As the Christmas season approaches, there’s no better gift for your favorite theologian than one of these nine new titles published by Candler faculty members. Covering a wide range of historical and contemporary theological issues from local and global perspectives, the books published in 2019 will appeal to seminarians, clergy, and laity alike.
Antonio Alonso, assistant professor of theology and culture and director Candler’s Catholic Studies program, published Revival II (GIA Music), a new collection of liturgical music. A follow-up to Alonso’s 2017 musical anthology Revival, the second volume offers arrangements of 14 beloved congregational hymns for use by contemporary ensembles throughout the liturgical year.
Jennifer R. Ayres, associate professor of religious education and director of Candler’s Doctor of Ministry program, published Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Baylor University Press), in which she proposes a solution to humans’ increasing alienation from the natural world: the way of inhabitance. Examining inhabitance practices that foster more intentional engagement with the places in which people live, Ayres shows that ecological religious education nurtures a disposition of loving commitment toward God’s creation.
Anthony A. Briggman, associate professor of early Christianity, published God and Christ in Irenaeus (Oxford University Press), part of the Oxford Early Christian Studies series. Briggman offers a fundamentally new understanding of Irenaeus of Lyons, unpacking his polemical and constructive arguments in the first book to study both Irenaeus’s conceptions of God and the person of Christ.
Jehu J. Hanciles, D.W. and Ruth Brooks Associate Professor of World Christianity, served as editor of The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Twentieth Century—Traditions in a Global Context, Volume IV (Oxford University Press). The fourth of five volumes, this tome provides detailed examination of Protestant dissent as a globalizing movement, probing the radical shifts and complex reconstruction that took place as dissenting traditions encountered diverse cultures and took root in a multitude of contexts, many of which were simultaneously experiencing major historical change.
Helen Jin Kim, assistant professor of American religious history, co-authored Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans (Oxford University Press). The first book based on a national survey on Asian American religious practices, Kim and her co-authors Russell M. Jeung and Seanan S. Fong offer a new way for understanding Chinese religion and a new lens for understanding religious “nones” in the United States.
Ian A. McFarland, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Theology, published The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Westminster John Knox Press). In it, McFarland explores how the divine and human come together in the life of Jesus, arguing that rather than competing against one another, Christ’s divinity and humanity should both be affirmed and treated as equal in theological significance.
Carol A. Newsom, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament, who retired after the 2018-2019 academic year, published Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature (Mohr Siebeck). Newsom’s collection of essays explores how ancient texts rhetorically engage existing traditions and how they themselves become objects of hermeneutical transformation in contexts ranging from sectarian Judaism to the politics of post-World War I and II Germany and America to modern film criticism and feminist re-reading.
Philip L. Reynolds, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Medieval Christianity and Aquinas Professor of Historical Theology, edited Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium (Cambridge University Press), a systematic collection of essays describing how these early Christian leaders and scholars contributed to law and jurisprudence to maintain social order and guide people from this life into the next. The book invites a holistic and realistic appreciation of early-medieval contributions to the history of law and jurisprudence.
Kevin M. Watson, assistant professor of Wesleyan and Methodist studies, published Old or New School Methodism? The Fragmentation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford University Press), a detailed study of the formation of the Free Methodist Church, which represents an initial fragmentation of what had been a coherent theological tradition. It points to the need for a broader reevaluation of the history of American Methodism as a theological tradition.
Deanna Ferree Womack, assistant professor of history of religions and multifaith relations, published Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh University Press). Drawing on rare Arabic publications, Womack offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of the Ottoman Syrians with American missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims from 1860 to 1915. She challenges historiography that focuses on Western male actors, and instead shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings.
Two emeriti faculty members also published new works in 2019:
M. Patrick Graham, librarian and Margaret A. Pitts Professor Emeritus of Theological Bibliography, served as co-editor of Luther as Heretic: Ten Catholic Responses to Martin Luther, 1518-1541 (Pickwick Publications). Drawing on the rich resources of Pitts Theology Library’s Kessler Reformation Collection, this collection offers English translations of Luther’s Catholic opponents in order to make it possible for students to understand both sides of the sixteenth-century religious debates.
Don E. Saliers, William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship Emeritus and theologian-in-residence, published a new edition of A Song to Sing, a Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice (Fortress). In this book, Saliers and his daughter, Grammy Award-winning musician Emily Saliers, tell the stories of their own lives in music, and share what they have learned about the power of music in human life.