New Books in Religion

In Genesis 9, Noah plants a vineyard, and eventually becomes drunk and uncovered in his tent. Then we are told that Ham sees the nakedness of his father, but when Noah wakes up he curses Canaan, Ham’s son. For more than two thousand years, interpreters have struggled to make sense of this story, trying to fill its gaps and explain its ambiguities.

Tune in as we speak with Justin Michael Reed, who offers a novel explanation in his recent book, The Injustice of Noah's Curse (Oxford UP, 2025)

Justin Michael Reed is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
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In The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars (Duke UP, 2025) Mariam Goshadze traces the history of noise regulation in Accra, Ghana, showing how the 1990s and 2000s conflicts between the Ga people and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches during the annual city-wide ban on drumming illuminates the inner workings of Ghanaian secularity and the importance of "traditional religions" to African urbanity. Goshadze shows how the drumming ban represents a reversal of the top-down model of noise regulation and illuminates the reality of Ghanaian secularity, in which the state unofficially collaborates with indigenous religious authorities to control sound. In so doing, Goshadze counters the tendency to push African “traditional religions” to the margins.

The author, Mariam Goshadze, is an Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at Leipzig University.

The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.
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Today Pierce Salguero sit down with Prof. Jeff Kripal, noted scholar of religion at Rice University, to talk about extraordinary, mysterious, and “impossible” experiences. This is a conversation I’ve been waiting a few years to have. Together we explore what you can or can’t talk about in the humanities — and what we risk when we break the rules. Along the way, we touch on paranormal phenomena, epistemological pluralism, conspiracy theories, Plato’s cave, and why no one dresses up as a humanities professor for Halloween.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy the show!

Resources related to this conversation:

Jeff Kripal's website

Archives of the Impossible & Conferences

Pierce Salguero, "Secret Lives of Buddhist Studies Scholars" (2024)

Pierce Salguero, "The Fractal of Humanities" (2021)

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, "On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research" (2023)

Jeff Kripal, The Flip (2020)

Jeff Kripal, Secret Body (2019)

Commonweal Podcast

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PDF of the introduction of Jeff's book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (2024)

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. See here.
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Manusmriti occupies a prominent place in Indian textual tradition as one of the authentic sources of dharma. However, contemporary engagement with the text has been wrought with prejudice and discomfort left in the wake of colonialism. Chatuh Shloki Manusmriti: An English Commentary (Vitasta, 2025) aims to address the gap in contemporary approach and facilitate a better understanding through a philosophical analysis of the first four verses of Manusmriti, shedding light on the object, purpose and relevance of dharma texts. Rather than reducing Manusmriti to a mere relic of the past through a historical study, the book locates the text within the larger Hindu epistemological, ontological, and theological worldview and extracts the eternal teachings embedded within it. The book addresses common misconceptions on topics such as the definition of dharma, the integrity and importance of Manusmriti, the notion of ritual competency, and the Hindu conception of varna.
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Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing.

In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual.
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