New Books in Religion

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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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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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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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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We laugh without thinking — but what if laughter is one of the most revealing human acts?

In this episode of The Van Leer Institute Series On Ideas, Dr. Tikva Blaukopf Schein explores laughter not as humor, but as power. Across ancient Roman and rabbinic texts, laughter could strengthen leadership, threaten institutions, or expose hidden fear. The same laugh that comforts one audience can unsettle another.

Our conversation moves from classical literature to contemporary academic life, touching on scholarship, family, identity, and the challenges facing Jewish and Israeli scholars today. Along the way emerges a surprising idea: societies become nervous about laughter precisely when they feel most fragile.

Thoughtful, personal, and deeply relevant, this episode asks why humans so often laugh in moments of crisis — and what that laughter reveals about hope, survival, and meaning.
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