Episodes

  • Boris Adjemian, "The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Boris Adjemian, "The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    Oct 12 2024
    In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The conductor, who was also Armenian, composed the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state. Drawing on this highly symbolic event, and following the history of the small Armenian community in Ethiopia, in The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia (Bloomsbury, 2024) Boris Adjemian shows how it operated on the margins of political society, hiding in its interstices, preferring intimacy and discreet loyalty to the glitter of open politics. The astonishing role of the Armenians in their host country was embodied in the friendship that the kings and queens of Ethiopia extended to them, a theme that is echoed in the life stories collected from their descendants. Bringing to light the political and cultural importance of a community that has long been ignored and has almost vanished, this study draws on the collective memory of Armenian immigration and the centuries-long history of proximity between the Armenian and Ethiopian Churches. The author argues for a sedentary approach to the diaspora, for a socio-history of this collective rootedness, which dates back to the 19th century and builds on historical representations of otherness from the early modern period up to the colonial era. Highlighting stateless immigrants halfway between the national and the foreign, this history reveals the agency of stateless immigrants and their descendants, their ability to play with identities and undermine assigned belongings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)

    Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)
    Oct 9 2024
    For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    35 mins
  • Uroš Kovač, "The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon" (Berghahn Books, 2022)

    Uroš Kovač, "The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
    Sep 30 2024
    A compelling work that explores the lives and aspirations of young footballers with deep nuance and insight, The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon (Berghahn Books, 2022) shows how precarious masculinity, Pentecostal spirituality, and aspirations of prosperous futures are intertwining and interrelated in the everyday lives in Southwest regions of Cameroon. Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. The book unpacks young Cameroonians’ football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism. Uroš Kovač is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen’s Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization. He is a social anthropologist researching gender, migration, religion and development, often through the prism of sports in Africa and Europe. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • Iemima Ploscariu, "Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands" (Brill, 2024)

    Iemima Ploscariu, "Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands" (Brill, 2024)
    Sep 19 2024
    Today I talked to Iemima Ploscariu about Alternative Evangelicals: Challenging Nationalism in Interwar Romania's Multi-ethnic Borderlands (Brill, 2024). Evangelicals in interwar Romania were a vibrant mix of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Jews, Roma, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Russians sang, prayed, and preached in their native languages. Romanian statesmen perceived them as a danger for the construction of a strong post-WWI national identity. The lived religion of interwar Romanian evangelicals and their struggle through music for legitimacy demonstrates the close ties between national self-understanding and religion. The diverse groups of Romanian evangelicals reveal how minorities in 20th century Europe challenged established religious concepts and constructed their new identities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 mins
  • Zoe Knox, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present” (Palgrave, 2018)

    Zoe Knox, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present” (Palgrave, 2018)
    Aug 13 2024
    Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often persecuted, and well-known for their proselytising efforts, they have made a substantial contribution in terms of human rights, and they count numerous famous musicians and sports stars among their membership. I caught up with Zoe Knox, Associate Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Leicester, to discuss her new book, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present (Palgrave, 2018), to talk about the ways in which this religious community has changed over time, and how it developed its distinctive attitudes towards politics, blood transfusion, and evangelism. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)

    Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)
    Jul 20 2024
    Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World (Penn State University Press, 2019) presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construct alternative frameworks and establish novel solidarities for the sake of our planetary home. The selections in this volume explore ecologies of interdependence as a frame for religious, theological, and philosophical analysis and practice. Contributors examine questions of justice, climate change, race, class, gender, and coloniality and discuss alternative ways of engaging the world in all its biodiversity. Each essay, poem, reflection, and piece of art contributes to and reflects upon how to live out entangled differences toward positive global change. Constructive and practical, global and local, communal and personal, Ecological Solidarities is an innovative contribution to the discourses on relational and liberative thought and practice in religion, philosophy, and theology. It will be welcomed by scholars of World Christianity and theology as well as seminary students, activists, and laity interested in issues of justice and ecology. Krista E. Hughes is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Muller Center at Newberry College. Dhawn B. Martin is Executive Director of the Source of Light Center in San Antonio, Texas. Elaine Padilla is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Latinx/Latin American Studies at the University of La Verne. She is the author of Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance and coeditor of three volumes in the series Christianities of the World. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 27 mins
  • Gale L. Kenny, "Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Gale L. Kenny, "Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jun 13 2024
    Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism. In Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritised issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire. 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
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    1 hr
  • Jonathan A. Seitz, "Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology" (U Notre Dame Press, 2024)

    Jonathan A. Seitz, "Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology" (U Notre Dame Press, 2024)
    Jun 3 2024
    With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology. Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 2 mins