New Books Network

About Hillary Kaell

NBN Episodes hosted by Hillary:

Religion June 17, 2019

Church in the Wild

Evangelicals in Antebellum America

Brett Grainger

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
We often credit the Transcendentalists with introducing a revolutionary new appreciation for nature into American spirituality when they claimed that God could be found in the forests, mountains, and fields …
Religion January 24, 2019

Beyond Debt

Islamic Experiments in Global Finance

Daromir Rudnyckyj

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2019), anthropologist …
Religion December 24, 2018

The Story of Radio Mind

A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land

Pamela E. Klassen

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E …
Religion August 17, 2018

New World A-Coming

Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

Judith Weisenfeld

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In …
Religion May 16, 2018

Christian Slavery

Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

Katharine Gerbner

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in …
Religion March 7, 2018

Catholic Modern

The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church

James Chappel

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of …
Religion October 24, 2017

Religion and the Morality of the Market

Anthropological Perspectives

Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella, eds.

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake …
Religion August 19, 2017

The Matter of Voice

Sensual Soundings

Karmen MacKendrick

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts …
Religion May 19, 2017

Blackpentecostal Breath

The Aesthetics of Possibility

Ashon T. Crawley

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley brings together black studies, queer theory, theology, and continental philosophy to …
Religion February 1, 2017

Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain

Piotr Kosicki

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of …
Religion December 10, 2016

The Suburban Church

Modernism and Community in Postwar America

Gretchen Buggeln

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
After World War II, America's religious denominations spent billions on church architecture as they spread into the suburbs. Gretchen Buggeln's latest monograph, The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar …
Religion October 14, 2016

History and Presence

Robert Orsi

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Beginning with the Catholic doctrine of the literal, embodied presence of Christ, scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was …
Religion April 30, 2016

Sensational Movies

Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana

Birgit Meyer

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Anthropologist Birgit Meyer's most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as …
Religion March 2, 2016

Mother Figured

Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal

Deirdre de la Cruz

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her …
Religion January 5, 2016

American Possessions

Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States

Sean McCloud

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Exorcisms and demons. In his new book American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sean McCloud argues that not only have such phenomena been …
Religion November 12, 2015

Hittin' the Prayer Bones

Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South

Anderson Blanton

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Anderson Blanton's Hittin' the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of …
Religion October 28, 2015

Emotions and Christian Missions

Historical Perspectives

Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, Keran Vallgard

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Published by Palgrave in 2015, Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives brings together scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, the US, Germany, and Denmark. Through a set of wide-ranging …
Religion September 17, 2015

Border Medicine

A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo

Brett Hendrickson

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Mexican American religious healing - often called curanderismo - is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American …
Religion July 12, 2015

A Ministry of Presence

Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law

Winnifred F. Sullivan

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation's public institutions, especially its prisons, hospitals and military …
Religion June 28, 2015

Blood

A Critique of Christianity

Gil Anidjar

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Blood. It is more than a thing and more than a metaphor. It is an effective concept, an element, with which, and through which, Christianity becomes what it is. Western …
Religion May 29, 2015

The Anthropology of Protestantism

Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen

Joseph Webster

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above …
Religion March 31, 2015

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America

Paula Kane

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC Press, 2013) is a detailed journey into the life of Margaret Reilly, an American Irish-Catholic from New York who entered the …
Religion March 10, 2015

Religion and the Sciences of Origins

Kelly James Clark

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Kelly James Clark acknowledges that for many people in the contemporary West it can seem as though scientists, from Darwin and Dawkins, have succeeded in disproving religion: God is simply …
Religion February 2, 2015

The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs

Emma Anderson

Hosted by Hillary Kaell
Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers …