RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP

Margaret M. Grubiak, Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith & Doubt in Modern America (University of Virginia Press, 2020)

The American landscape is host to numerous works of religious architecture, sometimes questionable in taste and large, if not titanic, in scale. In her lively study of satire and religious architecture, Margaret Grubiak, PhD, challenges how we typically view such sites by shifting the focus from believers to doubters, and from producers to consumers. Dr. Grubiak considers an array of sacred architectural constructions―from "Touchdown Jesus" at the University of Notre Dame to the Wizard of Oz Mormon temple outside Washington, D.C., to the renamed "Gumby Jesus" of the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas―that show how religious doubt is made manifest in the humorous, satirical, blasphemous, and popular culture responses to religious architecture and image in modern America.

Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism as the Religion of Modernity (Belknap Press: An imprint of Harvard University Press, 2022)

Now in paperback, this book has been described as “an extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy.” McCarraher challenges the conventional view of capitalism as a force for disenchantment. He argues that, from Puritan and evangelical valorizations of profit to the heavenly Fordist city, the mystically animated corporation, and the deification of the market, capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity, laying hold to our souls.

Anna Bonta Moreland, Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)

Scholarly attempts to understand Islam in the West over the past several years have failed to take Islamic theology seriously. This book engages Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad. Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy to view Muhammad within a Christian theology of revelation, without either appropriating the prophet as an unwitting Christian or reducing both Christianity and Islam to a common denominator. This historical recovery leads to a more sophisticated understanding of Islam, one that honors the integrity of the Catholic tradition and, through that integrity, argues for the possibility in principle of Muhammad as a religious prophet. Muhammad Reconsidered not only is a constructive contribution to Catholic theology but also has enormous potential to help scholars reframe and comprehend Christian-Muslim relations.

Michael Tomko writes about “Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English” in this third volume of the Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, which addresses the literary, intellectual and cultural expressions of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland.