Episodes

  • Lauren E. Osborne, "Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition" (Routledge, 2024)

    Lauren E. Osborne, "Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition" (Routledge, 2024)
    Mar 15 2025
    In Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition, Lauren Osborne delves into the sonic dimensions of Islam, exploring how the tradition’s rich soundscape offers deep insights into culture, identity, and spirituality. In this innovative work, Osborne shifts the focus from the written word to the auditory, asking, "What can we learn about Islam when we enter through its sounds, instead of books?" This approach provides a unique lens through which to study the intersections of modernity, belonging, and pluralism in Muslim-majority cultures. The book explores the centrality of sound within Islam, from the recitation of the Qur’an to the daily practices of prayer, the call to prayer (adhaan), and the sonic expressions found in Islamic chantings, nasheeds, qawwalis, and even contemporary genres like hip-hop. Osborne also tackles the underexplored intersection of deafness and Islam, shedding light on how the experience of deafness intersects with a traditionally "hearing" religion. In today’s interview, Osborne discusses the core themes of the book, including the debates around music’s role in Islam, the relationship between Sufism and music, and the significant cultural conversations surrounding hip-hop’s place within the Islamic world. This book is an essential resource for students of Islam, religious studies, world music, and anyone interested in the profound role of sound in shaping human experiences across diverse cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 41 mins
  • Selena Wisnom, "The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Selena Wisnom, "The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Mar 14 2025
    When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal’s library to the ground - yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (U Chicago Press, 2025), Assyriologist Dr. Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories - in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognizable. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilization at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity’s first civilization: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    38 mins
  • Patrick Beldio, "The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga" (Lexington Books, 2024)

    Patrick Beldio, "The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga" (Lexington Books, 2024)
    Mar 13 2025
    The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) to the Integral Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) co-created for his ashram. Scholars have ignored Mirra for Aurobindo, which prevents a full understanding of their spiritual practice. Scholars have also avoided examining work Aurobindo produced after they began their partnership in 1920 until his death in 1950, and privilege the written output in his journal Arya from 1914 to 1921. In this initial fertile period, he put forth his innovative teaching about what he called the “Supermind,” an emergent human faculty that he said would manifest a new humanity and a new earth through Mirra’s body. Mirra claimed that after his death in 1956 this manifestation happened as he foretold. Mirra’s work in the ashram from his death until hers in 1973 reveals important ways that she both fulfilled and changed Aurobindo’s initial vision. These developments are chiefly based on her experiences of mental dissolution while her body gained a new supramental form and consciousness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    49 mins
  • Moshe Tzvi Wieder, "Siddur from Its Sources" (Wieder Press, 2023)

    Moshe Tzvi Wieder, "Siddur from Its Sources" (Wieder Press, 2023)
    Mar 11 2025
    The author of Siddur from Its Sources has combed through the history of the Jewish prayer book to identify when each prayer was added. The results are presented with captivating visuals, including a digitally enhanced presentation of the first known manuscript for each prayer, some dating back thousands of years! There is intimate access to the source material that is the basis for the modern Jewish prayer book both in the book and the supplemental website. This first volume includes the prayers for the weekday services, including all three daily prayers, special prayers for The New Month and reciting the Shema before going to sleep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    57 mins
  • Daemons, Tantra, and Cultural Exchange with David Gordon White

    Daemons, Tantra, and Cultural Exchange with David Gordon White
    Mar 11 2025
    In this episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with David Gordon White, a distinguished indologist and scholar of Tantra. Our conversation focuses on David’s most recent project tracing the transregional histories of spirits, gods, demons, and their associated rituals across Eurasia. Along the way, we dive into an intellectual conversation about dog-headed men, angry goddesses, alchemical mercury, body-snatching yogis, the origins of Dracula, and much, much more. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned David Gordon White, Daemons are Forever (2021) David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (1991) David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body (1997) David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini (2006) David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (2011) Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine (2002) Michel Strickmann, Mantras et Mandarins (1996) David Gordon White, “Three Shades of Tantric Yoga,” in Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies (2024) David Gordon White, "Were-Creatures of the Eurasian Ecumene," Journal Asiatique(2020) David Gordon White, "Dracula’s Family Tree," Gothic Studies (2021) Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

    Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)
    Mar 8 2025
    In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons. Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." In Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford UP, 2021), Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self. Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

    Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)
    Mar 8 2025
    Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe. In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus―a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world. Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired―often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos. Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    32 mins
  • Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

    Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)
    Mar 8 2025
    Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
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    51 mins