New Books in Religion

In The Problem of the Devil in Cappadocian Thought (Cambridge UP, 2026), Gabrielle Thomas questions the popular assumption that the devil served as the primary explanation for evil, sin, and suffering as early Christians grappled with all that is wrong in the world. Interrogating the status of the devil in the teachings of the Cappadocians – Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina the Younger – she identifies their points of agreement, that the devil is a fallen angel, and disagreement, notably how Christ defeated him, his continued existence, and his ultimate end. In her investigation, Thomas engages fourth-century Christian thought in conversation with ancient philosophy, ancient history, classics, and biblical studies. She demonstrates how the Cappadocians negotiated myriad philosophical, theological, and spiritual problems with the devil. Thomas argues that the devil is not simply a strategy for explaining the problem of evil. Rather, the devil himself is the problem.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Gabrielle Thomas, an Anglican priest, is Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Early Christian, Anglican, and Theological Studies at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of The Image of God in the Theology of Gregory of Nazianzus and For the Good of the Church: Unity, Theology, and Women and co-editor of Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at Umass Boston
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. Francesca Sbardella experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman.

Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) was translated from Italian by Claudio Bendazzoli, with a foreword by Simon Ditchfield and an afterword by Fabio Dei.

Francesca Sbardella is an anthropologist and historian of religion and a professor at the University of Bologna.

* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Amid global dialogue on the nature of human enhancement, this book traces humanity's pursuit of self-transcendence and enhancement from ancient times to the present, as reflected in diverse traditions across the globe. Transhumanism and Divine Humanity in Global Traditions (Routledge, 2026) examines how the term "transhuman" can move beyond its scientific and technological origins by linking it to ideas, symbols, and practices of transcending human limits found in Asian and global religions and philosophies, including spiritual practices. Ultimately, the book argues that many religions in Asia and beyond emphasise the desire to transcend human limits, addressing life enhancement both spiritually and physically, and advancing a philosophy of self-transcendence that embraces the physical nature of human existence. By bridging perspectives from scholars of Indic spirituality, Buddhist tantric, and transhumanist philosophical discourse, the book facilitates the ability for mutual understanding, and will be of use to researchers studying philosophy of religion, Asian philosophy, the philosophy of science, and philosophical anthropology. Those working in the fields of posthumanism and transhumanism studies will also find the volume of use.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Something deep within you recognizes it–the instinct that sacrifice matters, that something must be offered, that violence and beauty are woven together in ways that mere reason cannot explain. You are not alone. Civilizations throughout history have felt it.

In Bloodshed and Blessing: Stories of Sacrifice from Ancient Altars to the Holy Mass (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), Fr. Dwight Longenecker takes you on a gripping journey through ten ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Vikings, in which blood sacrifice was not the mark of barbarism but the beating heart of an entire worldview. And then he asks the question that will stop you cold: What if they weren’t so different from us?

Well, they weren’t. And once you see this reality, you can’t unsee it. Fr. Longenecker shows you that the violence, resentment, and desperate longing for meaning surging through our culture today are the very same forces that once drove men to the altar of sacrifice. The difference is that we have largely forgotten the One True Sacrifice that puts them all into perspective.

The ancient peoples were our ancestors – not just biologically but spiritually. Their worldview, so seemingly foreign to us, echoes down through the ages into our own deepest longings and anxieties.

In a culture surging with resentment and a desperate hunger for meaning, Fr. Longenecker shows you how sacrifice has always been humanity’s answer–a way of channeling violence into something transcendent, of transforming chaos into communion.

The questions people were asking then are the same ones we are asking now. And the answer, it turns out, has been on the altar all along.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker was brought up an Evangelical, studied at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, and later was ordained as an Anglican priest in England. After ten years in the Anglican ministry as a curate, a chaplain at Cambridge, and a country parson, in 1995 Dwight was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. He has published in numerous religious magazines and papers in the UK, Ireland, and the USA, writing on film and theology, apologetics, Biblical commentary and Catholic culture.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Matthew Thomas Miller's new book Feeling like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (U California Press, 2026), and is available as an open access book (see link below), considers how for many medieval Sufis, Sufism was the “path of love”, and God was the Beloved, and so one had to become a lover of the Beloved on this path. And though there remains a rich corpus of Sufi texts from theological, legal to philosophical that speak to and about this trajectory, Miller re-focuses our attention to the felt and affective dimensions of the genre of poetry, especially of qalandariyyat or rogue poetry. In concentrating on these specific poems and their metaphoric and metaphysical treatments of beauty, sama‘ and ultimately fana’, we begin to the grasp the critical significance of how feelings and the felt dimension (experience) informs the path of love, particularly in how Sufis came to know the secret realities of the Beloved. In this way, the spectrum of emotion, aeffect (affect and effect) held in the body then help us restore the relationship between the mind-body in Sufi thought, according to Miller. This book will be of interest to those who enjoy Sufi and Persian poetry, as well as those who study history of emotion, affect, and literature as well as Sufism generally.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion