New Books in Religion

Edward Blum interviews Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt on how new book Protestant Relics in Early America.

In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.
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Tune in to this interview about Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale UP, 2026). Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. with honors in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago. Her research operates at the intersection of biblical philology, poetics, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its own Terms (Routledge 2019), Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026), as well as the co-author of Hebrew Funerary Inscriptions from Iron Age Judah (Society of Biblical Literature Press, forthcoming). Her current major projects include a commentary on Ecclesiastes for the Old Testament Library series (Westminster John Knox Press), and serving as Project Director for an NEH-funded international collaboration investigating the institutional history and anti-Jewish scaffolding of modern biblical criticism.
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Since time immemorial, water has been a major theme in myth, religion
and folklore throughout the world. With its 12,000-mile coastline, as
well as a plethora of rivers and lochs, Scotland is a particularly
rewarding place in which to explore the spiritual dimensions of what is
both the most commonplace and yet the most mysterious of all chemical
compounds.

Liquid Faith: Scotland's Sacred and Supernatural Waters
(Birlinn, 2026) by Ian Bradley is a journey from healing wells,
springs, river sources and bogs to the seashore, islands and whirlpools,
to discover the legends, superstitions and rituals that have grown up
around them. Drawing on spirituality, philosophy and faith as well as
history and tradition, Professor Bradley highlights the crucial
importance of water over thousands of years, and emphasises its
preciousness and vulnerability today and in the future.

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. 
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It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.

Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman.

This lecture originally took place on December 21, 2023.
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Should willingness to kill be a requirement for U.S. citizenship? Girl Without a Country: The Untold Story of a Landmark Fight for U.S. Citizenship (Purdue University Press, 2026) by Rick Ramseyer tells the compelling, confounding story of Martha Graber—a Mennonite, registered nurse, and conscientious objector who in 1929 was twice denied citizenship because she refused to say she would take up arms to defend the United States. The unexpected denials, which came despite Martha's pledge to give her life for her adopted country, caught the attention of a diverse group of peace advocates, religious leaders, lawyers, and politicians, setting up a climactic third court appearance.

Martha’s nineteen-month fight for citizenship made national news, featuring dramatic testimony, historical insights, and interesting backstories that stretched from Alsace-Lorraine in western Europe to America’s heartland. Elegantly written by Martha’s maternal grandson with never-before-published details and closely connected with a controversial Supreme Court decision, Girl Without a Country surfaces an array of topical issues, ranging from immigration and naturalization to conscientious objection and patriotism. Perhaps most importantly, Martha’s story considers what it truly means to be an American.

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.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion