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Exegetically noteworthy and culturally-theologically relevant

Violence in its wide range of horrifying expressions is real in people’s lives, and biblical interpreters must take violence in the world seriously to arrive at relevant ideas about the place of the Bible in the world. Each essay addresses people’s experiences of violence in the study of the Bible through the context of la violencia, the Spanish noun referring to the brutal, repressive, and murderous policies of state-sponsored violence practiced in many South and Central American and Caribbean countries during the twentieth century that external powers such as the USA often endorsed and fostered. The volume represents an important contribution to biblical studies and to the field of Latina/o studies. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Pablo Andiñach, Nancy Bedford, Lee Cuéllar, Steed V. Davidson, Serge Frolov, Renata Furst, Julia M. O’Brien, Todd Penner, José Enrique Ramírez, Ivoni Richter Reimer, and Susanne Scholz.

Features:

• Twelve essays by scholars living and working on the American continent
• Articles reveal the complex historical, political, and cultural conditions on the American continent that have contributed to our understanding of violence in the Bible
• Focus on themes of racial, social, and cultural violence

A new anthropology of Protestant feminism, anchored by the language experiments of one Lutheran community.
 
The language of the Bible is a powerful lens through which many Protestants understand themselves and their world, and its prohibitions on women’s speech pose complicated challenges to women. Nevertheless, women frequently serve as vocal leaders in Protestant organizations, including the early twentieth-century Norwegian Mission Society. In Life in Language, Ingie Hovland offers a unique biography of Henny Dons, a leader of the society’s so-called mission feminists, that grapples with ways Protestant women crafted innovative, expansive self-understandings through Christian language. More than their male peers, the mission feminists turned to religious speech to express material, as well as heavenly, desires for paid work, voting rights, and more, and Hovland argues that these experiments in women speaking, reading, writing, and listening paved the way for a new way of being in the world.

2026 PROSE Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers (AAP) 
2026 Book Prize Shortlist, Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 

The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.

War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it. The care work that grandparents do for grandchildren allows labor migration and contributes to the overall well-being of the extended family. The book considers the efforts migrant workers make to build and buy houses and the ways those rooms and walls constrain social activities. It outlines the strategies elders employ to age in place, and the alternatives they face in local old folks’ homes. Based on ethnographic work done over a decade, Michele Gamburd shows how elders face the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world.

Listening to the Voices of the Dead is an account of the author’s search for the disquieted voices of the dead in the wake of the March 11, 2011, Tōhoku Disaster and his attempt to translate those voices for the living. Isomae Jun’ichi considers the disaster a challenge for outside observers to overcome, especially for practitioners of religion and religious studies. He chronicles the care and devotion for the dead shown by ordinary people, people displaced from their homes and loved ones. Drawing upon religious studies, Japanese history, postcolonial studies, and his own experiences during the disaster, Isomae uncovers historical symptoms brought to the surface by the traumas of disaster. Only by listening to the disquieted voices of the dead, translating them, and responding to them can we regain our true selves as well as offer peace to the spirits of the victims. While Listening to the Voices of the Dead focuses on a specific event in Japanese history and memory, it captures a broadening critique at the heart of many movements responding to how increasing globalization impacts our sense of place and community.

As Catholic theology emerged from the crisis of modernity, theologians turned to both patristic and medieval sources to recover lost wisdom from the theological tradition, and adapt it to the challenges of an age that separated reason from faith, the practice of theology from the spiritual life. . In time, Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar became the patrons of two very different approaches to this challenge. St. Thomas Aquinas offering contemporary theologians an approach rooted in the patristic-medieval Latin synthesis of Augustine and Aristotle that also draws on the East, and von Balthasar offering contemporary theologians a patristic-modern approach rooted in the Eastern theological synthesis of Maximus the Confessor and Erich Przywara, that also draws on the West. Although Aquinas and Balthasar, together with their contemporary followers, sought to unite reason and faith, theology and prayer, contemporary Thomists and Balthasarians have tended to diverge widely from one another, often with a polemical spirit. How should one understand the theological genius of St. Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar today? How can two of the greatest theologians in the Catholic tradition be brought together in more fruitful and peaceful dialogue? This edited volume comprises contributions from a range of scholars who elucidate the depth and breadth of two of the most prominent figures of the Catholic tradition today. A scholar from each school of thought contributes an essay on a particular theme: Metaphysics, Trinity, Revelation, Christology, Anthropology, Evil, and Eschatology. By presenting the two essays side by side, this volume provides the contemporary reader with an opportunity to better engage both thinkers and understand disagreements and areas for constructive movement forward. The tone of the volume is intentionally irenic, seeking points of constructive dialogue, and opening new pathways to the renewal of sapiential theology through a fruitful synthesis of Thomistic and Balthasarian thought.

The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.
 
President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration.
 
For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar, National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art.
 
Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises.