New Books in Religion

The writings of ancient and medieval Christian mystics were rediscovered in the twentieth century, and today they are read more widely than ever before. But do modern assumptions about religious experience influence how we hear those premodern voices? Do we do them justice by thinking of mysticism as interior and ineffable? Or can mystical experience intersect with the natural environment, and indeed the cosmos, which science calculates with precise quantities? David Albertson's The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure (Oxford UP, 2025) suggests a fresh approach to the history of mystical theology that is oriented toward exteriority more than interiority, and toward the measurable world outside more than the invisible world within.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus had taught contemplatives to close their eyes and withdraw into the soul. Most Christians followed his directions, but others dissented. In three critical episodes, an alternative model of Christian contemplation began to emerge: from Dionysius the Areopagite, to the Byzantine monks John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, to eccentric humanists in medieval Paris. Together these episodes add up to a very different theological aesthetics, one that can enliven the modern study of mysticism and correct some of its imbalances. For in the centuries before the scientific revolution and the secularization of nature, Christians still saw God in the exterior world, not only the interior soul. God was not an ineffable and formless Absolute, immeasurable as the soul, but an infinite Measure who leaves behind geometrical traces in the figures of the world. The God who became a human body in the Incarnation not only entered time and matter, but also spatial extension, and with it the conditions of measure: points, lines, curves, shapes, planes, dimensions, and magnitudes.

Today the wisdom of this counter-tradition can strengthen the study of mysticism, not only by supplementing our contemporary fascination with negative theology by redefining what it means to name God positively, but by suggesting a new connection between Christian mysticism and the hyper-measured, hyper-technologized world that surrounds us.
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In Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan (U Hawai'i Press, 2025), Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first, she argues that picturebooks are a new genre of Buddhist writing, and second, she calls attention to an emergent family Buddhism in Taiwan that fashions children as religious subjects through shared attention with adult readers.

Surveying Taiwanese Buddhism from the ground up, Heller explores the changing family dynamics that have made children into a crucial audience for Buddhist education and the home a key site for Buddhist cultivation. By taking picturebooks seriously as part of the Buddhist textual tradition, Heller demonstrates their engagement with canonical sources alongside innovations formodern audiences. Close readings analyzing both text and image trace narrative themes aboutBuddhist figures, and connect representations of buddhas and bodhisattvas to a visual culturewhere new values such as cuteness are articulated. Heller shows that picturebooks have becomean integral part of a contemporary Buddhist education that equips children with strategies tointerpret everyday life in Buddhist ways and provides religious models for action in the modern world.

Literature for Little Bodhisattvas is a pathbreaking work revealing how contemporary picturebooks reframe Buddhism and offer fresh perspectives on its teachings and ideals of family for both children and adults.

Natasha Heller is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism with research interests spanning the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, her first book, is a study of an eminent monk of the Yuan dynasty using poetry, calligraphy, and gong’an commentary to explore the social and cultural dimensions of Chan Buddhism.

Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The book draws from various genres of writings, including biographies and hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Qur’an commentaries and juristic compilations to capture the tensions and practices around tomb and relic veneration. Some of the discussion of Muslim relic veneration are polemical as they aim to establish some boundaries around similar pious practices amongst Jewish and Christian communities. In the process, we learn that there were indeed debates with regards to the post-mortem “traces” or “athar” of Muhammad’s tomb, which then impacted how spaces associated with him were also perceived, as well as other prophetic figures like Ibrahim (Abraham) or Daniel. Such examples raise conceptual questions of absence and presence and Prophet Muhammad’s capacity for intercession and obligatory versus non-obligatory rituals. In charting these early Muslim debates and narratives, Bursi masterfully captures the differing approaches Muslims had to holy bodies and sacred spaces. The book will be of interest to scholars who think about early Islamic history and also for scholars who work on contemporary Islamic material and shrine cultures.
Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.
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In the writings of ancient Christians, the near-ubiquitous references to the "fear of God" have traditionally been seen as a generic placeholder for piety. Focusing on monastic communities in late antiquity across the eastern Mediterranean, Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism (U California Press, 2025) by Dr. Daniel Eastman An explores why the language of fear was so prevalent in their writings and how they sought to put it into practice in their daily lives.

Drawing on a range of evidence, including sermons, liturgical prayers, and archaeological evidence, Dr. An explores how the languages monastics spoke, the socioeconomic settings they inhabited, and the visual spaces in which they prayed came together to shape their emotional horizons. By investigating emotions as practices embedded in the languages, cultures, and sensorial environments of late antiquity, this book offers new insights into the spiritual world of Christian monasteries.

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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Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence (Routledge, 2025) explores Hindu religion from a global perspective and investigates the presence of Hindu religious traditions and some of their diversity worldwide.

A timely overview and analysis of Hinduism outside India, with a focus on the diversity of Hindu traditions and their contemporary transformation in a number of different geographical settings worldwide, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Hinduism, South Asian religion and society, Asian religions, and migration and religion in the contemporary world.
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