New Books in Christian Studies Marshall Poe

From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU Press, 2023) tells the story of the federal government’s Depression-era effort to redeem Dust Bowl refugees in rural California through the religion of reform.
During the Depression hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and Southwest to look for farm work in California. Seeing destitute white families living in filthy shelters, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide shelter and community. 
Drawn from the archives of the federal camp system, Jonathan H. Ebel tells the story of the religious dynamics in and around the farm labor camps, making the case that they served as mission sites for the conversion of migrants to more modern ways of living and believing, centered around ideas of virtuous citizenship based on a foundation of seemingly secular values such as cleanliness, hard work, and family life. The migrants, particularly those who came from charismatic and conservative Protestant faiths, sometimes had different ideas about right living. 
Ebel shows how the New Deal program was animated simultaneously by humanitarian concern and by the belief that these poor white migrants and their religious practices needed to be transformed for them to achieve a better life in a modernized, secular world. 
Recommended reading: 
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
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John Michael Talbott is a tremendously successful musician and writer; he is also the founder of a monastery—the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage in Arkansas—where he is Minister General today. He started as a Methodist and a country rock musician in the seventies and the story of his journey is amazing, from the encounter with Jesus he had at seventeen to the intense mystical experiences that he had later in life during an illness that brought him into closer communion with Our Lord.

John Michael Talbot’s website.

John Michael Talbot’s Wikipedia page.


Late Have I Loved You, album on Amazon Music.


Late Have I Loved You, book on Amazon.com.


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“Wisconsin has always been my home. It’s not a place, however, where I’ve always felt at home,” (ix) declares Dr. Sergio M. González in the first two lines of his acknowledgments for his recently published book Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging & Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024). These two sentences are the essence of the manuscript as González guides the reader through a one-hundred-year history of Latino migration, settlement, and religious life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and surrounding rural regions. Many different nationalities that fall under the banner of the “Latino” identity have made home, work, and life in Wisconsin, but their presence was met with varying scales of hospitality – the act of welcoming “the stranger.” He writes in the Introduction, “Strangers No Longer demonstrates that relationships within hospitality interactions are in fact relations of power” (3). It is through a framework of hospitality that González structures his manuscript to show how clergy and laity accepted, to varying degrees, newly arrived Latinos in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin religious institutions have a long engagement with Latino populations. From the arrival of Mexican immigrant laborers in the 1920s who were recruited as strikebreakers, to post-war Tejano and Puerto Rican migrants who were encouraged to assimilate into eurocentric ideals of belonging, and finally to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in which Central American asylees sought protection from state and federal immigration enforcement, each of these topics and more are covered in Strangers No Longer. González skillfully crafts a narrative where the reader witnesses the development of the relationship between Wisconsin religious institutions and various Latino communities as one moving from a relationship of paternalism in the early 20th century to one of self-determination by the late 20th century. “Wisconsin Latinos pushed churches to acknowledge that they were no longer guests in their communities, or, in the words of the organizers of a statewide conference held in Appleton in 1974, ‘strangers in our homeland’” (141). By the 21st century, González asserts, the church had become a site for Latino political consciousness and resistance for decades.
González’s methodological rigor, clear writing, and strong theoretical grounding allow the reader to understand the delicate political, racial, economic, and spiritual power relations at play for Latinos in the Midwest during the 20th century. Strangers No Longer is a valuable read for undergraduate courses in Latino history, religious history, and social movement history. Alongside his academic work, González is building out his public history projects that offer primers on the sanctuary movement, immigration history, and Latino religious life in the Midwest.
Links to Dr. Gonzalez’s publications and projects:

Strangers No Longer

Mexicans in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Latinx History Collective


PBS Wisconsin's The Look Back 

Wisconsin Historical Society's upcoming History Center


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One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of early Christianity reverent to Israel’s scriptures. 
In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith addresses the consensus for the supposedly Gentile Luke and concludes that no solid New Testament or patristic evidence exists to substantiate such a claim. Moreover, Smith suggests by means of a cognitive linguistic analysis of insider and outsider terms in Luke and Acts, as well as their author’s attitudes toward the Torah and intricate knowledge of Jewish festival celebrations, that these books were more likely to have been written by an individual enculturated in “a Jewish setting … among the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora” (p. 233). Smith joined the New Books Network to discuss this revision of his Ph.D. thesis, our ability to know an ancient author through their textual remains, and why it would be inappropriate to interpret Luke’s full-throated embrace of the Gentile mission as an indicator of his non-Jewish identity.
Joshua Paul Smith (Ph.D., University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology, 2021) teaches presently at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include literary and cognitive approaches to New Testament texts, as well as early Jewish and Christian identity formation. He is currently working on a short book on Acts for a general audience, and conducting research for an article that applies social network analysis to named characters in Luke and Acts. Additionally, he serves as Managing Editor for Reviews of the Enoch Seminar, publishing book reviews on a wide range of topics related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic origins.
Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.
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With a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with Chinese language and culture, and the exchange flowed both ways as Morrison—a working-class man whose firsthand experiences made him an “accidental expert”—brought depictions of China back to eager British audiences. Author Jonathan A. Seitz proposes that, despite the limitations imposed by the orientalism impulse of the era, Morrison and his fellow missionaries were instrumental in creating a new map of cross-cultural engagement that would evolve, ultimately, into modern sinology. Engaging and well researched, Protestant Missionaries in China explores the impact of Morrison and his contemporaries on early sinology, mission work, and Chinese Christianity during the three decades before the start of the Opium Wars.
Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.
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Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity.
Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.
Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500.
Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages.
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