Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Philosophy — Asian and Asian American Studies

The modest number of Scientologists worldwide belies the movement's cultural influence, which is extensive. Two factors contribute to this influence: celebrity adherents and legal activism. In the US, the Scientology movement has deployed the First Amendment in ways that parallel the National Rifle Association's deployment of the Second. This has produced an extraordinary level of popular curiosity, widespread publicity, intense controversy, and scholarly publication. Given the extensive literature on Scientology, new publications must be distinctive to merit a reviewer recommendation. Westbrook achieved this by investing six years in participant-observation fieldwork that enabled him to produce a study that "gets inside" the life experiences of participants without the loss of scholarly perspective. The book is carefully referenced (80 pages of end notes) and well documented (24 pages of bibliography). It combines the best features of a social history and an anthropological case study. Among fine similar studies, Westbrook's stands at the level of Hugh Urban's concise, well-balanced The Church of Scientology (CH, Jan'12, 49-2620) and journalist Lawrence Wright's Going Clear (CH, Jul'13, 50-6140), a probing expose based largely on interviews with disaffected former followers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Modern readers of the Gospel of Mark are likely to ask questions: "Who is the author of this book?" "When and where did the author publish it?" "For whom?" In this persuasively argued monograph, Larsen (Yale) contends that such queries, as appropriate as they are for modern times, are not those first- and second-century CE readers and users would have asked in approaching this material. For them, a "gospel" would have been viewed as an open, unfinished collection of notes, which they and others could--and in fact were encouraged to--rewrite or reorder. To buttress his case, Larsen uses the first chapters of this elegantly written volume to introduce terms such as unfinished texts, accidental publication, and multiple authorized versions as they would have been understood in antiquity. This is the "gospel before the book" of Larsen's title. In the second half of the book, Larsen applies these insights to the Gospels, especially Mark, with an eye toward helping readers appreciate the earliest users' and readers' encounters with an unfinished collection. An invaluable resource for those seeking a clearer understanding of ancient literature, including (but by no means limited to) religious texts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

A major Jewish religious movement, Hasidism began in the 18th century in Eastern Europe and quickly came to occupy a central position in the life of the Jewish communities of Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and parts of Czarist Russia. In the 20th century it became a major subject of research connected with the efforts of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. Hasidism is not, however, easy to deconstruct, and it has been the subject of much controversy. Conveying its importance to students in college courses is no simple matter. The present work serves to do just that, and so makes a valuable contribution to the literature on Hasidism. Wodzinski (Jewish history and literature, Univ. of Wroclaw, Poland) bases the study on a wide variety of original sources, and he organizes the volume in a series of discussions of basic issues--among them the definition of the name of the movement; the role of women in Hasidism; the nature of its special charismatic leaders, known as the zaddikim; Hasidism's demographic growth and geographical boundaries; and its impact on the economy of the Jewish community. This is an excellent and comprehensive teaching tool for Jewish studies and religion programs.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

The historiography of Puritanism is vast, but until this monograph, it lacked an Atlantic synthesis. With Hot Protestants, Winship--this generation's leading scholar of Puritanism and a historian at the University of Georgia--has produced the first truly transatlantic account of the Puritan movement. This text is a sweeping yet succinct narrative history, beginning with the movement's roots in 16th-century England and concluding with its slow disintegration both there and in the North American colonies following the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The text is organized by chronology, not geography; the narrative's four parts mirror the four periods Winship identifies in his history of Puritanism. He illuminates the permutations of Puritanism by contextualizing "exemplary episodes, individuals, and experiences" (p. 4), such as the Salem witch trials, the migration of John Cotton to Massachusetts, and the rapprochement of English Congregationalists and Presbyterians as the "United Brethren," which he asserts exemplified Puritanism's contemporaneous ethos. Engaging and informative, this is a must-read for any student of Puritanism.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This erudite study of the concept of religious freedom among Christian thinkers and its development over time effectively challenges the notion that religious freedom is a modern product of secular and Enlightenment thought. A distinguished specialist in Christian patristics, Wilken (emer., Univ. of Virginia) provides documentation for his assertion that religious freedom is grounded in the conviction held by Christians from the earliest days of their religion that religious faith is a free act and should therefore be beyond the state's jurisdiction. Though he devotes considerable attention to the dramatic and varied impact of the Reformation era on ideas of religious freedom, Wilken convincingly argues that important Christian thinkers advocated such freedom long before the 16th century, and that the upheaval of the Reformation era served to convince a much larger portion of society that social justice requires liberty in the things of God. Modern developments in communication and transportation have served only to broaden this notion. Engagingly written, this volume should appeal to a large audience, and its influence can only be positive.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Israel (religion and Jewish studies, Williams College) refutes the traditional logic that given sufficient time and innovative programs social injustice will become a historical phenomenon and a sense of kindred social justice will prevail. He argues that the historical legacy of oppression, resentments, and discrimination will not go away--he suggests that to believe otherwise is neither realistic nor obtainable--and in fact may not be the ideal attitude for American society to flourish. With the diligence of a scholar and the sensitivity of a humanist, Israel offers a brilliant new paradigm in which people can live together with a new sense of freedom and perhaps new respect for a shared American society. Drawing throughout on the humor and role-playing of contemporary writers, entertainers, and philosophers, Israel documents the ways in which celebrities like Lenny Bruce, Norman Lear, Philip Roth, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum have provided a common ground in which society can flourish without the need for forgetting and forgiving. From the pulpit to the seat of government, Israel's model may be the reality of the future American dream.

In a tour de force of political/institutional history and moral/political theology, Smith (law, Univ. of San Diego) pairs the culture wars between paganism and Judeo/Christianity in imperial Rome with contemporary culture wars in the US. The imminent religiosity/theology of polytheistic paganism, then and now, battles transcendent religion for symbolic, cultural, and political dominance. One of the few legal writers to make sense of the seemingly incoherent and contradictory jurisprudence of church-state relationships in contemporary America, Smith contextualizes and vindicates his argument. His most contentious assertion is that the cultural/political aspirations and agenda of secular progressives are religious battles that require the replacement of Judeo-Christianity--"a transcendent secular"--with "positivistic and pagan conceptions of the secular," that is, an immanent public religion worshipping nature and deifying all-too-human desires. An interesting challenge would be to integrate the intellectual history of culturally and politically ascendant liberal and social gospel Protestantism in 19th- and early-20th-century America into Smith's secularism/paganism thesis. Gary Dorrien's The Making of American Liberal Theology (3v, 2001-06) might then be read as "we have met the enemy and...."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Also author of Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (CH, May'08, 45-4771), among other works, Simpson (English, Harvard) has written a provocative study of the English Reformation's transformation of literature, theology, and politics. He argues that because the religious allegiances of the English monarchs alternated between Protestantism and Catholicism, a state of "permanent revolution" was created--with each generation seeking greater biblical fidelity and religious devotion than its predecessor generation. He traces the despair created by Calvinist and Puritan reading practices, which made believers constantly question their final salvation, and finds evidence of this religious despair in works by Milton and others. Simpson points out that this desire to know the true state of one's soul also made the charge of hypocrisy difficult, and he explores how these theological themes appeared in literature and the ways in which critiques of Catholic sacramental practice shaped English theater. He also examines the ways in which these religious debates shaped modern conceptions of liberty. This masterful study will be valuable for those interested in literature and political theory as well as for scholars of theology.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In the context of heated contemporary debates between religious believers and skeptics, this voluminous study of similar debates nearly 200 years ago in the US could not be more timely or relevant. In the course of his meticulous research, Grasso (history, William and Mary) unearthed a treasure trove of material from mostly obscure personages who entered the fray with a fury shortly after the American Revolution. Joined by deists, Unitarians, Universalists, freethinkers, scoffers, hard-core believers, "infidels," Evangelicals, and numerous other individuals who moved across the spectrum of belief and unbelief, the contest was characterized by passion and commitment on both sides. The strength of the book (as well, perhaps, as its one downside) is its extensive, detailed recounting and inclusion of long excerpts from the writings of the parties to the conflict. Grasso may try the patience of those who work their way through the multiple excerpts from the writings of people both familiar and virtually unknown. But the story is well worth telling, and Grasso does a marvelous job in laying it out for curious readers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

The Book of Revelation is a breathtaking book. Beal (Case Western Reserve Univ.) offers a fresh, creative approach to this strange final book of the New Testament. Writing as a biblical scholar, but from a cultural historical perspective, Beal argues that Revelation is not a book so much as a "multimedia constellation of images, stories and story-shaped images," as he writes in the introduction. These images and stories were used again and again in different cultural contexts to interpret the events of a particular time. The author chases the manifold manifestations of "Revelation thinking" through Christian history. He looks at familiar figures such as Augustine, Joachim of Fiore, Luther, and Cranach and continues on to contemporary times. The book includes a rich discussion of commentaries of critical studies of the Book of Revelation. The notes to references are equally rewarding, and they enable readers to pursue avenues of research as Beal did. In addition, the book is appealing in itself; it has the feel of an older, classic text that is an important possession. All in all, thus lucid book is full of rewards.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

McClymond (Saint Louis Univ.) presents an exceptionally thorough, verging on magisterial account of universalism in Christian thinking. Universalism is the doctrine that all people will be saved. The roots of this idea track to an esoteric tradition with Gnostic and Platonic precursors. Corollaries appear in all the Abrahamic religions. The two volumes trace the branches of universalism of Origen in the early centuries and after the enlightenment to Jakob Bohme. Though not a universalist himself, Bohme influenced European theologians and philosophers including, among others, Hegel, Schelling, Jung, and Berdyaev. Universalism developed in Catholic, protestant, evangelical, and charismatic theologies. The central question is whether God punishes humans created in God's own image. The doctrine settles down to a question about the nature of God. To resolve this universalists invoke speculation of the intra-Trinitarian life of God. The concluding chapter offers a critique of universalism as de-potentiating God (God cannot punish creation without self-fragmention) and favors God treating humanity with the dignity that allows humans to make choices and bear the consequences, even in rejecting God. Universalism substitutes "all will be saved" for the particularist view that "each can be saved."Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

An established scholar of the European Reformation, Eire (Yale) has written a fascinating biography of Teresa of Avila's Libro de la vida (The Life of Teresa of Jesus), in which Teresa recounts the visions and experiences she had while in the Avila cloister. The Vida, along with Teresa's The Interior Castle, is widely read in many courses on Christianity. Eire puts Teresa in social and historical context while taking seriously her theological claims about the God whom she claimed appeared to her. After outlining the contents of the Vida, Eire explores the book's influence by tracing the time frame of printings and translations of the book across the centuries. He also looks at how images from Teresa's writings, and depictions of Teresa herself, evolved over time with paintings of various scenes and sculptures of Teresa and her work. Finally--in a chapter that is more directed at the scholarly guild but will nevertheless fascinate nonspecialists--Eire traces how political regimes, psychoanalysts, and historians have treated Teresa and Christian mysticism in general. Throughout, Eire's writing is lucid, at times witty, and he combines historical awareness with theological sensitivity. Readers interested in Christianity, mysticism, and theology will find this book both informative and engaging.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.