be of great interest scholars and students of the histories of the early modern economy, religion, and the state in France and elsewhere, as well as the history of capitalism more broadly.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith.

Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics (Texas Tech University Press, 2025) tells their stories within the background context of pacifist churches in America. It is the first book exclusively devoted to such men, who emerged initially from the historic peace churches--Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites--and from Seventh-day Adventists, who would comprise roughly half of all conscientious objector medics serving in the Vietnam War. From World War II on, growing numbers of men from mainstream churches made the same choices, and after a Supreme Court decision in 1965, so too would men who claimed humanist and secular justification. The pages contain the stories of pantheists and Catholics, among others from the peace traditions.

Gary Kulik, who also served as a conscientious-objector medic, interweaves his own story into those he recounts, stories of fierce combat, stumbling accidents, moments of fleeting honor and ever-present death.

Gary Kulik served as a deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, near Wilmington, Delaware. Previously, he was a department head and assistant director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the editor of American Quarterly.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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• Chris’s book Pope Leo XIV, Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy (Loyola Press, 2025).
• Chris’s talk about the Synod in San Francisco, 2024.

Here are some earlier episodes of AGC we referred to in this discussion:

• Sr. Nathalie Becquart, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 36: Quo Vademus? The Pilgrim Church on the Road of Synodality
• Bp. Athanasius Schneider, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 101: Salve Regina: The Power of the Rosary

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During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a utopian fantasy, but a way to bring contemporary political and theological questions into sharper focus. In this new study, John Eldevik shows how the manuscripts that transmitted the story of Prester John reflect the ways contemporary audiences processed ideas about religious conflict and helped them imagine a new, global dimension of Christianity. It includes an appendix with a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John.

John Eldevik is Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton (New York State), and has previously published on medieval social and religious history.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.  

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Michael Amoruso's insightful work, Moved By The Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as a form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.

Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine is an exploration of why the Augustinian tradition’s attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conceit at the heart of the book is that the concrete practices of love or charity—almsgiving, works of mercy, good works—can tell us much about how religious leaders attempted to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts with some startling reversions, attempting to expand the community and incorporate others. The first part probes the ways Augustine’s understanding of love is put into practice and how this understanding informs a tradition of political action inspired by Christian concepts of love and enacted through practices of charity. In a second, more expansive part, the book turns to the ways in which the Benedictine tradition as illustrated by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux receives this vision, invigorates it with new visions of care and leadership, and puts it into practice in radically different contexts from those of Augustine’s age. At the heart of Charity after Augustine is an attempt to find a non-idealized vision of love that can inform thick, meaningful relations within a community that are not diluted by the inclusion of others

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Jonathan D. Teubner is a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. This book is something of a sequel to his first, Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition.

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

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Roman Identity and Lived Religion: Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Stefanie Lenk is a postdoc the university of Göttingen, and she’s held other postdocs and fellowship at the Universities of Bern and Hamburg. And she, along with Jaś Elsner, was Curator at the Ashmolean’s of the international exhibition “Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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For the protagonists of Vote of Faith, democracy becomes a sphere in which divine will and human ambition compete with one another, a tension embedded in the vernacular concept of faith. In the Brazilian context, faith signifies a complex set of assumptions about the nature of the world, assumptions derived not just from Christianity, but also from Afro-Brazilian and secular ideas about power, causation, and human agency. In combining ethnographic, theological, and feminist perspectives, Vote of Faith places desiring bodies at the very heart of Catholicism’s complex con­nection to multiple forms of power and offers provocative new angles on the question of the secular.

The first work by an anthropologist to explore the unique phenomenon of the mayor-priest, this book offers an essential new angle on emerging debates about secularity as the condition of separation of the religious from the political. Brimming with originality, Vote of Faith is required reading for those interested in the gendered and sexual dimensions of the secular, the plasticity of religion, and the fundamental nature of the world’s largest religious institution.

Maya Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores religion, theology, politics, and gender in Brazil and beyond. She is the author of Gender, Morality and Catholicism in Brazil and co-editor of The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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You can two interviews with David Tracy here and here.

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The book explores how the 'moral-political economy of poverty' - defined as a new and changing conceptualisation of and approach to poverty, across laws, institutions, and acts of resistance - played a critical role in the development and governance of the Spanish Empire. In so doing it offers insights into the negotiated nature of sovereignty, the construction of inequalities, and strategies of resistance. Empire of Poverty explains how the combined processes of the transition to global capitalism and imperialism in the long-sixteenth century wrought a moral crisis which led to the transformation of poverty and reconceptualization of the poor and how the newly emerging beliefs, laws, and institutions of poverty helped structure the inequalities of the new global order.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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He was a successful Wall Street investment guy for decades, but he had a deep love of art and art history; after brush with death and a re-conversion to his Catholic faith, Stev Auth applied both of those gifts in service of his lay apostolate of evangelization. Today we talk about his new book—Visions of the Divine: An Artistic Journey into the Mystery of the Eucharist (Sophia, 2025)—and how Our Creator speaks to us through his artists, his creative creatures, on Almost Good Catholics.

The book is filled with colorful photographs of inspiring masterpieces but small enough to carry with you to the museum or to read under a tree in the park. You can also read it with your computer at hand to look up the paintings online and magnify them as you read along with Steve’s conversational narrative (which is mostly how I read it).

• Steve Auth’s book, Visions of the Divine (Sophia Press, 20205)
• Steve Auth at the Regnum Christi website
• Steve Auth at the Lumen website
• Steve Auth’s video series Pilgrimage to the Museum at EWTN.

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Sam Young is a recent PhD graduate from Cardiff University and now independent scholar, specialising in the theological history of French social Catholicism during the 1920s and 1930s.

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In Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Stephanie Schmidt sheds light on a rare manuscript about Nahua child converts who were killed for acts of zealotry during the late 1520s. This is the Nahuatl version of an account by an early missionary-friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía. To this day, Catholics venerate the slain boys as Christian martyrs who suffered for their piety. Yet Franciscan accounts of the boys' sacrifice were influenced by ulterior motives, as the friars sought to deflect attention from their missteps in New Spain. Illuminating Nahua perspectives on this story and period, Schmidt leaves no doubt as to who drove this violence as she dramatically expands the knowledgebase available to students of colonial Latin America.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy. In this powerful new history of the era, acknowledged expert on the history of the Middle East and the Crusades Simon Mayall focuses on some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history: the taking and retaking of Jerusalem and the collapse of the Crusader states; the fall of Constantinople; the sieges of Rhodes and Malta; the assault on Vienna and the 'high-water mark' of Ottoman advance into Europe; culminating in the Allied capture of Jerusalem in World War I, the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the sultanate and the caliphate, and the formation of modern Europe and the modern Middle East. 

The House of War: The Struggle Between Christendom and the Caliphate (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers a wide, sweeping narrative, encompassing the broad historical and religious context of this period, while focussing on some of the key, pivotal sieges and battles, and on the protagonists, political and military, who determined their conclusions and their consequences.

Simon Mayall is a former soldier in the British Army, and an acknowledged expert on the history of the Middle East, and of the Crusades. Much of his 40-year professional career was focussed on the Middle East, and he has strong family and academic interests in the region. His last appointments were as the British Government's Defence Senior Adviser for the Middle East, and the Prime Minister's Security Envoy to Iraq and the Kurdish Region.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Four early popes are given close attention for their respective administrations: Damasus I, Leo I, Gelasius I, and Gregory I. Emphasis is also given to the specific administrative genius that emerges from the monastic orders, including the 'Pachomian solution' and the Benedictine Rule.

Governing Perfection (St. Augustine's Press, 2024) is an important contribution to the history of the papacy and origins of the modern-day Roman Curia, ecclesiology and its relevance to legal ordering, and administration within governance as affected by multiple legal and cultural traditions. It is a masterful presentation that provides both the framework and reflection needed to inspire true perfection the in administrative forum. The relevance and force of Prudlo's Governing Perfection makes it a choice follow-up to his recent translation of Bartholomew of the Martyr's classic, Stimulus Pastorum: A Charge to Pastors (2022).

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Drawing on a mass of archival sources, Timothy Twining reconstructs the religious, cultural, and institutional contexts in which the text of the Old Testament was considered and contested throughout post-Reformation Europe. In so doing, this book brings to light a vast array of figures from across the confessional spectrum who invested immense energy in studying the Bible. Their efforts, it shows, were not disinterested, but responded to pressing contemporary concerns. The Limits of Erudition employs a novel conceptual framework to resurrect a world where learning mattered to inquisitors and archbishops as much as to antiquaries, and in which the pursuit of erudition was too important to be left to scholars.

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A beautiful read, and Don discusses why every new bishop should have a copy, and every cardinal entering the conclave should keep Bartholomew's counsel in his discernment. 

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Why did these erstwhile foes end their schism and begin to make peace? 

In this riveting study, Udi Greenberg shows that ecumenism grew out of a shared desire to protect against perceived threats to Christian life. 

The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s (Harvard UP, 2025) overturns conventional wisdom about this revolutionary change by showing that the cause was not growing mutual tolerance but solidarity against the threats of socialism, feminism, and liberation movements.

By working together Christians could defend their dominance in European life by maintaining and reinforcing the inequality inherent in Christian hierarchical order.

Peacemaking between the confessions was accelerated by the rise of the Nazis, when Christian denominations debated their relations to each other and to nationalism, and was further pressed by the Cold War and decolonization, when Catholic and Protestant authorities formally declared each other "brethren in faith". 

Working together, Catholics and Protestants designed Europe's economic policies, regulated its sexual practices, and shaped postwar relationships with the Global South. This coalition of Christians has grown more cohesive over time as they leveraged their alliance to maintain influence across a politically fractured Europe.

Related: 

Listen to the New Books Network interview with Udi Greenberg about The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War

Author recommended reading: The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century by Dagmar Herzog

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Simon Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Dr. Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically “mislocating” Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories.

Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Dr. Mittman’s thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

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In The Crown of Thorns: Humble Gods and Humiliated Kings (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Faith Tibble rectifies this misunderstanding, showing how The Crown of Thorns underwent a yet unrecognized artistic evolution. Dr. Tibble tracks the artistic progression of the Crown of Thorns from its first depiction in the 4th century, until the 11th century, when it begins to exhibit the artistic trends that are still recognizable today. In doing so, Dr. Tibble adds new perspective to our understanding of the ideologies associated with medieval Christianity - victory, humility, perseverance - and how those ideologies are exemplified in depictions of the Crown of Thorns. Dr. Tibble demonstrates the profound and unintended consequences of a simple misunderstanding of the Gospels, and examines an unexpected trajectory in European art.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, has identified the challenges of our age, “a new pagan society,” he calls it, and “anti-Christian”; others have said “post-Christian” or apostolic. Although the time is difficult, Bishop Schneider is not afraid. He tells us to pray and to have confidence in the power or the Rosary, its importance and efficacy. So, today we are talking about his new book, Salve Regina: A Rosary Crusade for Holy Popes (Sophia, 2025); he entreats us to petition God that He give us holy popes in the coming years, that the head may lead the body, as the church sails on into the unknown. He also talks about the traditions and history of the Rosary. We also talk about his remarkable life.

• Bishop Schneider’s book, Salve Regina: A Rosary Crusade for Holy Popes
• Bishop Schneider’s website, Gloria Dei
• Bishop Schneider on Wikipedia

Another episode of Almost Good Catholics about the Rosary:

• Annabelle Mosely on Almost Good Catholics, episode 12: Did God Just Wink? Seeing the Numinous All Around Us

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In this interview, he discusses his new book Good Trouble: The Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland Connection 1963-1972 (First Hill Books, 2025).

Good Trouble investigates the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann, who took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969.

Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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This book highlights that Sister Eufrasia was aware of the progress illumination underwent in contact with the artists we now include in the High Renaissance. She quickly established a style which she then passed on to younger sisters to establish a convent workshop where mutual exchange was the norm. Here, for the first time, Eufrasia Burlamacchi is recognized and discussed as an influential and gifted artist in her own right.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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• Here is the book on the En Route Books website (which includes video links)here is the book on Amazon.com.
• Deborah Savage’s website.
• Robert Fastiggi’s website (as a theology professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary).
• The article we refer to by Leah Fessler, “A Lot of Women Don’t Enjoy Hookup Culture—So Why Do We Force Ourselves to Participate?” Quartz Online, May 17, 2016.
• Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI on Wikipedia and on the Vatican website.

Robert Fastiggi’s previous appearance on Almost Good Catholics, three years ago (recorded in February of 2022, on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine):

• Robert Fastiggi on Almost Good Catholics, episode 7: Mother of All Nations: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary

An episode of Almost Good Catholics on the same theme:

Garrett Johnson on Almost Good Catholics, episode 42: Who Do You Think You Are? Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine.

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Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

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In the early United States, the Catholic Church grew rapidly—and with it, confession’s centrality. Although the sacrament was practiced unevenly for much of the nineteenth century, frequent confession became common by the early twentieth. Both priests and parishioners understood confession as a ritual crucial for the soul, while on a social level, it established Catholic distinctiveness within a largely Protestant country. Today, however, even faithful Catholics seldom confess. The reasons for this change, Dr. O’Toole reveals, include the emergence of psychology and other forms of counseling; the Church’s stance against contraception, which alienated many parishioners; and a growing sense of confession’s inability to confront social problems like structural racism, poverty, and sexism. Meanwhile, increasing recognition of sexual abuse within the Church further undermined trust in clergy as confessors.

Sensitively attuned to the historical importance of confession, For I Have Sinned also suggests that, if the sacrament no longer serves the needs of US Catholics, the Church and its members might find new ways to express their ideals in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.

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The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.

Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and shoplifting, and suffered her mother's death in a car crash - all by the age of 18.

Her pain, anger and compassion would turn her into one of the world's greatest protest singers and activists. She would release ten studio albums during her 36-year music career - the second of which (I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got) would reach number 1 across the world and earn her ten million pounds, half of which she gave to charity. During this time, she would also advocate for survivors of child abuse and racism, and stand up for the LGBT community and women's reproductive rights.

Most notably, she would tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II during an episode of Saturday Night Live in order to protest at child sex abuse within the Catholic church, creating headlines around the world and derailing her career.

The Real Sinéad O'Connor (White Owl, 2024) features six exclusive interviews with friends and peers who knew her, this is the true story of her extraordinary and courageous journey.

Ariane Sherine’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Bluesky.

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In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian’s process. Harnetty’s audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self. 

This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we’ve heard. 

(And, of course, we’ll have a longer version of the interview and our What’s Good segment for our Patrons.)

Who was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It’s hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries. 

Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.”

Brian Harnetty

Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire).

Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine’s “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013).

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Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art.

The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History (Yale UP, 2024) brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.

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The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary Catholic authors jeopardize this dialogue by polarizing liberalism and the common good, interpreting the commitment to individual liberty as incompatible with commitment to the common good.

Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good (Georgetown UP, 2023) clarifies the meaning of the common good through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth-century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. It makes the case that embracing the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The book argues that liberal political philosophy is not only compatible with Catholic Social Teaching but may also be the most appropriate framework for communicating the richness of the Church’s tradition today. Furthermore, accepting political liberalism can facilitate collaboration in political life between those who hold different worldviews and foster an enriched discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.

Students and scholars of Christian ethics and political philosophy will benefit from this response to the challenges of dialogue about the “common good” in the context of the resurgence of this topic.

Sam Young is a recent PhD graduate from Cardiff University, specialising in the theological history of European social Catholic movements active during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s.

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The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History (Cernunnos, 2024) examines the literary, philosophical, theological, and most of all artistic expressions of the seven deadly sins and their respective seven cardinal virtues, drawing upon millennia of history to gather a compendium of humanity at its best and its worst. As a volume, the book explores the Manichean nature of the human animal in all of its grandeur and canker, motivated by the faith that tales of damnation and salvation are the only stories that are ultimately worth telling.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dr. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus' ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop's fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved.

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The BEEC aims both to provide a critical review of the methods used in Early Christian Studies and also to update the history of scholarship.

The BEEC addresses a range of traditions, including iconographic, martyrological, ecclesiastical, and Christological traditions, as well as cultic phenomena, such as the veneration of saints. The history of the transmission of texts and the reception of early Christian writers are also addressed. The BEEC focuses on early Christianity from a historical perspective in order to uncover the lasting legacy of the authors and texts until the present day.

David G. Hunter is the Margaret O'Brien Flatley Chair of Catholic Theology at Boston College.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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The flashpoint for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador. Liberal Catholics described nuns and priests in Central America who worked to combat structural inequality as human rights advocates living out the Gospel’s spirit. Conservative Catholics saw them as agents of class conflict who furthered the so-called Gospel, according to Karl Marx. The debate was an old one among Catholics, but, as Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns contends, it intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns describes the religious actors as human rights advocates and, against prevailing understandings of the fundamentally secular activism related to human rights, highlights religion-inspired activism during the Cold War. In charting the rightward development of American Catholicism, Keeley provides a new chapter in the history of U.S. diplomacy. She shows how domestic issues such as contraception and abortion joined with foreign policy matters to shift Catholic laity toward Republican principles at home and abroad.

Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first book to examine Protestant and Catholic military chaplains in Germany from Hitler's rise to power, to defeat, collapse, and Allied occupation. Drawing on a wide array of sources - chaplains' letters and memoirs, military reports, Jewish testimonies, photographs, and popular culture - this book offers insight into how Christian clergy served the cause of genocide, sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, even unknowingly, but always loyally.

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To capture these entanglements, Dr. Barras analyzes—through interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysis—the everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN actors. Faith in Rights is a crucial new evaluation of how religion informs Christian nongovernmental organizations' understandings of human rights and their methods of work, as well as how being engaged in human rights work influences these organizations' own religious identity and practice.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The New Testament, as we know it, represents only a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and revelations that circulated before the establishment of the imperial church. It tells how the gospel passed from Jesus, to the apostles, thence to Paul. But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Dr. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Jan Machielsen reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger.

The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert’s contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic’s relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away—but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century, members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert the Great discusses the philosopher’s own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries. 

In the end, Disenchanting Albert the Great tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who himself would not be disenchanted until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time.

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Our conversation today exemplifies what contemporary theological discussions should encompass - a profound dialogue about the relevance of Christian theology in our time, acknowledging both trauma and pain, while exploring the tremendous opportunity Christianity can offer each of us.

This is more than just a book discussion - it's a sustained meditation on the vocation, lives, and work of pastors in our changing times.

Michael Plekon is a unique voice in contemporary religious scholarship, bridging academic theology and lived spirituality. Born in Yonkers in 1948, he has dedicated his life to exploring what holiness looks like in modern times through both scholarly work and pastoral experience. As a professor at Baruch College (1977-2017) and an ordained priest who has served in both Western and Eastern Churches, Plekon brings a rare dual perspective to religious studies. His dozen-plus books, including the award-winning "Uncommon Prayer," focus on finding the sacred in everyday life and examining how modern saints - from Dorothy Day to Thomas Merton - navigate faith in contemporary society. Plekon's work is particularly relevant today as he explores the intersection of religious identity, social justice, and community building in an increasingly diverse America.

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In Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2024), renowned scholar Dr. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks explores the history of women and the Reformations in full for the first time. Dr. Wiesner-Hanks travels the globe, examining well-known figures like Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth I, and Anne Hutchinson, as well as women whose stories are only now emerging. Along the way, we meet converts in Japan, Spanish nuns in the Philippines, and saints in Ethiopia and America. Dr. Wiesner-Hanks explores women’s experiences as monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics, and missionaries, revealing that the story of the Reformations is no longer simply European—and that women played a vital role.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2022), Dr. Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Dr. Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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• Bishop Olmsted, the doctors, and Paul’s wife, Beth, and his son, Michael, recall his death and return in a short video.
• Paul’s first book, Faith Understood: An Ordinary Man's Journey to the Presence of God.
• Paul’s second book, One Lord, One Faith, One Church.
• Paul’s website, Faith Understood.
• Here are other videos of Paul telling this story.

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Based on three years of examining these considerable funds in Rome, Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah (La Découverte, 2024) probes the motivations and dilemmas of the people involved in this story, their voices but also their silences. Going beyond a classic approach focused on the pope and diplomacy, this work sheds light on the political, humanitarian, religious and cultural issues of the Holy See's choices. The book raises this question in the long duration of relations between the Church and the Jews in order to evaluate the weight of a centuries-old culture of hostility in the Vatican's responses to anti-Semitic persecutions, before and during the war, but also after the Shoah. Has this unprecedented level of violence against a minority shaken the old bedrock of Christian anti-Judaism?

Finally, by making the voices of those on the ground and the persecuted heard, in particular those of mixed Judeo-Christian families, this book questions more broadly the resilience of religion in the face of genocide and the capacity of our civil societies to respond to mass violence.

This book was originally published in French as Les âmes tièdes: Le Vatican face à la Shoah (La Découverte, 2024)

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Over the last two decades, scholars have made a striking return to the resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder. To confront a racialized world, the modern Augustinian tradition of political thought must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master.

Drawing Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought into extended dialogue, Matthew Elia develops a critical analysis of the enduring problem of the Christian master, even as he presses toward an alternative interpretation of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtue, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery. Amid democratic crises and racial injustice on multiple fronts, the book breathes fresh life into conversations on religion and the public square by showing how ancient and contemporary sources at once clash and converge in surprising ways. It imaginatively carves a path forward for the enduring humanities inquiry into the nature of our common life and the perennial problem of social and political domination.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Matt Elia is Assistant Professor of Theology, Race, and Environment at Saint Louis University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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• Paul’s book, One Lord, One Faith, One Church: An Inconvenient Truth (Sophia Press, 2024)
• Paul’s website, Faith Understood

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In A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale UP, 2022) Mark Stoyle tells the story of the so-called “Prayer Book Rebellion” in full. Correcting the accepted narrative in a number of places, Stoyle shows that the government in London saw the rebels as a real threat. He demonstrates the importance of regional identity and emphasizes that religion was at the heart of the uprising. This definitive account brings to life the stories of the thousands of men and women who acted to defend their faith almost five hundred years ago.

Mark Stoyle is professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton. An expert on Tudor and Stuart Britain, he is the author of seven books, including Soldiers and Strangers and The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it's about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say - a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.

From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via Song dynasty China, medieval Europe and Soviet Russia, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion (Oneworld, 2024) sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.

Nicholas Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of a number of books including Darwin and God, The Evolution of the West and Atheists. He has presented a BBC Radio 4 series on The Secret History of Science and Religion, and has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, Prospect and more. He lives in London.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Noting important parallels between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine, Alister E. McGrath examines the growing view of early Christianity as a 'theological laboratory'. We can think of doctrinal formulations as proposals submitted for testing across the Christian world, rather than as static accounts of orthodoxy. This approach fits the available evidence much better than theories of suppressed early orthodoxies and reinforces the importance of debate within the churches as a vital means of testing doctrinal formulations.

McGrath offers a robust critique of George Lindbeck's still-influential Nature of Doctrine (1984), raising significant concerns about its reductionist approach. He instead provides a more reliable account of the myriad functions of doctrine, utilising Mary Midgley's concept of 'mapping' as a means of coordinating the multiple aspects of complex phenomena. McGrath's approach also employs Karl Popper's 'Three Worlds', allowing the theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects of doctrine to be seen as essential and interconnected.

We see how Christian doctrine offers ontological disclosure about the nature of reality, while at the same time providing a coordinating framework which ensures that its various aspects are seen as parts of a greater whole. Doctrine provides a framework, or standpoint, that allows theological reality to be seen and experienced in a new manner; it safeguards and articulates the core vision of reality that is essential for the proper functioning and future flourishing of Christian communities.

Alister E. McGrath served as Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxford, and subsequently as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. He initially studied natural sciences at Oxford and holds a special interest in how scientific method can illuminate aspects of Christian theology. He also served as Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, a position established in 1597. He has delivered the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford, the Hulsean Lectures at the University Cambridge, and the Gifford Lectures at the University Aberdeen.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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In The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024), Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

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Amidst this diversity, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 (Open Book, 2024) offers readers sympathetic and immersive insight into the religious realities of its subjects. To this end, this book identifies two perspectives: one uncovers hidden meanings and unexpected connections, while the other restricts Jesus to the space and time of human history. Minds that believed in Jesus, and those that opposed him, made use of both perspectives to make sense of their worlds.

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• Mercy Ships website.
• Mercy Minute podcast.
• Reanne’s website.

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American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale UP, 2024), Jerome E. Copulsky examines the Americans who rejected the secularism of American society, predicted the collapse of the nation, and hoped to develop a new and decidedly Christian commonwealth. 

By reviewing extreme religious dissent from colonial times through the current age, Copulsky shows how these thinkers opposed the American orthodoxy of pluralist democracy on theological grounds. Their views are diametrically opposed to the idea of America as a place where multiple sects and creeds peacefully coexist. Each chapter explains a different strain of heresy, beginning with loyal Anglicans who opposed the American Revolution and ending with current National Conservatives who embrace illiberal populism in an effort to enact their vision of a Christian America.

Author recommended reading: 

The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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Guiding God's Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Courtney Irby offers an examination of Christian marriage preparation programs, exploring their efforts to stabilise the institution of marriage and highlighting the tension between individualism and community in people’s relational lives. Marriage preparation programs offer a useful lens through which to trace shifts in both religious and family institutions because they set out clear and intentional articulations of marriage ideologies and gendered relationship scripts by faith communities. By documenting the changes in content and practices of Christian premarital education along with its advice regarding what makes a good marriage, the book charts the ways that religious communities have been transformed by and have helped to contribute to the individualization of faith and relationships.

Featuring archival research as well as first hand observations of four marriage preparation courses—two Protestant and two Catholic—along with seventy interviews with participating couples and leaders of these and other programs, the book offers a rare view of visions about how to realise a successful and faith-filled relationship. This examination of marriage classes offers key insight into how religious communities have responded to cultural changes in marriage, gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The religious wars of the crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence.

In the first history of its kind, Dr. Tibble explores the criminal underbelly of the crusades. From gangsters and bandits to muggers and pirates, Tibble presents extraordinary evidence of an illicit underworld. He shows how the real problem in the region stemmed not from religion but from young men. Dislocated, disinhibited, and present in disturbingly large numbers, they were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.

Crusader Criminals charts the downward spiral of desensitisation that grew out of the horrors of incessant warfare—and in doing so uncovers some of the most surprising stories of the time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History’ as a relatively coherent account of change, Jason Ramsey suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged.

Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Based on fieldwork in Yucatan among former plantation laborers, he publishes on topics such as semiotics, ruination, value, and the anthropology of history.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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The Irish sources, many written in the vernacular, are not accessible and are viewed as unconventional. The secularization of monasticism in Ireland has overshadowed evidence for a thriving lived monasticism. Edel Bhreathnach's book Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900-1250 (Four Courts Press, 2024) concentrates on those men and women who followed a monastic life, especially between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and who maintained a universal monastic ideology while incorporating monasticism into their own cultural environment.

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As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat. 

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Accolades: Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2017) * StIrling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology (2018) * Graburn Prize for Best First Book in Anthropology of Tourism (2018) * Honorable Mention, Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology (2018)

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

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The book traces the Order's evolution from a crusader field hospital into a major territorial ruler in northeastern Europe. Notably, the knights constructed distinctive fortified convents, including their headquarters in Western Christendom's largest castle. The narrative concludes with the Order's fifteenth-century decline due to the combined effects of a devastating war with Poland-Lithuania and the Protestant Reformation. The result is an accessible overview of this pivotal corporation in European history.

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Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion.

Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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• Dale’s book, Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching, from Sophia Press.
• Dale Ahlquist and the Society of G.K. Chesterton and the Chesterton Schools Network.
• Dale Ahlquist with Matt Fradd on the Pints with Aquinas podcast.
• Dale Ahlquist on EWTN: The Apostle of Common Sense.
• Rerum Novarum, encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, 1891

Here is the NEXT BOOK that Dale and I will be talking about on a future episode:

• G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man from Word on Fire Press

Joseph Pearce, one of the essayists in Dale’s book, has also been a guest on Almost Good Catholics.

• Joseph Pearce on Almost Good Catholics, episode 10: What about Hell? CS Lewis and Theology of the Afterlife.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes on the subject of Catholic Education:

• Joseph Nagel and Heather Skinner on Almost Good Catholics, episode 8: It's Elementary! Catholic Education in the 21st Century.
• Pete Imperial on Almost Good Catholics, episode 90: What Would Jesus Say about Diversity and Inclusion?
• Rich Meyer on Almost Good Catholics, episode 45: Education in the World not of the World: A School Director and Father Talks about Forming the Whole Child.

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'Trust' is the root meaning of Christian 'faith' (pistis, fides), and trusting in God and Christ is still fundamental to Christians. But unlike faith, and other aspects of faith such as belief or hope, trust is little studied. Building on her ground-breaking study Roman Faith and Christian Faith, and drawing on the philosophy and psychology of trust, Teresa Morgan explores the significance of trust, trustworthiness, faithfulness, and entrustedness in New Testament writings.

Trust between God, Christ, and humanity is revealed as a risky, dynamic, forward-looking, life-changing partnership. God entrusts Christ with winning the trust of humanity and bringing humanity to trust in God. God and Christ trust humanity to respond to God's initiative through Christ, and entrust the faithful with diverse forms of work for humanity and for creation. Human understanding of God and Christ is limited, and trust and faithfulness often fail, but imperfect trust is not a deal-breaker.

Morgan develops a new model of atonement, showing how trust enables humanity's release from the power of both sin and suffering. She examines the neglected concept of propositional trust and argues that it plays a key role in faith. This volume offers a compelling vision of Christian trust as soteriological, ethical, and community-forming. Trust is both the means of salvation and an end in itself, because where we trust is where we most fully live.

Teresa Morgan studied classics at Cambridge University, theology at Oxford, and violin and viola in London and Cologne. She joined Yale Divinity School in 2022, from Oxford University. Professor Morgan writes across Greek and Roman history, the New Testament, and early Christianity, especially on Greek, Roman, and early Christian ethics (e.g. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire, 2007), Greek and Roman education (Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 1998), and Paul (Being ‘in Christ’ in the Letters of Paul: Saved Through Christ and In His Hands, 2020). She is currently coming to the end of a four-volume investigation of the historical evolution, early religious meaning, and contemporary significance of ancient Mediterranean and early Christian trust and faith (Roman Faith and Christian Faith, 2015, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust, 2022, Trust in Atonement (2024), and The Invention of Faith (forthcoming). When this is finished, she plans to return to ethics with a study of the evolution of Christian ethics in the first four centuries CE.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals.

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalisation and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Mark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) should appear in 2025.

Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston.

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Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico.

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Dr. Imperial has a BA from the University of California in Berkeley, an MA in history from San Francisco State University, and an EdD in Educational Administration from the University of San Francisco. In addition to running the school, he also teaches Islamic Studies, Economics, and East Asian History.

This episode is indebted to Ryan Anderson, the listener and a friend of the podcast who suggested this episode and introduced me to Peter.

• St. Mary’s College High School website and Pete’s faculty webpage.
• About Lasallian education.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes on the subject of Catholic Education:

• Joseph Nagel and Heather Skinner on Almost Good Catholics, episode 8: It's Elementary! Catholic Education in the 21st Century.
• Rich Meyer on Almost Good Catholics, episode 45: Education in the World not of the World: A School Director and Father Talks about Forming the Whole Child.

Here is the pilgrimage with Monique and Joseph González this coming September with Inside the Vatican, and the related episodes from Almost Good Catholics:

• Pilgrimage to Mexico: Our Lady of Guadalupe & the Flower World Prophecy 2024
• Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 16: Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution
• Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics.
• Joseph and Monique González on Almost Good Catholics, episode 74: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth: How the Flower World Bloomed into History in 1531.

Here is my first discussion with Pastor Brian Zahnd and the film A Hidden Life which we will be talking about in August:

• A Hidden Life (2019) trailer, IMBD, and on Amazon Prime.
• Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross?

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This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also listen to the trailer for next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Public.

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Not only was Bl. Pier Giorgio’s body free from corruption when it was exhumed 75 years after his death, but he also has a couple of astounding miraculous healing attributed to him through his intercession. Christine Wohar talks to me about this remarkable figure in the church and how we can follow in his footsteps.

• Christine Wohar’s organization, FrassatiUSA, on the web.
• Christine Wohar’s book, Finding Frassati from Sophia International Press and also on Amazon.com.
• Kevin Becker on YouTube discussing the miraculous healing through Bl. Blessed Pier Giorgio and also an article about it.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes that we referred to in this interview:

• Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 17: Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA.
• Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross?

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The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale.

By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine.

Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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From Trump’s affiliation with his “court evangelicals” and televangelists to the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy and other prophetic/apostolic movements latching onto Trump’s ascension in service of dominionistic ends, and from his support among very conservative Catholics to the “cult” of Trump that has coalesced in conspiratorial online spaces advocating QAnon beliefs, the last decade has witnessed a mainstreaming of theology and ideology ripe for an interdisciplinary analysis of the performative aspects of Trump’s faith-based support. Dr. Willenbrink joined the New Books Network to discuss all these subjects as well as Christian nationalism in the present American political climate.

Hank Willenbrink (Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. A scholar and theatre artist, Hank has published on a range of topics like Hell Houses, the playwright Naomi Iizuka, the intersections of playwriting and nature writing, and the use of music in HBO’s Girls. With his wife, Dr. Yamile Silva, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese writing. Hank’s play, The Boat in the Tiger Suit, premiered in New York and is published by Original Works Publishing. He’s developed theatrical work internationally, including at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Hank has also led several interdisciplinary, community-engaged projects that bring together students and community members of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to engage in deeper and more intentional ways through collectively created theatrical performance. Hank played in a number of questionable bands, co-founded the music blog We Listen for You, and hails from Toad Suck, Arkansas. He is currently continuing the research that he discusses on today’s podcast episode on his Substack: performingforthedon.substack.com.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) primarily hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) by Dr. Genji Yasuhira explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the mediaeval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible.

Recommended reading: 

Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred & 

How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else 

both by Jeffrey J. Kripal.

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The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879–80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume’s opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879–80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book’s two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume’s concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice’s neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University.

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In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-colour journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dr. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad.

Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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• John Michael Talbot’s website.
• John Michael Talbot’s Wikipedia page.
• Late Have I Loved You, album on Amazon Music.
• Late Have I Loved You, book on Amazon.com.

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Wisconsin religious institutions have a long engagement with Latino populations. From the arrival of Mexican immigrant laborers in the 1920s who were recruited as strikebreakers, to post-war Tejano and Puerto Rican migrants who were encouraged to assimilate into eurocentric ideals of belonging, and finally to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in which Central American asylees sought protection from state and federal immigration enforcement, each of these topics and more are covered in Strangers No Longer. González skillfully crafts a narrative where the reader witnesses the development of the relationship between Wisconsin religious institutions and various Latino communities as one moving from a relationship of paternalism in the early 20th century to one of self-determination by the late 20th century. “Wisconsin Latinos pushed churches to acknowledge that they were no longer guests in their communities, or, in the words of the organizers of a statewide conference held in Appleton in 1974, ‘strangers in our homeland’” (141). By the 21st century, González asserts, the church had become a site for Latino political consciousness and resistance for decades.

González’s methodological rigor, clear writing, and strong theoretical grounding allow the reader to understand the delicate political, racial, economic, and spiritual power relations at play for Latinos in the Midwest during the 20th century. Strangers No Longer is a valuable read for undergraduate courses in Latino history, religious history, and social movement history. Alongside his academic work, González is building out his public history projects that offer primers on the sanctuary movement, immigration history, and Latino religious life in the Midwest.

Links to Dr. Gonzalez’s publications and projects:

• Strangers No Longer
• Mexicans in Wisconsin
• Wisconsin Latinx History Collective
• PBS Wisconsin's The Look Back 
• Wisconsin Historical Society's upcoming History Center

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But as Stephanie Mawson shows in her book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines (Cornell UP, 2023), the Spanish colonization of the Philippines was contested at every step, went on for centuries, and in many respects remained incomplete. Mawson tells the story of the diverse peoples who resisted Spanish colonization, in some cases for over 300 years. These included the “fugitives, apostates, and rebels, Chinese laborers, Moro slave raiders, native priestesses, Aeta headhunters, Pampangan woodcutters, and many others...

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Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.

Helen J. Nicholson is Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published extensively on the crusades, the military orders, and various related subjects, including a translation of a chronicle of the Third Crusade and an edition of the Templar trial proceedings in Britain and Ireland. She has just completed a history of Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186-1190).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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• Professor Bonagura’s website.
• Professor Bonagura’s book Jerome's Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning (Sophia International Press, 2023).

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Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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University of Notre Dame scholar Jaime Pensado is at the forefront of the work of recasting Catholicism as a truly global object of inquiry, as evidenced by his most recent work Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2023). In my conversation with Pensado, we explored some of the greatest intellectual boons of the global turn for the study of what he has called “the Catholic Sixties,” as well as persistent blind spots and crucial considerations for future research.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.

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Michael John Cusick, author, counselor, host of the wonderful podcast, Restoring the Soul, talks about what he has learned about addiction, disorder, mercy, and freedom, in his book Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle and also on this episode of Almost Good Catholics.

• Michael John Cusick’s website.
• Restoring the Soul intensive counseling ministry.
• Restoring the Soul podcast, and on Apple.
• 
  

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

• Heather King on Almost Good Catholics, episode 4: Divine Intoxication: A Discussion about Grace, Sainthood, and Women in the Church
• Mako Fujimura on Almost Good Catholics, episode 14: The Silence of God: The Meaning of Our Suffering and Redemption
• Brant Hansen on Almost Good Catholics, episode 75: The Men We Need: What Men Are Supposed to Be Doing

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In this interview, she discusses Her most recent book The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (NYU Press, 2024), which surveys the changing images of Ireland and Irishness in American popular culture.

The Green Space examines the variety of factors that contributed to remaking the Irish image from downtrodden and despised to universally acclaimed. To understand the forces that molded how people understand “Irish” is to see the matrix—the green space—that facilitated their interaction between the 1890s and 1960s. Marion R. Casey argues that, as “Irish” evolved between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a visual and rhetorical expanse for representing ethnicity was opened up in the process. The evolution was also transnational; both Ireland and the United States were inextricably linked to how various iterations of “Irish” were deployed over time—whether as a straightforward noun about a specific people with a national identity or a loose, endlessly malleable adjective only tangentially connected to actual ethnic identity.

Featuring a rich assortment of sources and images, The Green Space takes the history of the Irish image in America as a prime example of the ways in which culture and identity can be manufactured, repackaged, and ultimately revolutionized. Understanding the multifaceted influences that shaped perceptions of “Irishness” holds profound relevance for examining similar dynamics within studies of various immigrant and ethnic communities in the US.

The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image is published with NYU Press, as part of their Irish Diaspora series

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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In Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge UP, 2022), Markus Vinzent interrogates standard interpretations of Christian origins handed down over the centuries. He scrutinizes - in reverse order - the earliest recorded sources from the sixth to the second century, showing how the works of Greek and Latin writers reveal a good deal more about their own times and preoccupations than they do about early Christianity. In so doing, the author boldly challenges understandings of one of the most momentous social and religious movements in history, as well as its reception over time and place.

Markus Vinzent has recently retired as Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt. A recipient of awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Agence Nationale de Recherche, France, he is the author of Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian (Georgetown UP, 2006) is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican, remains committed to the Catholic Church. Over a nearly fifty-year career, Charles E. Curran has distinguished himself as the most well-known and the most controversial Catholic moral theologian in the United States. On occasion, he has disagreed with official church teachings on subjects such as contraception, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, moral norms, and the role played by the hierarchical teaching office in moral matters. Throughout, however, Curran has remained a committed Catholic, a priest working for the reform of a pilgrim church.

In 1986, years of clashes with church authorities finally culminated in a decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology. As a result of that Vatican condemnation, he was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University of America. Yet Curran continues to defend the possibility of legitimate dissent from those teachings of the Catholic faith—not core or central to it—that are outside the realm of infallibility.

In this poignant and passionate memoir, Curran recounts his remarkable story from his early years as a compliant, pre-Vatican II Catholic through decades of teaching and writing and a transformation that has brought him today to be recognized as a leader of progressive Catholicism throughout the world.

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The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most important are two Latin lives written a century or more after her death. The first was composed by a churchman named Cogitosus and tells of her many miracles of healing and helping the poor. The second source, known as the Vita Prima, continues the tradition with more tales of marvellous deeds and journeys throughout the island. Both Latin sources are a treasure house of information not just about the legends of Brigid but also daily life, the role of women, and the spread of Christianity in Ireland. 

Philip Freeman's Two Lives of Saint Brigid (Four Courts Press, 2024) for the first time presents together an English translation of both the Life of Brigid by Cogitosus and the Vita Prima, along with the Latin text of both carefully edited from the best medieval manuscripts. Also included are an introduction, notes, and commentary to help general readers, students, and scholars in reading these fascinating stories of St. Brigid.

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I am grateful for Josh Del Colle of South Dakota for this episode suggestion and for arranging the introduction.

• Website of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem
• Father Firas’s webpage.

Almost Good Catholics episodes with Father Piotr Żelazko in Jerusalem:

• [Part 1] Fr. Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 71: Live from Israel: Catholics in the Holy Land Today
• [Part 2] Fr. Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 73, starting at 55 minutes after my interview with Jay Richards: Darwinian Accident or Divine Architect? The Debate between Natural Selection and Intelligence Design
• [Part 3] Fr. Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 79, The Ground is Crying out to God: Live from Jerusalem Part 3

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This book is part of the Jesuit Sources imprint, IJS Studies: Research on Jesuits and the Society of Jesus.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Bronwen McShea is a Visiting Assistant Professor in History at the Augustine Institute Graduate School. She earned her B.A. and M.T.S. at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in history at Yale University, and was a 2018-20 James Madison Program Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. She is also the author of Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France and Women of the Church (What Every Catholic Should Know).

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012; paperback 2023) closely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity--and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions--during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony.

The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.

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• Pastor Brian’s webpage.
• Pastor Brian’s book, The Wood between the Worlds (IVP, 2024)
• Tim Stewart’s interview with Brian on the Impact Nations podcast (February 2024)

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

• David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 39: Why a Savior? The Theology of Sacrifice and Redemption
• Jeff Brannon on Almost Good Catholics, episode 40: O Death, Where is Your Sting? The Biblical Theology of Resurrection
• Fr Chris Alar on Almost Good Catholics, episode 61: Master Craftsman, Broken Tools: Why God Works Through Us, Hears Intercessory Prayers, and Grants Divine Mercy
• Sr Mary Josefa of the Eucharist on Almost Good Catholics, episode 68: Brides of Christ: Contemplative Life among the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles

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• Joe and Nicole’s website
• Joe McGivney’s book, You’re a Miracle, on Amazon.com
• Blessed Fr Michael McGivney founder of the Knights of Columbus
• Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome on the NIH website.

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Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Dr. Harriet Lyon is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries after the dissolution. Dr. Lyon argues that our understanding of this historical moment is enriched by taking a long chronological view of the suppression, by exploring how it was remembered to those who witnessed it and how this memory evolved in subsequent generations. Exposing and repudiating the assumptions of a conventional historiography that has long been coloured by Henrician narratives and sources, this book reveals that the fall of the religious houses was remembered as one of the most profound and controversial transformations of the entire English Reformation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Examining the Catholic community’s interpretation of the A-bomb, this book not only uses memory to provide a greater understanding of the destruction of the bombing, but also links it to the past experiences of religious persecution, drawing comparisons with the ‘Secret Christian’ groups which survived in the Japanese countryside after the banning of Christianity. 

Through in-depth interviews, it emerges that the memory of the atomic bomb is viewed through the lens of a community which had experienced suffering and marginalisation for more than 400 years. Furthermore, it argues that their dangerous memory confronts Euro-American-centric narratives of the atomic bombings, whilst also challenging assumptions around a providential bomb. Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki presents the voices of Catholics, many of whom have not spoken of their losses within the framework of their faith before. As such, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese history, religion and war history.

I asked Gwyn about three questions that we could face when reflecting on the complex survivor narratives provided by the Catholic victims of the nuclear Holocaust in Japan, or more precisely, what the book refers to as the "dangerous memory in Nagasaki."  

• Do Nagasaki Christians and their unique intercultural Mariology (i.e., Maria kannon and Maria with a keloid scar) present any issues to today's theology (especially with regard to their possible reception by the Vatican)?
• How was John Paul II's visit to Nagasaki, which put an emphasis on human responsibility regarding war atrocities, received among the survivors who embraced the traditional interpretation of their losses as a sacrificial hansai (a burnt offering) or a part of setsuri (providence)? 
• How can the nation of Japan (both Catholics and the rest of the country) move forward in light of the dangerous memory of Nagasaki? 

The author's responses to these questions reflected his intellectual virtue as a patient witness to the extraordinary life stories of the war victims in Nagasaki. The interview ends with a note of undying hope, the future possibility of transformative reconciliations that can move the whole country forward, while doing justice to dangerous memories.   

Gwyn McClelland holds a Master of Divinity from the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Japanese history from Monash University. He is the winner of the 2019 John Legge prize for best thesis in Asian Studies, awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Takeshi Morisato is a philosopher and sometimes academic. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.

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Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren't just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance.

From Abraham Lincoln's death mask to Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse, Emily Dickinson's envelopes to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick, relics are the objects which the faithful understand as being more than just objects. Material things of sacred importance, relics are indicative of a culture's deepest values.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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• Jeremy Holmes’s faculty webpage at Wyoming Catholic College
• Professor Holmes’s book, Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word Became Words (Ignatius Press, 2021).
• “Confederate Evolution Debate” from Gettysburg (1993)

Related Almost Good Catholics episode:

• Jay Richards on Almost Good Catholics, episode 73: Darwinian Accident or Divine Architect? The Debate between Natural Selection and Intelligent Design

Another Almost Good Catholics episode with Jeremy Holmes:

• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 20: Words and the Word: How Scripture Brings Us into God’s Eternal Moment

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• Peter Hess’s webpage at “Climate Abandoned.”
• Peter Hess’s book, Catholicism and Science (Greenwood, 2008).
• Laudatus Si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical letter (2015).
• TERA website, the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance.
• ‘Firefighter Type 2’ explained at the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.



Related Almost Good Catholics episode:

• Joseph Nagel and Heather Skinner, episode 8: It's Elementary! Catholic Education in the 21st Century.

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These questions are at the core of Eugenio Refini's book Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Legenda, 2022), which explores pedagogical uses of allegorical drama in Italy in the decades around 1600, with a focus on the place of theatre in the education of female orphans in the hospitals of Venice. The consumption of morality plays is looked at as a form of spiritual practice modeled on long-lasting theatrical metaphors. In this context, tropes such as the theatrum mundi not only regained their literal meaning by being actually staged, but also turned into rhetorical devices able to promote the inner staging of the ‘world’ on the ‘spiritual’ stage of the soul.

Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu.

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In this episode, Nic joins me again to discuss histories of nomadic peoples fighting with and against the Crusader armies; what military history can tell us about the economic, social, and cultural history of the medieval Near East; and why Crusader history is still relevant to us today.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s) had on people living in early modern Ireland.

What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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• Our original YouTube interview on Missio Dei (October 1, 2023)
• Apocalypto on the Best Pick podcast with John Dorney, Jessica Regan, Tom Salinsky and( guest) Joy Wilkinson (August 24, 2022)
• The Making of Apocalypto documentary with Mel Gibson.James
• Empires of death: Apocalypto (2006) on Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast with James Majewski
• History article by Richard Hansen: “Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto.”

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

• Joseph González and Monique González on Almost Good Catholics, episode 74: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth: How the Flower World Bloomed into History in 1531
• Brant Hansen on Almost Good Catholics, episode 75: The Men We Need: What Men Are Supposed to Be Doing

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes with Jonathon Fessenden:

• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1: Silence and The Scarlet and the Black
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 49: Catholic Movies, Pt. 2: The Mission and A Man for All Seasons
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 58: The Book of Job: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 64: The Fourth Wise Man: Follow Jesus—He’s Getting Away!

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Months after King Philip III of Spain signed an edict in 1609 denouncing the Muslim inhabitants of Spain as heretics, traitors, and apostates, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory, on threat of death. In the brutal and traumatic exodus that followed, entire families and communities were forced to abandon homes and villages where they had lived for generations, leaving their property in the hands of their Christian neighbors. By 1613, an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory.

Blood and Faith presents a remarkable window onto a little known period of modern Europe--a complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, cultural oppression, and resistance against over-whelming odds that sheds new light on national identity and Islam.

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This is the seventy-fifth episode of Almost Good Catholics and starts off our third season and the year 2024. My discussion with Brant is 52 minutes long, but then I’ve added fifteen minutes of Christmas music from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band to celebrate.

• Brant Hansen’s website and radio show.
• The Men We Need by Brant Hansen (2022) and all of his books.
• Brant Hansen’s page and CURE International’s page on Wikipedia.
• Trailer for Wall-E (Disney and Pixar, 2008).
• The ever-growing Josh and Margot Christmas Album and the Great Space Coaster band website.

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When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In this book, Dr. Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision is a critical biography of this American saint written within the context of the religious order she founded. It ties her sainthood to the Sisters’ ministries to Black and Indigenous communities; Margaret McGuinness's careful examination of the work Katharine Drexel and her Sisters accomplished brings a critical perspective to this important ministry in the Church. It deepens our understanding of these communities and renews our commitment to the difficult, ongoing conversation about race in America.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Max Deardoff's A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) examines the vast, trans-Atlantic transformation of political ideas about subjecthood that ultimately allowed some colonial mestizos and indios ladinos (acculturated natives) to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards in colonial Santafé de Bogotá and Tunja. In a spirit of comparison, it illustrates how some of the descendants of Spain's last Muslims appealed to the same new conceptions of citizenship to avoid disenfranchisement in the face of growing prejudice.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied.

Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Yet Joseph Julián and Monique González concluded that the opposite was true. They argue “that God had prepared the Mesoamerican people to receive Christianity” that this Nahua myth had been inserted into history to make Our Lady comprehensible to the Nahua people—leading to ten million conversions—at a time when Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos were making a mess of the New World with their slavery and greed, polluting the evangelical work of the humble friars preaching Gospel.

• Misa Azteca on Soundcloud, composed by Joseph Julián González
• The book, Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy (Sophia Institute Press, 2023)
• Missio Dei interview with Joseph and Monique González with Jonathan Fessenden

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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– Gregory Goalwin, Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Religion and nationalism are two of the most powerful forces in the world. And as powerful as they are separately, humans throughout history have fused religious beliefs and nationalist politics to develop religious nationalism, which uses religious identity to define membership in the national community. But why and how have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of national identity in what sociologists have predicted would be a more secular world? This book takes two cases - nationalism in both Ireland and Turkey in the 20th century - as a foundation to advance a new theory of religious nationalism. By comparing cases, Goalwin emphasizes how modern political actors deploy religious identity as a boundary that differentiates national groups. This theory argues that religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a powerful movement developed as a tool that forges new and independent national identities.

"In an age where religious nationalisms and populisms are on the rise, Goalwin's comparative-historical work is a welcome contribution for comprehending how religious identities and politics interact. A valuable source for social scientists as well as non-specialists who are interested in this complex phenomenon."

– Efe Peker, co-author, Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park: From Private Discontent to Collective Action

Gregory Goalwin is an assistant professor of sociology at Aurora University in Illinois. His research has been published in journals including Social Science History, Patterns of Prejudice, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.

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Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.

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J. Christopher Edwards is professor of religious studies at St. Francis College, Brooklyn.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window.

Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems,

The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and is the only book of its kind.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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At the end of this episode (at 55 minutes), we hear an update from Father Piotr Żelazko in Israel as we enter the second month of the Gaza War.

• Here’s the book, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, edited by Ann Gauger (Sophia Institute Press, 2023)
• Here’s Jay Richard’s webpage at the Heritage Foundation.
• Here’s the debate between Jay Richards and Christopher Hitchens from 2008 at Stanford.
• Father Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 71: Live from Israel: Catholics in the Holy Land Today.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Paul Louis Metzger’s faculty webpage at Multnomah University.
• Paul Louis Metzger’s book webpage, More than Things (2023, IVP).
• Conclusion of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
• Trailer for Gattaca(1997).
• Trailer for Interstellar (2014).

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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The first 24 minutes of this recording are an update from Father Piotr about the current war between Israel and Hamas that began on October 7, 2023. The interview I recorded in August begins at 24 minutes.

• Website of the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew-Speaking Catholics in Israel.
• Father’ Piotr’s webpage.
• Father Abraham Shmuelof reading the Torah; Father Abraham’s biography.
• Cardinal Pizzaballa’s offer to be exchanged for hostages.
• The story of Rachel Edery who fed Hamas fighters with coffee and cookies when they came to murder her.
• Hagiography of St. Louis.
• “The Carousel” scene from Mad Men (about nostalgia).

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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• Professor Peters’s faculty webpage at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx.
• Jane Sloan Peters’s articles (several of which we discussed today) for America Magazine, the Jesuit Review.
• Inside the Vatican podcast: “Deep Dive: How World Youth Day became an epic event for young Catholics” episode with Jane Sloan Peters (her interview begins at 28:40, though of course the whole episode is lovely).
• Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Lecture (1993).

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Drawing on a wealth of manuscript and print sources from the era, A. Katie Harris uses the case of St. John of Matha’s stolen remains to explore the roles played by saints’ relics, the anxieties invested in them, their cultural meanings, and the changing modes of thought with which early modern Catholics approached them. While in theory a relic’s authenticity and identity might be proved by supernatural evidence, in practice early modern Church authorities often reached for proofs grounded in the material, human world—preferences that were representative of the standardizing and streamlining of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century saint-making. Harris examines how Matha’s advocates deployed material and documentary proofs, locating them within a framework of Scholastic concepts of individuation, identity, change, and persistence, and applying moral certainty to accommodate the inherent uncertainty of human evidence and relic knowledge.

Engaging and accessible, The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century (Penn State University Press, 2023) raises an array of important questions surrounding relic identity and authenticity in seventeenth-century Europe. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and casual readers interested in European history, religious history, material culture, and Renaissance studies.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Women in World Christianity features findings from the Women in World Christianity Project, a groundbreaking study that produced the first quantitative dataset on gender in every Christian denomination in every country of the world. Throughout the text, special emphasis is placed on women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the period of Christianity’s shift from the global North to the global South. Easily accessible chapters – organized by continent, tradition, and select topics – introduce students to the wide variety of Christian belief and practice around the world. The book also discusses issues specifically relevant to women in the church: gender-based violence, ecology, theological education, peacebuilding and more. This textbook:

• Provides a balanced view of women’s involvement in Christianity as a world religion and how they sustain the faith today
• Introduces students to female theologians around the world whose scholarship is generally overlooked in Western theological education
• Discusses women’s essential contributions to Christian mission, leadership, education, relief work, healthcare, and other social services of the church
• Complements the growing body of literature about Christian women from different continental, regional, national, and ecclesiastical perspectives
• Explores the contributions of contemporary Christian women of all major denominations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania
• Helps students become more aware of the unique challenges women face worldwide, and what they are doing to overcome them

Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement is an excellent primary textbook for introductory courses on World Christianity, History of Christianity, World Religions, Gender in Religion, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses specifically focused on women in World Christianity.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.

Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and the history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia and Protestant missions. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion, church-state relations, and politics of religion.

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How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries?

By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest—locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting—this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Martina Mampieri has been granted a special mention of excellence in the Alberigo Award 2021 by the European Academy of Religion and Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose.

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Matthew and Leeanne Thomas edited and annotated these texts for the Ignatius Study Bible. Matthew is a theologian and professor at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California. He and Leeanne are both scholars of Biblical Hebrew; they met in graduate school and got married. She had also once been a candidate for ordination in the Anglican Church in Canada before becoming a Catholic. Today, the couple live in Berkeley with their four beautiful children.

• The First and Second Books of the Maccabees, edited by Matthew and Leeanne Thomas, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.
• Matthew Thomas’s faculty webpage at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.
• Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 02: Who Wrote the Bible? Sorting out the History of the Bible We Have.
• Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 03: The Gospels in the Early Church: Evidence for the Chronology and Transmission of the Christian Scriptures.
• Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 22: Better Call Paul How Did the Early Jewish Christians Understand “Works of the Law”?

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We also discuss the late Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster who founded their community who drew the attention of the world earlier this year when her exhumed body was miraculously not corrupted four years after death, nor her garments (though the fabric of her coffin was completely rotted away).

Finally, we discuss the special charism and Marian consecration of this Benedictine community who emulate the quiet, loving role of the Mother of God in the years between the Ascension of Jesus and her own Assumption, supporting the Early Church.

• The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles website
• The new book, Brides of Christ, from Sophia Institute Press
• Articles about Sr Wilhelmina Lancaster’s uncorrupted remains: in the New York Times, in the Catholic News Agency, and in the Catholic Review.



Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Here to discuss is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. In addition to her work on the history of Christianity, medieval liturgy, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, she teaches a popular course "Tolkien: Medieval and Modern," and has a series of lectures and writings mining the depths of Tolkien's thought and writing.

• More on Rachel Fulton Brown here.
• The syllabus to her course is here.
• Her lecture series, "The Forge of Tolkien" is here. 
• Her blog, "Fencing Bear at Prayer" is here. 
• Dragon Common Room, which contains more lectures and information about creative writing, is here. 

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on a novel movement of low and no-caste devotees worshipping Jesus in the purported heart of Hindu civilization. Through thick description and analysis, and by attending to devotees and clergy in their own voices, Kerry P. C. San Chirico examines the worldview and ways of life of these Khrist Bhaktas, or devotees of Jesus, along with the Catholic priests and nuns who mediate Jesus, Mary, and other members of the Catholic pantheon in a place hardly associated with Jesus or Christianity. San Chirico places this movement within the context of the devotional history of the Banaras region, the history of Indian Christianity, the rise of low caste and Dalit emancipatory strategies, and the ascendance of Hindu nationalism. Attending to convergences and disparities between devotional Hinduism and charismatic Catholicism, Between Hindu and Christian demonstrates that religious categories are not nearly as distinct as they often seem.

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.

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In On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2019), Matthew W. Knotts explores this question in close conversation with Augustine, according to whom our nature as God's creatures determines fundamental aspects of our identity and our knowledge. In a postmodern context informed by a renewed appreciation of the limitations of human nature and reason, Augustine once again emerges as an insightful and compelling source for further reflection.

Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago.

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In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police. This was after the CIA assisted coup that overthrew democratically elected president, Salvador Allende in 1973. Augusto Pinochet then ruled Chile as a dictator, clamping down on unrest, journalists, and critics. Those who tried tried to protect some of these dissidents from detention, torture, disappearance, and death were considered traitors and received the same punishment. Kathy Osberger learned all this, but she still wasn’t prepared when the secret police came with a warrant for her arrest, forced her into a car, and handed her a blindfold. They soon let her go, but everyone knew they’d come back, and she had to disappear.

Kathleen Osberger earned her B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. from Maryknoll School of Theology, and an A.M. from the University of Chicago–School of Social Work Administration. Her life was shaped by volunteer experiences when she lived in San Miguelito, Panamá; Santiago, Chile; Chimbote, Perú and the South Bronx. In 1987 she began a seventeen-year relationship with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners as an instructor in their orientation to mission program and in 1993 she joined the University of Chicago Hospitals—Department of Psychiatry. Her work as a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist has centered on the issues of trauma and torture. 

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Brad H. Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. PhD in Public History. Asst. Prof. of Latin American History at Alabama A&M University.

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• Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio.
• Kevin Vallier’s personal website.
• Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled.
• Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna.
• “What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar.



Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Articles by Father Chris Pietraszko from Missio Dei (including all of the ones about the Seven Deadly Sins)
• Father Chris at the Kent Lambton Roman Catholic Family of Parishes
• Many videos with Father Chris for listeners who would like to hear more

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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In From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership (Baylor UP, 2022), Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short.

Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God.

Bingwan Tian is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo interested in the study of special education and citizenship education.

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Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.

Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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In addition to her book, Dr. Holland has recently published an article in Feminist Studies, “‘Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust’: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Dr. Holland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and Book Review Editor for the Journal of Women’s History.

In Tiny You, Holland tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century in the United States: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion.

The interview covers the origins, spread, and success of this conservative movement in the Mountain West during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although she discusses the many leaders of the movement, her focus is on how women at the local level championed the rights of fetuses in domestic spaces, churches, and schools, therefore changing the tenor of local, state, and national politics in enduring ways.

After reading this book, one can never look at American conservatism or anti-abortion politics in the same way again. Please join us for an enlightening interview.

Jennifer L. Holland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma.

Sandie Holguín, Professor of History, Co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History, and author of Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity can be reached at jwh@ou.edu.

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The first link below is to the movie itself (71 minutes) on YouTube:

• The film, The Fourth Wise Man, on YouTube, also on Formed, and on Amazon.
• Our video of this discussion on the Missio Dei website and also on YouTube.
• Henry van Dyke’s eulogy for Mark Twain from the New York Times.
• Henry van Dyke’s poem, “Time Is.”
• Henry van Dyke’s The Other Wise Man on Wikipedia.
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1: Silence and The Scarlet and the Black
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 49: Catholic Movies, Pt. 2: The Mission and A Man for All Seasons
• Jonathon Fessenden on Almost Good Catholics, episode 58: The Book of Job: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Ben Metcalf’s webpage at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley
• Ben Metcalf’s webpage at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley
• The website for California’s Department of Housing and Community Development
• The website for the national Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Brother John Vianney Russel, OP, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 31: Chatting with the Homeless Looking for Jesus among the Least of Our Brothers

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order―visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church’s text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

Dr. Joel Anderson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine. He is a historian of medieval Europe, and his research revolves around issues of communication, imagination, and authority, particularly in the high and late medieval church.

Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.

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In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Cornell UP, 2018) also explores the emergence of the idea that a destructive "Jewish spirit" was the national enemy. In combining the historical study of antisemitism with more recent considerations of religion and nationalism, Hanebrink addresses an important question in Central European historiography: how nations that had been inclusive of Jews before World War I became rabidly antisemitic during the interwar period. As he traces the crucial and complex legacy of religion's role in shaping exclusionary antisemitic politics in Hungary, Hanebrink follows the process from its origins in the 1890s to the Holocaust and beyond.

More broadly, In Defense of Christian Hungary squarely addresses the relationship between antisemitic words and antisemitic violence and between religion and racial politics, deeply contested issues in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The Hungarian example is a chilling demonstration of how religious nationalism can find a home even within a pluralist and tolerant civil society.

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• Bishop Hunter’s webpage on the Churches for the Sake of Others website.
• Bishop Hunter’s new book: What Jesus Intended (IVP Press, 2023), including an excerpt.
• Mike Angell, article: “The Accidental Anglican: Bishop Todd Hunter” (July 15, 2017)
• Philip Kosloski, article: “Main differences between Anglicanism and Catholicism.” Aleteia (May 11, 2023)

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Judith Roumani is founder and director of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano.

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• Father Chris’s page on the Marian Fathers’ website.
• Father Chris’s video about St. Faustina.
• St. Faustina’s Diary online (in multiple languages)
• Father Joe Roesch’s podcast: St. Faustina’s Diary in a year.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Live Action website
• What is Abortion? video series
• Pro Life Replies video series
• Can’t Stay Silent video series

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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This Dr. Tavárez’s third time on the New Books Network. He spoken twice in 2020 about his earlier work: his 2011 book The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (from Stanford University Press), and his 2017 edited volume Words & Worlds Turned Around (from UP of Colorado). His new book, published last year (2022, University of Texas Press), is Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico builds on his earlier work and is a magisterial and profound discussion of Zapotec ideas of cosmology and time, and how indigenous communities maintained and integrated their pre-Columbian beliefs, the quela li, or true custom, into the Colonial Spanish World and the Catholic Christian Faith.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. His dissertation on diplomacy and travel in the early sixteenth century is a forthcoming book from Brepols Press. He is also the host of the Almost Good Catholics podcast, part of New Books Network Academic Partners.

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Eric Vanden Eykel (Ph.D., Marquette University, 2014) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Forrest S. Williams Teaching Chair in the Humanities at Ferrum College in Virginia. Dr. Vanden Eykel’s primary area of research is early Christian apocryphal literature, with a special focus on texts and traditions about the infancies and childhoods of Jesus and his mother, Mary. He has previously authored “But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James (T&T Clark, 2016) and co-edited Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lexington Books, 2022). In his free time, he enjoys making beer, running, and woodworking.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Brad Stoddard is Associate Professor in the History and Art History Department at McDaniel College, Westminster, MD. He researches religion in the United States. He is the author of Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida's Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State (2021) and has edited or coedited several books. He is currently researching the topic of entheogens. 

Craig Martin is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY. His research interests include method and theory in the study of religion, discourse analysis and ideology critique, and poststructuralism. His books include A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (2017) and Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture (2022). He edits a book series with Bloomsbury titled Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com

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Joëlle Rollo-Koster is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rhode Island. A scholar of the Avignon papacy, she is the author of Avignon and its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society and Raiding Saint Peter. In 2016, she was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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• Eduard Habsburg’s new book, The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times (Sophia Institute Press, 2023)
• Eduard Habsburg on Twitter: @EduardHabsburg
• First Things: interview with Mark Bauerlein, “Eduard Habsburg on the Habsburg Way of Life” (April 24, 2023)
• The New York Times: an article by Jason Horowitz, “Hungary’s Habsburg Ambassador to the Pope, With an Offbeat Résumé” (April 27, 2023)

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London and Head of the School of History. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge. She has taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and has held visiting positions in Paris, Princeton, and New York. Her research has explored areas of the religious cultures of medieval Europe, and has been influenced by an interdisciplinary approach which had benefited from the use of textual, visual and musical sources. She enjoys writing for diverse audiences and discussing history wherever engaged interest arises.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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In this interview she discusses her new book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64 (Manchester UP, 2022).

Gender and Punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as ‘double deviance’, chivalry, paternalism and ‘coercive confinement’, the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history.

Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh

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• The video of our discussion of The Book of Job on the Missio Dei website and on YouTube
• Jonathan Fessenden’s bio on Missio Dei
• The Book of Job on the USCCB (US Conference of Catholic Bishops) webpage
• The Book of Job (NABRE) on Bible Gateway
• Professor Wesley Morrison, “God’s Answer to Job” (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• Bishop Barron’s sermon “Why Is Life So Full of Suffering” (2022)
• Professors Sommers and Pizarro discussion on Job, “How Do You Solve a Problem like Theodicy?” on Very Bad Wizards (2019)
• Jonathan Fessenden’s, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1: Silence and The Scarlet and the Black.
• Jonathan Fessenden’s, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 49: Catholic Movies, Pt. 2: The Mission and A Man for All Seasons.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Father Maurice’s webpage
• Father Maurice’s book, Deep Down in My Soul (Orbis, 2023)
• Father Maurice’s spiritual direction ministry
• Father Maurice on Almost Good Catholics, episode 21: We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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• Tim Staple’s profile in Catholic Answers
• Tim Staples’s article, “What Happens in Purgatory?,” in Catholic Answers, July 8, 2021.
• What the Catechism teaches on the subject of purgatory (CCC #1030 – 1032)
• 1 Corinthians 3:11-15

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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In Jesus the Purifier: John's Gospel and the Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus (Baker Academic, 2023), renowned New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg advances the idea that John is a viable and valuable source for studying the historical Jesus. The data from John should be integrated with that of the Synoptics, which will yield additional insights into Jesus's emphases and ministry. Blomberg begins by reviewing the first three quests, reassessing both their contributions and their shortcomings. He then discusses the emerging consensus regarding demonstrably historical portions of John, which are more numerous than usually assumed. Peeling back the layers, we discover in Jesus's ministry an emphasis on purity and purification. The Synoptics corroborate this discovery, specifically in Jesus's meals with sinners. Blomberg then explores the practical and contemporary applications of Jesus the purifier, including the "contagious holiness" that Jesus's followers can spread to others.

Craig Blomberg is distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Denver Seminary in Littleton, Colorado, where he has taught for more than thirty years.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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• Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) on Wikipedia and IMDB.
• Babette’s Feast trailer.
• Mark Le Fanu’s article: Babette’s Feast: “Mercy and Truth Have Met Together,” June 22, 2013, Criterion.com.
• Sr. Maria Catherine on the faculty page at JSerra High School.
• Sr. Maria Catherine on the JSerra Podcast.
• Sr. Maria Catherine on the Lumen Ecclesia podcast.
• Rich Meyer, director of JSerra High School, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 45: Education in the World not of the World: A School Director and Father Talks about Forming the Whole Child
• Ronald Reagan’s joke about the atheist and the cook.
• King David, Psalm 23

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, interpret it as a metaphorical expression of hope for those suffering now, or only recognize its highlights from pop culture, what you think Revelation reveals…is almost certainly wrong.

In Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (Simon and Schuster, 2023), acclaimed New Testament authority Bart D. Ehrman delves into the most misunderstood—and possibly the most dangerous—book of the Bible, exploring the horrifying social and political consequences of expecting an imminent apocalypse and offering a fascinating tour through three millennia of Judeo-Christian thinking about how our world will end. By turns hilarious, moving, troubling, and provocative, Armageddon presents inspiring insights into how to live our lives in the face of an uncertain future and reveals what the Bible really says about the end.

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Drawing from theologian David Tracy's method of critical correlation, the book focuses on key historical, philosophical, and theological shifts that have allowed liberation theologians to produce a new interpretation of the relationship between faith and politics in the Christian tradition, especially when issues of social justice are at stake. The book further approaches liberation theology's contributions to theorizing social justice through an unconventional path: a critical dialogue with the work of philosopher John Rawls. This dialogue, as Zegarra contends, allows us to see more clearly the contributions of liberation theology to the cause of progressive social change. Ultimately the book stands between "public religion" and "public reason," offering something of a blueprint for theological innovation and for how to remain committed to one's faith while respecting and defending the core values of democracy.

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Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Lee Martin McDonald (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 1976) is President Emeritus at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, where he taught New Testament Studies for many years, and was also president of the Institute for Biblical Research from 2006 to 2012. He has written or edited 35 books over a career that spans back to the 1980s, and his most recent work is Before There Was a Bible: Authorities in Early Christianity (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2023).

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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• Richard Foster’s Learning Humility from IVP (InterVarsity Press)
• Richard Foster’s Learning Humility on Amazon
• Richard Foster’s Learning Humility excerpt on Renovaré
• Richard Foster and Brenda Quinn on the Renovaré podcast
• Richard Foster’s page on Renovaré and on Wikipedia
• Brenda Quinn’s page on Renovaré
• Richard Foster’s orthodox breath prayer in the Ignatian daily examen (at 00:36) with Dan Wilt from the Belfast City Vineyard
• Amy McKeever, “The heartbreaking, controversial history of Mount Rushmore,” National Geographic, October 28, 2020

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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The Liber pontificalis presented Rome as a holy city of Christian saints and martyrs, as the bishops of Rome established their visible power in buildings, and it articulated the popes' spiritual and ministerial role, accommodated within their Roman imperial inheritance. Drawing on wide-ranging and interdisciplinary international research, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy offers pioneering insights into the evolution of this extraordinary source, and its significance for the history of early medieval Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic information center in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. 

• Number of children per family, broken down by religion
• Her recent essay, "1968 is So Over"

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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• “Statement from Bishop Hying on the ‘Synodal Way’ process from bishops in Germany,” Madison Catholic Herald, March 21, 2023
• Bishop Hying’s Wikipedia page
• Discussion of Bishop Hying’s statement (and other topics) by JD Flynn and Ed Condon on the Pillar Podcast
• Bishop Hying on Almost Good Catholics, episode 19: Pray Like a Mystic: Mystical Traditions and What to Do with Them
• Sr. Nathalie Becquart, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 36: Quo Vademus? The Pilgrim Church on the Road of Synodality

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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In 1958, at the ancient Christian monastery of Mar Saba just outside Jerusalem, Columbia University scholar Morton Smith claimed to have unearthed a letter written by the Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria and containing an excerpt from a previously unknown version of the canonical Gospel of Mark. This excerpt recounts a story of Jesus's apparent sexual encounter with a young, resurrected disciple. In recent years, an influential group of researchers has alleged that no Secret Gospel or letter of Clement existed in antiquity, and that the manuscript that Morton Smith "found" was a modern forgery--created by none other than Smith himself. 

Smith Landau enter into the controversy surrounding this document and argue that the Secret Gospel of Mark is neither a first-century alternative gospel nor a twentieth-century forgery by the scholar who announced its discovery. Instead, this account is intimately bound up with the history of Mar Saba, one of the oldest monasteries in the Christian world. In this fascinating work, Smith and Landau present the realities and misconceptions surrounding not only the now-lost manuscript but also its brilliant, enigmatic, and acerbic discoverer, Morton Smith.

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Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic―a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following―including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions―Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice.

Andrew R. Casper's book An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.

Andrew Casper is a professor of art history in the Department of Arts at Miami University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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• Paul Bloom’s Yale faculty webpage
• Paul Bloom’s Toronto faculty webpage
• Paul Bloom’s Wikipedia page
• Paul Bloom’s book, Psych
• Paul Bloom and Dave Pizarro’s Psych podcast
• Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology on Yale Open Courses
• Paul Bloom’s TED Talk about St. Augustine of Hippo and perversity.
• Paul Bloom talks with Russ Roberts on EconTalk about Psych, The Sweet Spot, Cruelty, and Empathy.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell.

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Munir Sheikh is a Sunni Muslim from Bangladesh. He’s a management consultant on Wall Street in New York. He joined a Catholic Dads’ group (how I met him) to talk about important issues of faith and family life with some of his oldest American friends (who are Catholic).

• Munir Sheikh on LinkedIn
• Derya Little, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 27: Faithful Frontiers: A Turkish Scholar Describes How She Became a Catholic Apologist
• Mufti Menk, “The Story of Jesus”
• Omar Suleiman, “The Life and Mission of Jesus”
• Omar Suleiman, “Islam,” on the Lex Fridman Podcast

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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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.

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South Asia's Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2023) begins with a discussion of south India’s ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia’s Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. He then underscores the efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavors, but rarely succeeded in yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of postcolonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.

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This book focuses on the ethnographic study of Catholicism and media. Chapters demonstrate how people engage with the Catholic media-scape, and analyze the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie Catholic media and mediatization.

Case studies examine Catholic practices in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa, providing a truly comparative, de-centered representation of global Catholicism.

Illustrating the vibrancy and heterogeneity of Catholicism world-wide, the book also examines how media work to sustain larger global Catholic imaginaries.

Eric Hoenes Del Pinal’s chapter in particular examines “how Guatemalan Catholics have variously used FM radio and internet streaming video to manage the uncertainties of producing spectacular public rituals during Holy Week. Focusing on the devotional labor that Catholic lay leaders do to mount these events and the fact that efficacy of that work is not always easy to asses, he asks how their various media practices, which are meant to counterbalance unprecedented social changes, have contributed to the mediatization of parish life” (9).

Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. She researches religion, media, and technology with a focus on Catholic communities around the world.

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Understanding the movement to be dynamic and highly diverse, Pablo Bradbury's book Liberationist Christianity in Argentina (1930-1983): Faith and Revolution (Tamesis Books, 2023) reveals that ecclesial and political conflicts, especially over Peronism and celibacy, were at the heart of the construction of a liberationist Christian identity, which simultaneously internalised deep tensions over its relationship to the Catholic Church. It first situates the rise of a revolutionary Christian impulse in Argentina within changes in society, in Catholicism and Protestantism and in Marxism in the 1930s, before analysing how the phenomenon coalesced in the late sixties into a coherent social movement. Finally, the book examines the responses of liberationist Christians to the intense period of repression under the presidency of Isabel Perón and the rule of the military junta between 1974 and 1983. By exploring these distinct responses and uncovering the heterogeneity of liberationist Christianity, the book offers a fresh analysis of a movement that occupies a major role in the popular memory of the period of state terror, and provides a corrective to narratives that depict the movement as monolithic or as a passive victim of the dictatorship.

Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements.

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And that momentous accomplishment is only one milestone in the career of this multi-faceted scholar. George is one of the few scholars to wield influence in multiple fields of study. A lover of the humanities and liberal learning, he has made major contributions in his primary fields of analytic philosophy and its subbranch, the philosophy of law. He has also done important work both in academic writing and through public service in the form of membership and chairmanship of federal government bodies in such fields as bioethics, religious freedom and civil rights.

All of these accomplishments and more are discussed by leading Protestant scholars and thinkers in Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement With Robert P. George (Crossway, 2023), edited by the evangelical scholar, Andrew Walker. Walker contributes an introduction and an interview with George himself, both of which make clear why the latter is so admired in evangelical circles and what qualms some of them have about some aspects of his activism. Carl Trueman, for example, suggests that as wokeness has corroded and coarsened public discourse, George’s gentlemanly approach is no longer effective.

Let’s hear from the editor of this study, Andrew Walker.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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• Senator Lieberman’s book, The Gift of Rest
• Senator Lieberman’s Wikipedia page

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach (Crossway, 2023) is arranged book by book from the Old Testament (using the Hebrew order) through the New Testament. For each text, Kostenberger and Goswell analyze key biblical-theological themes, discussing the book’s place in the overall storyline of Scripture. Next, they focus on the ethical component, showing how God seeks to transform the lives of his people through the inspired text. Following this technique, readers will better understand the theology of each book and its author.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability. 

In these cases, the Papal Chancery bore the responsibility for determining if disabled people were suitable to serve as clerics, with all the rights and duties of divine services. Whilst some petitioners were allowed to enter the clergy, or - in the case of currently serving churchmen - to stay more or less active in their work, others were compelled to resign their position and leave the clergy entirely. Petitions and papal letters lie at intersection of authorized, institutional policy and practical sources chronicling the lived experiences of disabled people in the Middle Ages. As such, they constitute an excellent analytical laboratory in which to study medieval disability in its relation to the papacy as an institution, alongside the impact of official ecclesiastical judgments on disabled lives.

A transcript of this interview is available here.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio.

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In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges--in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.

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.

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Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, and teacher of theology. He has written about movies and worked in the industry as a composer, and continues to write music for film.

• Jonathan Fessenden’s articles at Missio Dei.
• The Mission (1986): Trailer, Wikipedia page, and IMDB page.
• A Man for All Seasons (1966): Trailer, Wikipedia page, and IMDB page.
• Jonathan Fessenden’s album, Upon the Water, is here.
• Jonathan Fessenden’s, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 37: Catholic Movies, Pt. 1: Silence and The Scarlet and the Black.
• Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 17: Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA.

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• Short Interview with Fr. Norman, National Black Catholic Congress
• Fr. Norman on Facebook
• St. Peter Claver Parish on Facebook and on the diocesan webpage.
• Gina Christian’s article in Detroit Catholic (which talks about Fr Norman at Asbury)
• Asbury University webpage about the Outpouring
• “A Gen Z Religious Revival” on the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss.
• The Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano, on the Real Presence website and Wikipedia

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Twice married, twice widowed, and twice exiled, Clare established herself as a penitent living in a roofless cell in the ruins of the Roman walls of Rimini. She sought a life of solitary self-denial, but was denounced as a demonic danger by local churchmen. Yet she also gained important and influential supporters, allowing her to establish a fledgling community of like-minded sisters. She traveled to Assisi, Urbino, and Venice, spoke out as a teacher and preacher, but also suffered a revolt by her spiritual daughters.

A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life in English translation for the first time, bringing modern readers into Clare’s world in all its excitement and complexity. Each chapter opens a different window into medieval society, exploring topics from political power to marriage and sexuality, gender roles to religious change, pilgrimage to urban structures, sanctity to heresy. Through the expert guidance of scholars and translators Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo, Clare’s life and context become a springboard for readers to discover what life was like in a medieval Italian city.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II (NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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In 2023, Kathryn Wehr annotated, edited, and published a new edition of these plays by Dorothy Sayers, including her commentary on the text and its context. Dr. Wehr is a Catholic apologist and writer, and is the managing editor of Logos: A journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. She also writes and performs devotional songs. She has a Doctorate of Divinity from St. Andrews University in Scotland.

• Kathryn Wehr’s website
• Kathryn Wehr’s YouTube Channel, which includes many of her songs
• A recording of the plays on YouTube, The Man Born to be King (but it is out of copyright and abridged, as Katy Wehr explains in our discussion).

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Our guest is: Dr. Jonathan Coley, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University and Deputy Editor of The Sociological Quarterly. His research focuses on social movements, politics, religion, education, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. His current research projects examine LGBTQ activism at Christian colleges and universities; the presence of political, religious, and social activist groups at U.S. colleges and universities (with Dhruba Das, Gabby Gomez, Jericho McElroy, and Jessica Schachle); local-level church-state relations in the United States (with Gary Adler, Damon Mayrl, and Rebecca Sager); and LGBTQ faith leaders in the United States (with Joseph Anthony). His research has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Mobilization, Sociology of Religion, and Sociology of Education. He is the author of Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

• Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice, by Brantley Gasaway
• From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, by Dana Malone
• Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition, by Melissa Sanchez

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights, by Heather White

The Queer Faith page at Union Theological SeminaryThis podcast on feminism and fierceness in the Bible

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

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In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power.

Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022) paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini.

Just as Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Pope and Mussolini became the definitive book on Pope Pius XI and the Fascist regime, The Pope at War is destined to become the most influential account of his successor, Pius XII, and his relations with Mussolini and Hitler. Kertzer shows why no full understanding of the course of World War II is complete without knowledge of the dramatic, behind-the-scenes role played by the pope.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Gary Kulik is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War; he was a medic in the Fourth Infantry Division and the Sixty-first Medical Battalion. He’s a graduate of St. Michael’s College and has earned a PhD in American Civilization at Brown University. He served as deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and had also been assistant director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and also the editor of American Quarterly.

• Gary Kulik’s book, War Stories, available from Potomac Press and also from Amazon.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309, about Just War, from the USCCB.
• Article by William C. Michael, “What does the Catechism of the Catholic Church teach about War?” (2022), Classical Liberal Arts.
• Podcast about the Petraeus Directive in Iraq and Afghanistan, “War Poems” on Rough Translation, from NPR.

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In Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940 (Princeton University, 2023), Chowning shows that the church repeatedly emerged as a political player, even when liberals won elections, primarily because of the overlooked importance of women in politics. Catholic women kept the church alive through the wars of independence and made it into the political force it continues to be in present-day Mexico. Using archival sources from ten Mexican states, the book shows how women, who were denied the vote and expected to stay out of the political sphere, nevertheless forged their own form of citizenship through the church. After Mexico gained its independence in 1821, women self-consciously developed new lay associations and assumed leadership roles within them. These new associations not only kept Catholicism vibrant, they also pushed women into public sphere. Methodologically, this book shows the value of exploring gender in political and religious history and reveals the equal importance of informal political power to more formal activities like voting.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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• JSerra High School website.
• JSerra High School podcast: Unplugged.

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The purpose of this volume is to introduce the reader to principal theological themes in Bede's thought. Bequette's thesis is that Bede was a theologian writing in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet making creative, original contributions to that tradition for the sake of his contemporaries, both in the monastery and in the culture at large. The method involves a close reading and analysis of key texts within Bede's corpus of writings. These texts include the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Life of St Cuthbert, and several of Bede's biblical commentaries (On the Tabernacle, On the Temple) his homilies, and didactic treatises (On the Reckoning of Time, Concerning Figures and Tropes in Sacred Scripture). Bede the Theologian: History, Rhetoric, and Spirituality constitutes a scholarly study of Bede's thought as an integral whole, identifying key themes and ideas that pervade his writings. Thus, it can serve as an introduction to Bede's thought for non-specialists in the areas of theology, religious studies, and other areas of the humanities.

John Bequette is professor of philosophy and theology at the University of St. Francis (Ind.)

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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From Constantine the Great's pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire--which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction--to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.

Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (Knopf, 2023) is an unparalleled history of early Christianity.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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• IVP Kids imprint webpage.
• Square Halo Books webpage.
• World End Images webpage.
• St. Patrick’s writings, the Confessio and the Epistola, in English and Latin.
• EWTN Ireland documentary, Discovering St. Patrick
• Pope Francis’s homily on Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2023.

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These transitionary decades serve as the backdrop to Joseph W. Peterson’s wide-ranging and deeply human book, Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-century France and Algeria (Oxford UP, 2022). In it, he tells that stories of French Catholic missionaries and the Algerian men and women with whom they interacted, exploring the gray areas between faith and politics, between colonial ideology and colonized experience. Peterson balances micro-historical approaches with an awareness of global events to tell a new story about the role of religion in the development of the French civilizing mission, colonial ethnography and racial pseudo-science, as well as in the construction of regimes of legal difference. Sacred Rivals is deeply readable book and will be of interest to scholars of French Algeria, colonialism, and all those interested in the long and complex history of Christianity and Islam.

Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu).

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Monsignor Stephen Rossetti is the head of St. Michael’s Center for Spiritual Renewal and teaches at the Catholic University of America. He has a PhD in psychology and is the author of a number of books, including Diary of an American Exorcist.

• Msgr. Rossetti’s website and blog.
• Msgr. Rossetti on Instagram.
• Msgr. Rossetti’s Exorcism App.
• Msgr. Rossetti’s publications.
• Bishop Robert Barron’s recent talk in which he describes how far fewer people are going to Confession since the Council of Vatican II.
• Al Pacino’s rant—part 1 and part 2—from The Devil’s Advocate that Msgr. Rossetti praised in our discussion for its verisimilitude.
• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) statement about Exorcism.

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Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Dr. Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.

Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Dr. Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds—from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Elina Gertsman is a professor of Art History at Case Reserve Western University. She specializes in medieval art.

Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert in medieval history, on which she has written a number of influential works.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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• Garrett’s website, brotherwithoutorder.com.
• The websites for Courage and also Encourage. Courage serves people experiencing same sex attraction and Encourage is for the people—parents, siblings, others—who love them.
• Bishop Barron’s sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.
• Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics.

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Lerone Martin draws on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents and memos to describe how, under Hoover's leadership, FBI agents attended spiritual retreats and worship services, creating an FBI religious culture that fashioned G-men into soldiers and ministers of Christian America. Martin shows how prominent figures such as Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and countless other ministers from across the country partnered with the FBI and laundered bureau intel in their sermons while the faithful crowned Hoover the adjudicator of true evangelical faith and allegiance. These partnerships not only solidified the political norms of modern white evangelicalism, they also contributed to the political rise of white Christian nationalism, establishing religion and race as the bedrock of the modern national security state, and setting the terms for today's domestic terrorism debates.

Taking readers from the pulpits and pews of small-town America to the Oval Office, and from the grassroots to denominational boardrooms, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover completely transforms how we understand the FBI, white evangelicalism, and our nation's entangled history of religion and politics.

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After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation by Kenneth Stow of the incident's legal and historical significance. Stow's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts--and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses--provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.

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Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, with a concentration in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford UP, 2022) by Professor Stephen Bullivant explores who they are and why they joined the rising tide of the ex-religious. It draws on dozens of interviews, original analysis of high-quality survey data, and a wealth of cutting-edge studies to present an entertaining and insightful exploration of America’s ex-religious landscape. While American religion is not going to die out any time soon, ex-Christian America is a growing presence in national life. America’s religious revolution is not only a religious one—it is catalyzing a profound social, cultural, moral, and political transformation.

Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at St Mary’s University, London. He is professorial research fellow at University Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia. He holds doctorates in Theology (from Oxford) and Sociology (from Warwick). He joined St Mary’s in 2009, having previously held posts at Heythrop College, London, and Wolfson College, Oxford. He’s also held Visiting fellowship at the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, Blackfriars Hall at University of Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University College London. 

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland

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Anthony Bale is professor of medieval studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published many articles and books on medieval literature and culture, including The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 and a translation of The Book of Margery Kempe.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible (Liturgical Press, 2022), written by a biblical scholar who has spent years working with this Bible, shows how calligraphic art powerfully interplays visual form, textual content, and creative process. Homrighausen proposes five lenses for this artform: gardens, weaving, pilgrimage, touching, and enfleshing words. Each of these lenses springs from the poetry of the Song of Songs, its illuminations in The Saint John’s Bible, and medieval ways of understanding the scribe’s craft. While these metaphors for calligraphic art draw from this particular illuminated Bible, this book is aimed at all lovers of calligraphy, art, and sacred text.

Jonathan Homrighausen, a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible at Duke University, teaches in Judaic Studies at the College of William & Mary. His research explores the intersection of Hebrew Bible, calligraphic art, and scribal craft. He is the author of Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John's Bible (Liturgical Press, 2018) and articles in Religion and the Arts, Image, Teaching Theology and Religion, Transpositions, and Visual Commentary on Scripture.

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Zachary M. Schrag is professor of history at George Mason University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation. Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. 

Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy (Syracuse UP, 2021), with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art.

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In his book and in our discussion, Jeff Brannon explains the necessity of the sacrifice of Jesus. “Without Jesus as the suffering servant, we could not be reconciled to God, could not have access to God’s presence, could not be a part of God’s kingdom, and could not inherit eternal life—both new spiritual life in the present and bodily resurrection life in the future” (pp. 103-104). He also explains how, in addition to being the sacrificial Lamb of God and the messiah, Jesus is an example and antecedent for us all: the “firstfruits” (p. 124; cf. 1 Cor 15), “leading the way for his people.”

Jeff Brannon is Professor of Biblical Studies and Chair of the Biblical Studies and Ministries Department at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi.

• Department of Biblical Studies and Ministries Faculty webpage.
• Jeff Brannon’s new book, The Hope of Life After Death: A Biblical Theology of Resurrection, from Intervarsity Press, 2022.
• Jeff Brannon’s first book, The Heavenlies in Ephesians: A Lexical, Exegetical, and Conceptual Analysis, from Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.
• David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 39: Why a Savior? The Theology of Sacrifice and Redemption

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David Basile is Chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana. He explains how Paul’s verdict—“the wages of sin are death” (Roman 6:23)—is not the bad news it sounds like and how the power of sacrifice and redemption—“whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:15)—is good news indeed.

The episode ends with two Christmas carols from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band: What Child is This? and Silent Night.

• Bishop Robert Barron’s commentary on the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary
• Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on Genesis and his anthropological discussion of sacrifice.
• Sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist.” (1966)
• Sermon by John Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (1741)
• David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 01: How Do We Know There is a God? Rational Proofs for a Loving Creator.
• David Basile on Almost Good Catholics, episode 09: From Zen Monastery to Catholic Church: Talking about Buddhist and Christian Mysticism.
• Cathleen Chopra-McGowan on Almost Good Catholics, episode 33: The Mesopotamian Connection: Comparing the Bible to Other Literature of the Ancient Near East.
• Matthew Thomas on Almost Good Catholics, episode 22: Better Call Paul: How Did the Early Jewish Christians “Works of the Law”?

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Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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