New Books: Religion & Philosophy

Critical race theory has become a lightning rod in contemporary American politics and evangelical Christianity. This irenic book offers a critical but constructive and sympathetic introduction written from a perspective rooted in Scripture and Christian theology. The authors take us beyond caricatures and misinformation to consider how critical race theory can be an analytical tool to help us understand persistent inequality and injustice--and to see how Christians and churches working for racial justice can engage it in faithful and constructive ways.

Looking closely at four main figures--Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Old Woman of Gaelic tradition--Hutton challenges decades of debate around the female figures who have long been thought versions of pre-Christian goddesses. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, literature, and history, he makes the compelling case that these goddess figures found in the European imagination did not descend from the pre-Christian ancient world, yet have nothing Christian about them. It was in fact nineteenth-century scholars who attempted to establish the narrative of pagan survival that persists today.

In the tumultuous decades before and immediately after the Civil War, the Transcendentalists changed nineteenth-century America, leading what Theodore Parker called "a Second American Revolution." Conflagration illuminates the connections between key members of the Transcendentalist circle--including James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, Elizabeth Stanton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller--who created a community dedicated to radical social activism. These authors and activists laid the groundwork for democratic and progressive religion in America.

Over the last few centuries, magic has developed a bad reputation, thanks to a successful propaganda campaign on the part of religion and science, which denigrated magic as backward, irrational, and "primitive." In Magic, however, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden restores magic to its essential place in the history of the world--revealing it to be an enduring element of human behavior that plays an important role for individuals and cultures. Drawing on decades of research around the world--touching on the first known horoscope, a statue ordered into exile, and the mystical power of tattoos--Gosden shows what magic can offer us today.

Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, first published in 1953, is a highly significant work by a towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy. The volume is known for its incisive analysis of the Western understanding of Being, its original interpretations of Greek philosophy and poetry, and its vehement political statements. This new edition features a revised and expanded translators' introduction and an updated translation, as well as the first English versions of Heidegger's draft of a portion of the text and of his later critique of his own lectures.

In recognition of the latest developments in patristics and other fields of study, Westminster John Knox Press commissioned this volume to continue in the previous work's tradition by providing up-to-date and immediate, authoritative, and introductory definitions and explanations of the major personalities, events, facts, and movements in the history of Christianity. Volume One covers the early, medieval, and Reformation periods and contains nearly fourteen hundred articles written by more than two hundred contributors.

This book offers an in-depth introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism. It also lucidly explicates the philosophical implications of Zen teachings and kōans, comparing and contrasting these with other Asian as well as Western religions and philosophies. Throughout it relates traditional Zen teachings and practices to our twenty-first century lives. In addition, the book provides concrete instructions for beginning a practice of Zen meditation. Its twenty-four chapters treat such philosophical topics as the self, nature, art, morality, and language, as well as basic Buddhist teachings such as the middle way and karma.

What was the world like, and what was going on in it, around the time of Jesus' death? This study examines this very question, and also seeks to place Jesus in his larger historical context, as a non-citizen resident of the Roman Empire living in Judaea and Galilee in the 20s and 30s AD. Attempts to recover the historical Jesus have sought to put him in his immediate context of ancient Galilee, Judaea, and the Jewish community to which he belonged. Instead this book gives the Roman historical background to the time and place of his ministry and death.

The Book of All Books is a narration that moves through the Bible as if through a forest, where every branch--every verse--may offer some revelation. Where a man named Saul becomes the first king of a people because his father sent him off to search for some donkeys that had gone astray. Where a man named Abraham hears these words from a divine voice: "Go away from your land, from your country and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you"--words that reverberate throughout the Bible, a story about a separation and a promise followed by many other separations and promises.

Have America's professional service members been uniquely exploited insofar as they have disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's collective war-fighting decisions since the inception of the all-volunteer force post-Vietnam and particularly since 9/11? By offering their original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'; the notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and exposure to 'dirty hands', Robillard and Strawser make the case that such a state of affairs indeed describes America's present relationship with her military.