New Books in Religion

Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era.In God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (UNC Press, 2026), Dr. Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity.But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Dr. Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change.

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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Where are you—spiritually, emotionally, and morally? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Rabbi Josh Franklin to discuss his book Where Are You? Finding Yourself in the Bible, a thoughtful exploration of the Torah as a map of the human soul.

The question God asks Adam—“Where are you?”—echoes throughout the biblical narrative and into our own lives. In Where Are You? Finding Yourself in the Bible, Rabbi Franklin traces the emotional geography of Torah, moving through landscapes of beginnings, wandering, revelation, rupture, exile, and return. These are not only places in Scripture, but experiences that define the human journey.

Weaving together biblical text, midrash, psychology, and personal storytelling, Franklin shows how the places of the Torah reflect the inner terrain of human life—moments of uncertainty, transformation, loss, and renewal. More than a commentary on Scripture, the book offers readers an invitation to locate themselves within the sacred story and to ask what it means to move forward with purpose and awareness.

Together, Franklin and Katz explore how ancient texts speak to modern struggles, how geography becomes metaphor, and why the question “Where are you?” remains one of the most powerful spiritual prompts in Jewish tradition.

About the Guest

Josh Franklin is the Senior Rabbi of Jewish Center of the Hamptons and the author of Where Are You? Finding Yourself in the Bible. A dynamic teacher and preacher, his work blends classical Jewish texts, contemporary psychology, and personal reflection to help readers engage Torah as a guide for navigating life’s emotional and spiritual challenges.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with scholars and rabbis, Katz brings timeless Jewish texts into conversation with contemporary questions and lived experience.
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Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified intenSati and Kripalu yoga instructor. Her popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion and Pious Fashion. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. For more about how religion shapes us all, even if we don’t believe, subscribe to Liz’s newsletter at LizBucar.com.

In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats, and follow the right celebrity gurus. But is this true? Or are we picking and choosing from a self-care salad bar in ways that satisfy our hunger but don’t truly nourish us?When we approach practices like yoga and ayahuasca as fitness routines and life hacks, we miss out on the sacred wisdom they have to offer us. But by digging into the real and often ancient religious traditions behind these practices, from Buddhism to Christianity and beyond, we can make them more meaningful, ethical, and effective—without the often unpleasant baggage of joining an organized religion.In this engaging and deeply personal book, award-winning scholar and writer Liz Bucar embarks on a quest to get to the heart of “spiritual but not religious” activities from detox diets to sound baths. As she tries out each practice for herself, she asks how we can get more out of it by tuning out the hype and taking the religious meaning behind it seriously—with emotionally profound and often surprising results. Whether it’s as simple as setting an intention for a yoga asana or as complex as reevaluating what a “higher power” is, it’s time to understand, experience, and simply get more out of our spiritual practices. It’s time to dig deeper with Beyond Wellness.
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Carola Lorea discusses the MANTRAMS project, a major ERC Synergy Grant initiative jointly hosted by Oxford, Vienna, and Tübingen dedicated to producing a history and anthropology of mantras. The six-year project investigates mantras across millennia and geographies — from their roots in Indian religious traditions through their circulation across South and Southeast Asia to their role in global spiritualities today — building extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives along the way.
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In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on qualitative interviews and historical studies the book explores the complex interplay of religious freedom, missionary activity, interdependent choice, and multilevel plausibility structures. An imperfect but sufficient religious freedom created the soil for the growth of mostly tiny Turkish Protestant churches that were countercultural and vulnerable, but also vitally interconnected. This work provides an extensive mission history of the Turkish Protestant movement.

The book is part of the Springer series Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies and was awarded the Science Award on Religious Freedom 2026 the Freie Theologische Hochschule (FTH) Gießen, Germany.
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