New Books in Religion

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

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

At the time of the conquest of Mexico, the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco (1560s) recorded the deaths of two Mexica ritual specialists. During the tumultuous events of the times, Quauhnochtli (a telpochcalli specialist) and Quauhcoatl (a calmecac specialist) died protecting the temple of Huitzilopochtli and his bundled embodiment in the neighborhood of Huitznahuac. In Incense and Performance: The Lives of Mexica Ritual Specialists (U Arizona Press, 2026), Dr. Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry reconstructs the lives and labors of the two specialists, articulated through Nahuatl-language texts, material culture from neighborhood and temple spaces, and the academic study of religion. The book expands on known theories on Mexica ritual specialists by providing new insights about telpochcalli and calmecac duties, their interrelated educational models, and the collective practices that brought people, animals, flora, specialists, and teteo (more-than-human forces) together. The book demonstrates that telpochcalli and calmecac specialists shared the ritual responsibilities of collective and elective practices. Giving care to teteo, giving life, and giving offerings were balanced with giving war, giving council, and giving music and dance. As Quauhnochtli and Quauhcoatl ensured the safety of the bundled Huitzilopochtli, they characterized how a Mexica ritual specialist lived and what they did. 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.

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the "spirit of protestation." Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France's Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself. Guest Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University; she is currently at work on two projects. The first one, tentatively titled Transnational Theologies — Religious Networks and The Making of French Thought, is centered on the reconfiguration of French thought between the wars, informed by transnational circulations, exchanges of ideas across cultural spaces, and intellectual transfers between the religious and the secular spheres. The second one is a French literary history of the notion of conspiracy, both as form and as imaginary, from Balzac and Marcel Proust to Paul Nizan and Michel Houellebecq. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Maklī became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty. In Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660 (UNC Press, 2026), Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Maklī’s built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Maklī, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.