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From the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Zohar, this is the untold story behind our enduring fascination with lost and found religious texts The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found, were discovered in a cave by a shepherd and his goat. This story is mostly true, and it is not the first such tale about long-lost books. Legend has it that the Zohar--the foundational text of Jewish Kabbalah--was lost for centuries before being discovered in a cave by a farmer, who sold it to spice merchants as packing material. It was only when a scholar picked through a trash heap and joined the fragments together that the world recovered its mystical secrets. These are just two of many tales recounting the discovery of ancient religious manuscripts. Tracing a time-honored pattern of storytelling about lost and recovered sacred texts, in Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past (Yale UP, 2026) Eva Mroczek reveals a surprising feature of Jewish and Christian thought: the idea that scripture is not complete--that it is partly lost, destroyed, or hidden--is not only the stuff of fantasy novels and conspiracy theories. Mroczek shows that modern scholarly mythmaking is more tightly bound with Jewish and Christian legends than we may think. Through the lens of discovery tales, this innovative book explores how traditions live in tension with the possibility of unknown pasts and surprising discoveries. New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Eva Mroczek is Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies; Professor; Religious Studies; Undergraduate Advisor for Religious Studies Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the "spirit of protestation." Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France's Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself. Guest Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University; she is currently at work on two projects. The first one, tentatively titled Transnational Theologies — Religious Networks and The Making of French Thought, is centered on the reconfiguration of French thought between the wars, informed by transnational circulations, exchanges of ideas across cultural spaces, and intellectual transfers between the religious and the secular spheres. The second one is a French literary history of the notion of conspiracy, both as form and as imaginary, from Balzac and Marcel Proust to Paul Nizan and Michel Houellebecq. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order to be read had first to be sold. The Bible is the most published text in history and the story of its publication in the English language is extraordinary. Published on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s groundbreaking printed translation of the New Testament, this book traces the evolution of the English Bible from 1525 to the much celebrated King James version of 1611. By this date, readers could already choose from over a dozen English versions, each of them printed in vastly different ways. Behind each edition are stories of rivalries, mistakes, bankruptcies and bestsellers. Far from being fixed, stable publications, Bibles were consistently undergoing change and development in the early modern period. Creativity and enterprise were at the heart of the English Bible market, something that the usual focus on Bible translators has often overshadowed. Illustrated with early editions, this book considers how printers created new markets for Bibles, how they advertised them, and how they commissioned innovative forms of illustration and decoration to attract buyers. How, it asks, did the English Bible become a bestseller? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas W. Barton examines how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. In tracing the intricate developmental histories of a cluster of competitive neighboring bishoprics, Dr. Barton reveals how rival factions fought over new territory by asserting that it belonged to their foundations according to ancient precedent. Wielding self-interested, manipulated recollections of the organization of the Visigothic church that had predated the eighth-century Muslim conquest did more than further these local territorial battles; it helped promote a shared revisionist Christian historical vision that delegitimized non-Christian rule and emphasized the elemental, divinely ordained centrality of papal authority.Based on over a decade of research and drawing on documentation from numerous underutilized local archives, Constructing Christendom presents the unwritten histories of these foundations to demonstrate how such local efforts to expand Latin Christendom’s frontiers and establish or enlarge dioceses came to be associated with the reordering of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the solidification of a cohesive European Christian identity. Despite the persistence of some unique features deriving from the formational histories of these frontier bishoprics, the overarching trend, Dr. Barton finds, was toward gradual homogenization, as dioceses on Christendom’s periphery and established ones situated closer to its core increasingly came to resemble one another in terms of their administrative and cultural attributes and relationships to papacy-centric governance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this special installment of the University of Notre Dame Press's Books for Better Understanding, Paul Scherz, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology with the University of Notre Dame, and Travis Pickell, Assistant Professor at George Fox University, get together to discuss their books, The Ethics of Precision Medicine: The Problems of Prevention in Healthcare, and Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics, both available from the University of Notre Dame Press. You can purchase The Ethics of Precision Medicine here You can purchase Burdened Agency here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press.  Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first.  In this book, anthropologist Gareth Breen asks: what is ‘Chinese’ about ‘Chinese Christianity’? He locates its distinctiveness in followers’ pursuit of what they call ‘organic oneness’, which Breen describes as a form of ‘sublime sociality’ that combines spontaneous social interaction with countervailing tendencies towards conformity and routine. By examining how unity is sustained through the everyday rhythms of church life—from meetings and daily prayer to communal meals and social groups—Breen offers a compelling portrait and penetrating analysis of Chinese Christianity, while bringing a new perspective to the anthropology of religion. Read Online and download for free here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad. Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma (Brill Schöningh, 2025) brings the anthropology of Roma into conversation with the anthropology of Christianity. Its first section, on Kaale belongings, looks at life in the city, at the silence surrounding sexuality, marriage and birth that shapes Kaale morality, and at "inbetweeners" who live apart from Kaale norms. The second section, on Evangelical becomings, turns to Kaale prayer groups within mixed Pentecostal congregations, to conversion as a repeated process of entering and leaving faith, and to Roma-to-Roma missionary work in Romania. Roman shows how religious identity becomes entangled with community identity, and how Pentecostalism can both bring Kaale together with non-Kaale Finns and draw new lines between believers and non-believers. About the author Raluca Bianca Roman is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and the Centre for Creative Ethnography. Her research focuses on religion, particularly Christianity, as well as ethnicity, nationalism, migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on Roma communities in Finland and Romania. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where she was later a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Advanced Grant project RomaInterbellum. She was also a researcher on the Academy of Finland project Roma and Nordic Societies at the University of Helsinki. She co-edited Roma Writings in History (Brill, 2021) and a special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Counter-readings on Finnish Nationhood: Minority Strategies and the Making of the Nation (2021). She is now developing research on artificial intelligence and transhumanism. About the host Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

God and Humanity: Herman Bavinck and Theological Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2024)is the first book to apply Bavinck's theological anthropology to contemporary theological issues. Sutanto provides a sustained close reading of Herman Bavinck's contributions to theological anthropology and positions him in conversation with current and historical dialogues on embodiment, revelation, affect theory, phenomenology, the cognitive science of religion, ethics, race, covenant, and the beatific vision. Dr. Gray Sutanto explores the holistic character of Bavinck's vision of humanity, suggesting ways in which his theological anthropology cuts across several potential binaries in contemporary discourse, between affect and reason, body and soul, animality and religiosity, unity and diversity, and between a this-worldly or other-worldly eschatology.  Dr. Sutanto serves as the Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Washington D.C. and an associate editor of the Journal of Reformed Theology. He has received visiting fellowships at the Theological University of Kampen-Utrecht and Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and is on the steering committee for the Reformed Theology and History Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Along with the theologian Herman Bavinck, Dr. Sutanto’s research interests are broad, ranging from modern Protestant theology, prolegomena, humanity and sin, the relationship between philosophy and theology, analytic theology, and Christianity and culture.  For previous NBN conversations on similar topics, see these interviews on Herman Bavinck's Christology and academic addresses or an introduction on Neo-Calvinism or the T&T Clark handbook on the global movement. In this conversation Sutanto mentioned this article he wrote on Bavinck and Christian nationalism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How Roman Britain ended is one of the most controversial questions in British history. Unique among former Roman citizens in Western Europe, the Britons established long-lived kingdoms, resisting 'barbarian' political takeover for centuries. Yet so little is known of them from written records that even the names of most of their kings are effectively lost to history.Packed with the latest discoveries and ground-breaking research, in Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings (Bloomsbury, 2026) Professor Ken Dark brings the fascinating, but mysterious, world of these rulers and their kingdoms to life. Archaeological evidence, along with re-analysis of the few existing texts, reveals an unexpectedly sophisticated society, connected to a wider international network of trade and cultural contacts than might until recently have seemed imaginable. Professor Dark demonstrates through the latest archaeological discoveries that Tintagel – an eroded coastal stronghold in Cornwall, closely associated with the later legend of King Arthur – was a royal fortress and trading centre of one of the most important British kingdoms of this period.This is a historical period filled with memorable characters and stories: from the outraged churchman Gildas, attempting to reform the corrupt rulers he thought threatened civilized life itself, to St. Patrick, who played a major part in converting Ireland to Christianity, to no less than King Arthur – whose historical existence Professor Dark shows to be much more likely than usually supposed.   This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Dominic Martino is a trial lawyer, law professor, former CEO, and former nuclear submarine officer. He serves as Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and is a co-founder of Honos Law PLLC. He studied in Annapolis and later Georgetown Law, served in the Navy, and in the Department of Homeland Security, and practices law in New York City. His new book from Sophia Press is Resurrection on Trial: A Judicial Inquiry into the Christian Claim of the Resurrection of Jesus (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), and he walks me through the evidence for our foundational belief—as he says, “the boldest claim that’s ever been made in the history of the world,”—on Almost Good Catholics. Here is Peter’s book from Sophia Press, and also from Amazon.Here is Peter’s faculty website at St. Thomas University College Law School. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The old story in the academy was that as science and technology progressed, western society would grow more secular while the supernatural would disappear permanently from the public square. But nowadays re-enchantment is the new byword, from renewed public interest in traditional forms of religion to weirder phenomenon like ufology and psychedelics entering mainstream culture. However, the academy has been slow to catch up with this wider sea change. So various scholars of religion have been putting forward new arguments for the legitimate study of the supernatural. One of these is Dale Allison, who is my guest today as we continue Season 6 to discuss modern religious experiences. Dale Allison is the Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the author of books such as The Resurrection of Jesus (2021) and Encountering Mystery (2022). We look at numinous events of bliss and terror, responses to prayers, out-of-body & near-death experiences, angelic encounters, and visions of dead loved ones. Along the way, we also discuss William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, current research into psychedelics, George Harrison’s mysticism, David Hume’s borrowing from anti-Catholic arguments, Jesus Christ’s post-mortem appearances, and the emerging scholarship on supernatural phenomenon. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tune in to this discussion of Epiphanies of Nature and Grace: Twelve Meditations from a Life in Dialogue (Orbis Books, 2025) These moving and eloquent meditations on a range of spiritual themes draw on the author’s study of scripture and his deep monastic experience, as well as on his many pilgrimages to India and his immersion in the spiritual wisdom both of Asia and the Christian West. Cyprian Consiglio is a Camaldolese Benedictine monk, musician, composer, author, and teacher. After retiring from his office as prior of his community, he currently lives in Rome, serving as Secretary General for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (DIMMID). Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East (Pegasus, 2026) unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: a Byzantine renegade, a crusader princess, a Turkish matriarch, a young Arab nobleman, a Syriac archbishop, Saladin's leading commander, and the vizier of Egypt. Between them, information, technologies, and ideas—as well as weapons—crossed borders at astonishing speed as their societies fought, allied, and traded. Their entangled fates reshaped not only the Middle East, but the medieval world itself. Drawing on sources from Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and Hebrew traditions, Nicholas Morton's enthralling panorama transforms our understanding of the Crusades, revealing these wars not as a single clash of faiths, but as a dynamic era of war, commerce, innovation, and exchange that defined the course of history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism (U Toronto Press, 2025) examines the deep historical roots of fundamentalism in Protestantism and the imaginative traditions of Romantic literature. It explores how the resurgence of fundamentalist thought within “born again” Christianity seeks to repress the trauma of modernity through the belief that the world must be radically transformed to align with a divine standard. By analysing the logic of this repression, the book reveals an alternative vision: a “revivalist rebirth” that offers a new ethical imperative to creatively shape the world in collaboration with others. Thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Percy Shelley, and Friedrich Schlegel are central to the analysis, as are the literary works Faust and Frankenstein. Jeffrey Champlin illustrates how a revivalist imagination challenges blind faith, presenting figures of life reawakened to conscious moral and political engagement. Engaging with Arendt’s politics of natality and Derrida’s ethics of survival, Born Again offers pathways to reimagine a world that confronts the profound losses fueling fundamentalist ideologies, making it a timely and thought-provoking exploration for contemporary readers. Jeffrey Champlin is Director of the Learning Commons and Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College Berlin. His research emphasizes connections between literature and political theory.  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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of the New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with Matthew Montgomery about his article “An Intercessor Like Moses: A Key Component of the Psalter’s Message”, published in the European Hebrew Journal. Montgomery’s study asks how the final form of the Masoretic Psalter communicates hope after the collapse of Judah and the Babylonian exile. Building on the widely recognized observation that Book III of the Psalter engages the downfall of the Southern Kingdom while Book IV places unusual emphasis on Moses, he traces textual signals connecting these sections with Exodus 32–34. Particular attention is given to the introduction of Moses and Aaron, the clustering of references to them in Books IV and V, and repeated allusions to Moses’ intercession after Israel’s covenant-breaking at Sinai. The central argument is that these features are not isolated reminiscences. Read together, they help shape the Psalter’s theological and literary message. Moses appears as the paradigmatic representative who can stand between God and a disobedient people, plead on their behalf, and turn away divine anger. Montgomery argues that, in the post-exilic horizon of the Psalter, this Mosaic pattern contributes to an emerging hope for an intercessory figure capable of mediating between God and a covenant-breaking community. The interview explores what this proposal contributes to final-form readings of the Psalter and why the arrangement of psalms can itself become a vehicle of meaning. Matthew Montgomery is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose research includes Psalms, scriptural reuse, rhetoric, literary coherence, and the shaping of biblical collections. His article was published on 18 June 2026 after double-blind peer review, with Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Eckart Otto serving as Academic Editor. The article is freely available through its permanent DOI. Montgomery will also speak at the EHJ International Scholarly Online Conference 2026, “New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies”. On 8 November 2026 at 22:00 CET, he will present “Neither Story or Arbitrary: The Rhetoric of Juxtaposition in the MT Psalter”. The presentation develops a related concern with how the Psalter’s ordering creates rhetorical and theological effects without requiring readers to treat the collection either as one continuous story or as an arbitrary anthology. The host, Željko Stanojević, is a Hebrew linguist, biblical philologist, lexicographer, translator, and scholar of Biblical and Modern Hebrew. He is President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, and a host on the New Books Network Biblical Studies channel. His work includes Biblical Hebrew, Semitic linguistics, textual criticism, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible translation, biblical onomastics, and Hebrew lexicography. This episode will be of interest to readers and listeners working on Psalms, the Hebrew Bible, Moses and Aaron, Exodus traditions, intercession, post-exilic theology, ancient Hebrew, biblical allusion, textual criticism, and the literary shaping of Scripture. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.