New Books at PEOSTA

Description: The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia’s roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system? Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW10 July 2017 p. 37; PW 14 Aug. 2017 p. 70; PW 30 Oct. 2017 (Best Books of 2017).
Description: Two biblical scholars combine to dig into the actions and words of the billionaire Green family, founders of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Moss and Baden portray the Green family members and their key executives as sincere evangelicals and benevolent employers. Throughout the book, however, they also show the Greens as naïve or dis-ingenuous. To be sure, the family’s proselytizing is not neutral. Rather, they are promoting a historically inaccurate saga of the U.S. as an exclusionary Christian nation meant to marry church and state. (publ.)

Description: Contains study notes, expanded essays, and informational sidebars. The extensive Reading Guide, the focal point of this volume, leads the reader through the Scriptures, book by book. References and background information are laid out to guide the reader to a fuller under-standing of the Bible. New to this edition is a more extensive treatment of the biblical background, including history and archeology. Other features include a 15-page glossary of special terms and complete Sunday and weekday lectionary readings for the liturgical years of the Church. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 29 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: The Chance of Salvation offers a history of conversions in the United States which shows how religious identity came to be a matter of choice. … By uncovering the way that religious identity is structured as an obligatory decision, this book explains why Americans change their religions so much, and why the United States is both highly religious in terms of religious affiliation and very secular in the sense that no religion is an unquestioned default. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 23 Dec. 2016 p. 10

Reviewed: TLS 23 Mar. 2018 p. 14.
Description: The 1400-year-old schism between Sunnis and Shi‘is has rarely been as toxic as it is today, feeding wars and communal strife in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other countries, with tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran escalating. In this richly layered ac-count, John McHugo reveals how this great divide occurred. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Traces the emergence of Christianity from its stirrings in the eastern Mediterranean, where Jewish monotheism coexisted with polytheism and prayer mixed with magic. In a time receptive to prophetic messages and supernatural interventions, Jesus of Nazareth convinced people to change their beliefs by showing, through miracles, his direct connection to god-like power. The miracle of the Resurrection solidified Jesus’s supernatural credentials. After his death, followers continued to use miracles and magic to spread Jesus’s message of reward for the righteous in this life and immortality in the next. Many Jews and polytheists strongly opposed the budding movement but despite major setbacks Christianity proved resilient and adaptable. It survived long enough to be saved by a second miracle, the conversion of Emperor Constantine. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Essential; Recommended for community college libraries); CHE 6 Apr. 2018 (new books).
Description: Offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Jan. 2018 p. 57; LJ 1 March 2018 p. 93; TLS 5 Oct. 2018 p. 29.
Description: Sands Hall chronicles her slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology. Her time in the Church, the late 1970s, includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. Hall compellingly reveals what drew her into the religion—what she found intriguing and useful—and how she came to confront its darker sides. … In this candid and nuanced memoir, Hall recounts her spiritual and artistic journey with a visceral affection for language, delighting in the way words can create a shared world. However, as Hall begins to grasp how purposefully Hubbard has created the unique language of Scientology—in the process isolating and indoctrinating its practitioners—she confronts how language can also be used as a tool of authoritarianism. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 12 June 2017 p. 60
Description: It wasn't until Libby Phelps was an adult, a twenty-five year old, that she escaped the Westboro Baptist Church. She is the granddaughter of its founder, Fred Phelps, and when she left, the church and its values were all she'd known. She didn't tell her family she was leaving. It happened in just a few minutes; she ran into her house, grabbed a bag, and fled. (publ.) “Phelps now finds ways to ‘undo the legacy of hate’ she helped to create, including by volunteering with Equality House, the LGBT-advocacy office located across from Westboro Baptist Church.” (PW)

Reviewed: PW 19 Feb. 2018 p. 38
Description: Assmann delves into the enduring mythic power of the Exodus narrative, examining the text's compositional history and calling attention to distinctive motifs and dichotomies: enslavement and redemption; belief and doubt; proper worship and idolatry; loyalty and betrayal. Revelation is a central theme–the revelation of God’s power in miracles, of God’s presence in the burning bush, and of God’s chosen dwelling among the Israelites in the vision of the tabernacle. Above all, it is God’s covenant with Israel–the binding obligation of the Israelites to acknowledge God as their redeemer and obey His law–that is Exodus’s most encompassing and trans-formative idea, one that challenged basic assumptions about humankind’s relationship to the divine in the ancient world. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Exodus: Die Revolution der Alten Welt (Munich: Beck, 2015).

Reviewed: Economist 26 Aug. 2017 p. 19 (referenced)
Description: From furious reactions to the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad to the suppression of women, news from the Muslim world begs the question: is Islam incompatible with freedom? With an eye sympathetic to Western liberalism and Islamic theology, Mustafa Akyol traces the ideological and historical roots of political Islam. (publ.)

Description: First published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament was a groundbreaking work, bringing the new Testament’s Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the new Testament. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 8 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: This book provides a uniquely personal look at the social worlds of a group of young male friends as they navigate the complexities of growing up Muslim in America. Drawing on three and a half years of intensive fieldwork in and around a large urban mosque, John O’Brien offers a compelling portrait of typical Muslim American teenage boys concerned with typical teenage issues—girlfriends, school, parents, being cool—yet who are also expected to be good, practicing Muslims who don’t date before marriage, who avoid vulgar popular culture, and who never miss their prayers. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 2 Feb. 2018 p. 33
Description: Gerald O’Collins & John Wilkins take a systematic look at the 2010 English translation of the Roman Missal and the ways it fails to achieve what the Second Vatican Council mandated: the full participation of priest and people. Critiquing the unsatisfactory principles prescribed by the Vatican instruction Liturgiam Authenticam (2001), this book tells the story of the maneuverings that sidelined the 1998 translation approved by eleven conferences of English-speaking bishops, criticizes the 2010 translation, and illustrates the clear superiority of the 1998 translation, the “Missal that never was.” (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 17 Nov. 2017 p. 40.
Description: Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists' basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse …The second is the idea of identification …Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists' conventional conception of religion emerges. (publ.)

Description: Looks at the origins, development and organization of the military orders during the 12th and 13th centuries, showing how they functioned as a form of religious life and concentrating on their role in the Crusades and in the government and defense of the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 7 June 2018 p. 34
Description: Drawing on a vast range of literary and archaeological evidence, Rüpke shows how Roman religion shaped and was shaped by its changing historical contexts from the ninth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Because religion was not a distinct sphere in the Roman world, the book treats religion as inseparable from political, social, economic, and cultural developments. The narrative emphasizes the diversity of Roman religion; offers a new view of central concepts such as “temple,” “altar,” and “votive”; reassesses the gendering of religious practices; and much more. Throughout, Pantheon draws on the insights of modern religious studies, but without “modernizing” ancient religion. This generously illustrated book is also distinguished by its unique emphasis on lived religion, a perspective that stresses how individuals’ experiences and practices transform religion into something different from its official form. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 25 Aug. 2017 (new books)
Description: Traces the lives of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace after revelations of a sex scandal and massive financial mismanagement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 12 Feb. 2018 p. 74
Description: Patriarchy is still sanctioned by every institution: capitalism, government, and even–maybe especially–the church itself. This is perhaps the ultimate irony–that a religion based on the radical justice and liberation of Jesus’ teachings has been the most complicit part of the narrative against women’s equality. If we are going to dial back the harmful rhetoric against women and their bodies, the community of faith is going to have to be a big part of the solution. Pastor and author Erin Wathen navigates the complex layers of what it means to be a woman in our time and place–from the language we use to the clothes that we wear to the unseen and unspoken assumptions that challenge our full personhood at every turn. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Jan. 2018 p. 60
Description: Traveling the world, the Crossans noticed a surprising difference in how the Eastern Church considers Jesus’ resurrection—an event not described in the Bible. At Saint Barbara’s Church in Cairo, they found a painting in which the risen Jesus grasps the hands of other figures around him. Unlike the Western image of a solitary Jesus rising from an empty tomb that he viewed across Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Crossans saw images of the resurrection depicting a Jesus grasping the hands of figures around him, or lifting Adam and Eve to heaven from Hades or hell, or carrying the old and sick to the afterlife. They dis-covered that the standard image for the Resurrection in Eastern Christianity is communal and collective, something unique from the solitary depiction of the resurrection in Western Christianity.

Reviewed: WSJ 9/10 Sept. 2017 p. C10; NPR 14 Sept. 2017 (book review) "It All Began With Adam And Eve"; NYRB 28 Sept. 2017 p. 22; LR Sept. 2017 p. 30; NYT/BR 8 Oct. 2017 p. 18.
Description: Tracking the tale into the deep past, to the Hebrews’ exile in Babylon, Greenblatt explores the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural creativity over the centuries that made Adam and Eve so profoundly resonant, and continues to make them, finally, so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. Both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness, their story–told in only a few verses in an ancient book–has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of human fears and desires. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Recommended for community college library collections)
Holdings: 1st ed. (2003) at Calmar Library; call no. 291.178 Sel
Description: From ISIS attacks to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Sacred Fury explores the connections between faith and violence in world religions. Selengut looks at religion as both a force for peace and for violence, and asks key questions such as how “religious” is this violence and what drives the faithful to attack in the names of their beliefs? (publ.)

Description: Most Americans and Europeans have by now heard of Shariah. In the West, politicians, media commentators, televangelists, and others have stoked fears that Muslims intend to impose a repressive rule based on Shariah in America and Europe. Shariah has been portrayed as a medieval system that oppresses women, stifles human rights, and imposes harsh punishments like stoning and amputation. In reality, however, Shariah is a complex concept that has been interpreted in many ways over time and around the world. It plays a vital role in the lives of Muslims around the world, offering guidance on everything from personal morality to ritual practices, family life, and finance. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (“Fresh Air” 3/20/2018)
Description: The author explains how a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 3 Nov. 2015 (All Things Considered).
Description: Leah Remini has never been the type to hold her tongue. That willingness to speak her mind, stand her ground, and rattle the occasional cage has enabled this tough-talking girl from Brooklyn to forge an enduring and successful career in Hollywood. But being a troublemaker has come at a cost. That was never more evident than in 2013, when Remini loudly and publicly broke with the Church of Scientology. Now, in this frank memoir, the former King of Queens star opens up about that experience, revealing the details of her painful split with the church and its controversial practices. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 May 2017 p. 56
Description: In a series of chapters that can function as standalone vignettes, the author corrects popular misconceptions that have sprouted up around Luther.

Reviewed: TLS 9 feb. 2017 p. 31; NPR (Review 9/26/2017 & "Fresh Air" 8/7/2017)
Description: At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer–and the reason we make other people suffer–is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: we can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly, and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. Robert Wright not only shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life–how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred–but also how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. (publ.)