New Books in Religion

When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise of Nazism. But as the persecution of Jews escalated during the Occupation, every bishop in France maintained a deafening silence. In fact, the Church stood publicly alongside Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Even when bishops famously broke silence to protest the deportation of Jews in 1942—a moment long remembered as one of moral awakening—they quickly retreated, discouraging further defiance.
The French Church’s public silence during the Holocaust is no secret. But as Aliza Luft shows, private interactions between bishops, French Jewish leaders, and Vichy officials were just as consequential. Turning to letters, diaries, and records of private conversations, Luft traces the moral dilemmas and calculated choices that shaped these hidden negotiations. As Jewish leaders turned to the Church for information and protection, bishops repeatedly assured them of the Church’s sympathy and support. These guarantees from the nation’s highest moral authorities, combined with the false promises of Vichy officials, encouraged French Jews to place their faith in relationships and republican ideals that proved tragically hollow.
Drawing on years of archival research, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2026) is a harrowing account of how genocide unfolds day by day—not only through spectacular violence, but also through misleading assurances, quiet capitulations, and broken promises.

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Mediating God: Muhammad Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in 20th century Egypt (Oxford UP, 2025) is a fascinating and compelling intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996). Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.
Dr. Zarate is an assistant professor of Global Humanities at San Jose State University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University and is now a historian of the modern Middle East whose research explores Islam, theology, politics, science, and spirituality in twentieth-century Egypt. His scholarship has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His work combines historical research with approaches drawn from religious studies and anthropology, building on his training at Columbia University as a historian of global Islam. He has conducted extensive archival research in Egypt and the United States and works with Arabic-language primary sources.
Dr. Amanie Yahia Antar is a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada whose research concentrates on the history of Islamophobia in the premodern era, with a focus on sixteenth century Iberia.

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In Pursuit of the Inconceivable: An Investigation of Metaphysics and Mysticism (Essentia Books, 2025) is a compelling exploration of fundamental questions about existence, reality, and the meaning of life that challenges the traditional scepticism of Western thought. It presents evidence for a systematic, comprehensive, and fundamental world-theory, and places the reader in a position to judge its merits and plausibility for themselves.

Peter G. Jones explains the ongoing failure of Western philosophers to comprehend metaphysics as a consequence of not engaging with the only world-theory that survives analysis, the one endorsed by the writers of the Indian Upanishads, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Meister Eckhart and, many would say, Jesus and Muhammad. The findings of philosophers in the Western analytical ‘rational’ tradition are compared with the teachings of the Perennial tradition and shown to be in complete harmony. In Pursuit of the Inconceivable presents a philosophical explanation of mysticism, an apology for Abrahamic religion, a solution for all metaphysical problems, and an appeal for a significant change of attitude in the academic and scientific communities.

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From the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Zohar, this is the untold story behind our enduring fascination with lost and found religious texts The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found, were discovered in a cave by a shepherd and his goat. This story is mostly true, and it is not the first such tale about long-lost books. Legend has it that the Zohar--the foundational text of Jewish Kabbalah--was lost for centuries before being discovered in a cave by a farmer, who sold it to spice merchants as packing material. It was only when a scholar picked through a trash heap and joined the fragments together that the world recovered its mystical secrets. These are just two of many tales recounting the discovery of ancient religious manuscripts. Tracing a time-honored pattern of storytelling about lost and recovered sacred texts, in Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past (Yale UP, 2026) Eva Mroczek reveals a surprising feature of Jewish and Christian thought: the idea that scripture is not complete--that it is partly lost, destroyed, or hidden--is not only the stuff of fantasy novels and conspiracy theories. Mroczek shows that modern scholarly mythmaking is more tightly bound with Jewish and Christian legends than we may think. Through the lens of discovery tales, this innovative book explores how traditions live in tension with the possibility of unknown pasts and surprising discoveries.
New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review
Eva Mroczek is Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies; Professor; Religious Studies; Undergraduate Advisor for Religious Studies
Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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What can shared sacred sites tell us about religious coexistence in South Asia? Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot joins Shreya Urvashi to discuss Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia: Negotiating Coexistence and Belonging (Hurst, 2026), co-edited with Laurent Gayer, Aminah Mohammad-Arif, and Grégoire Schlemmer. The book examines shrines, pilgrimage sites, and other sacred spaces across South Asia where people from different religious communities continue to worship, make offerings, and participate in overlapping devotional practices.
Christophe and Shreya discuss why “shared” does not necessarily mean harmonious, the book’s idea of coexistence as a “tensile equilibrium,” and what everyday religious practice can reveal about the boundaries between religious communities. The conversation explores religious reform, nationalism, and the everyday work required to sustain coexistence. More broadly, they discuss what shared sacred spaces can tell us about religion, belonging, and political change in South Asia.
Find the book at the publisher's site here

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