Monthly Updates on Recent Books in the History of Christianity
To raise awareness of recent books in the history of Christianity, the editorial staff of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture highlights each month a list of 10-15 books in diverse periods and geographical regions that we hope will be of interest to our members. We include here below the December 2025 list, chosen by our staff, with excerpts from the publishers’ blurbs.
Deborah E. Kanter, Pioneers of Latino Ministry: Claretians and the Evolving World of Catholic America, 2025
Pioneers of Latino Ministry tells the story of the Claretian Missionaries, a male Catholic congregation, dedicated to Latin American immigrants and their families on the margins of US society since 1902. The Claretians’ accompaniment of Latinos makes them distinct in American Catholic history. When the first Claretians arrived from Mexico, Spanish speakers were a small, often unrecognized part of Catholic America. Today Latinos constitute half of US Catholics.
The Claretians inaugurated parishes and schools in over fifteen states. Their outreach was felt in wider Catholic America as they published popular magazines, created missions in Central America, and fostered a now wide-spread devotion to St. Jude. They cultivated respect and dignity for Latino people in regions where wider society marginalized the newcomers. Because they encouraged education and leadership within their parishes, many Latinos emerged to lead and enhance US Catholic life as priests, female religious, and lay leaders. Today, the Claretians have circled back to their original mission in the US: committed to new generations of immigrants and their children.
Pioneers of Latino Ministry charts the history of the Claretians and their influence on Latino Catholics in the US, as well as on broader American Catholicism. Filled with compelling stories, the volume offers a vital portrait of unexplored Catholic American history.
Hunter M. Hampton, The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth-Century America, 2025
From the game’s early days, college football and a strain of muscular Christianity built a mutually reinforcing culture that taught lessons in America’s dominant religious, gendered, and racial belief systems. Christians of many denominations embraced the game to shape and reshape their faith to meet the changing social demands of the twentieth century.
Hunter M. Hampton analyzes the impact of football on Christian college campuses. Baptists and Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics sought spiritual and personal meaning on the gridiron. Fans watched the action to find God’s lessons for them. Wins and losses expressed the divine will while the game’s popularity offered a potent way to evangelize non-believers. Hampton also investigates the sport’s place in providing a stage for fostering Christian manhood, male community, gender dominance, and on-the-field displays of heroic savagery that served a higher purpose.
Provocative and engaging, The Gridiron Gospel looks at the All-American fusion of physical and spiritual muscle.
Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza: The Politics of an Anglo-Spanish Life, 2025
This book examines the active political life of Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza (1566–1614), a poet and mystic who renounced her noble birthright for an ascetic, spiritual life.
Historian Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez draws on Luisa’s autobiographical writings, letters, and poetry to explore how piety and politics interacted in early modern Europe. He recounts Luisa’s remarkable decision to leave Catholic Spain to work as a missionary in Protestant England. She sought to help the afflicted Catholic community there and fulfill a vow of martyrdom. Domínguez argues that, though Luisa was a “holy” person—twice imprisoned for her beliefs—her spiritual goals were fundamentally intertwined with politics. Not incidentally but purposefully, she sought to influence Spain’s foreign policy, advised political figures, and engaged in polemical debates and performances against Protestants in England.
As the first book to focus primarily on Carvajal y Mendoza’s politics, this multifaceted, innovative work expands our understanding of the role of laywomen in public life in early modern Europe. It also explores the roles of both Spain and England in shaping Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s story and how she emerged as a political actor in multiple public spheres.
John J. Harney, Dreams of a Young Republic: The American Vincentians in China, 2025
The Congregation of the Mission, a Catholic order known as the Vincentians after their founder Saint Vincent de Paul, began missionary work in China in 1699. First run by French priests and nuns, a large vicariate in the south of China was taken over by American priests in 1921. French envoys of nineteenth-century imperialism had given way to American priests who ascribed to an idealized vision of a modern democratic China. For the Americans, China was a dream: a place liberated from centuries of imperial orthodoxy, a nascent democracy, a country that would forever be free and democratic—and thus one that would inevitably be capitalist and more friendly to Catholicism.
In Dreams of a Young Republic John J. Harney examines the perceptions and expectations of this group of American Catholic missionaries between the 1911 revolution that created the Republic of China and the communist revolution of 1949 that led to the collapse of that republic on the Chinese mainland. The Vincentians experienced warlordism, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s partial unification of the country, Japanese invasion during World War II, and communist revolution. Through all this they clung to a vision of a free, democratic China friendly to the West. As Harney contextualizes the Vincentians’ observations and desires, he provides insight into the China that came to be and offers a history of a Sino-American relationship with much deeper roots than the antagonisms of the Cold War and the decades that have followed.
Amy E. Black and Douglas L. Koopman, Civil Religion and the Renewal of American Politics, 2025
American culture is evolving rapidly as a result of shifts in its religious landscape. American civil religion is robust enough to make room for new perspectives, as religious pluralism is foundational for democracy. Moreover, as Amy Black and Douglas L. Koopman argue, American religion and politics are indivisible. In this study, they interrogate three visions of American identity: Christian nationalism, strict secularism, and civil religion. Whereas the growth of Christian nationalism and strict secularism foster division and threaten consensus, by contrast, a dynamic, self-critical civil religion strengthens democracy. When civil religion makes room for robust religious pluralism to thrive, religious and nonreligious people can coexist peacefully in the public square. Integrating insights from political science, history, religious studies, and sociology, Black and Koopman trace the role of religion in American politics and culture, assess the current religious and political landscape, and offer insights into paths by which the United States might reach a new working consensus that strengthens democracy.
Leslie G. Virnelson, Fruit of Her Hands: Women, Work, and Society in the Hebrew Bible, 2025
Fruit of Her Hands considers how specialized roles for women are reflected in the texts of the Hebrew Bible, with a focus on four—midwives, diviners, weavers, and sex workers. Virnelson investigates the practice of each role in the ancient world and its corresponding portrayal in biblical texts, incorporating linguistics, material culture, comparative literature, and ethnography. Feminist theories situate the investigation of individual roles in a broader discussion of gendered roles in ancient texts.
The study of weavers considers paradigms of skill and craft for the manual expertise that women weavers developed. The study of midwives considers recognition in the absence of centralized credentialing and training as well as the latitude afforded to midwives as ritual and medical experts. The study of diviners considers how intersecting factors might create gendered opportunities and obstacles for women in divinatory roles. The study of sex workers reveals the ambivalent place of sex workers in society and the patrimonial household, and how sex work reveals broader paradigms of women's sexuality and work.
Fruit of Her Hands sheds light on the nature of specialized work in ancient society and the social roles of women in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world. Virnelson offers feminist historiographical approaches to the study of the Hebrew Bible and considers how modern ideas and debates about “women's work” influence our understanding of the past. Fruit of Her Hands ultimately emphasizes the need to explore gaps in biblical texts and scholarly knowledge, the paradoxes of women's inclusion and exclusion, and the need to disambiguate the category of “women” in biblical texts and historical reconstructions.
Kenneth J. Woo, John Calvin: Refugee Theologian, 2025
This book offers a robust introduction to John Calvin's writings through the lens of his experience as a religious refugee.
Calvin knew about persecution and political exile from personal experience. He lived as an exiled fugitive engaged in pastoral ministry to a church that included large numbers of immigrants and refugees. Calvin's teaching also addressed an international community experiencing religious violence and displacement in his day. In this engaging book, Kenneth Woo demonstrates how Calvin sought to make the comfort he found in God accessible to others through sermons, commentaries, letters, polemical treatises, and his magisterial Institutes. In his distinct-yet-inseparable roles as teacher, pastor, and polemicist, the reformer adapted his message of hope in exile to diverse audiences. Woo shows how Calvin's theology is an example of Reformed Christianity's refugee roots and history of pastoral care from the margins. And in a brief conclusion, he offers reflections on what a greater awareness of Calvin as refugee theologian could mean for those engaging his theology today.
John Calvin, Refugee Theologian helps students read Calvin for themselves, attuned to how his theology reflected dynamics of religious violence and migration in his day, making this book especially useful for undergraduate and seminary classes on Calvin, the Reformation, and the history of Christianity. It will also appeal to pastors and Christian educators.
Brooke Kathleen Brassard, Thirsty Land Into Springs of Water: Negotiating a Place in Canada as Latter-Day Saints, 2025
Looking at the example of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Thirsty Land into Springs of Water answers questions about Canadian and religious identities, immigration, and integration. Brooke Kathleen Brassard sheds light on the Latter-day Saint experience in southern Alberta between 1887 and 1947, revealing how the Latter-day Saints integrated into Canadian society while maintaining their "peculiar" identity through architecture, business practices, political participation, gendered roles, and family structures.
Drawing on family histories, correspondence, meeting minutes, and oral histories, Brassard explores how the Church negotiated the tension between integration and otherness. The book demonstrates how Latter-day Saints in southern Alberta embedded themselves in the social, economic, and political structures of Canada and how they adapted Mormonism to Canadian circumstances. It draws on the concept of "lived religion" and historical methodologies to reveal the complications that occur in the process of negotiation for members of a minority religion in Canada. Thirsty Land into Springs of Water ultimately illuminates the ways in which mainstream Canadian society forces newcomers to decide what they will adopt, reject, or adapt in order to belong.
Karla Boersma, and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds. Money in Early Modern Christianity, 2025
What role did the Bible, belief, or religion in general play in issues related to money in Early Modern Christianity? Whose view(s) were followed or rejected and which concepts, perceptions and practices were involved? What perspectives from the sides of both Catholics and Reformed can be brought to light on the topic of money in Early Modern Christianity (ca. 1400–ca. 1700)? This volume contains 19 contributions based on lectures delivered at the international conference “Calvin, Capital and the Camel: Thoughts and Practices on Money in Early Modern Christianity”, held in March of 2024 in Geneva. Famous names pass in review, such as Luis de Molina, François Fénelon, George Carleton, Thomas More, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. John Calvin's views on charging interest have an important place in these contributions. Also included is the first critical edition and translation of two letters documenting the exchange between John Calvin (Calvin's so called “legal brief”) and Claude de Sachins on this topic.
Finally, for staying up-to-date on the latest titles in all fields, we recommend regularly perusing New Books Network and its "New Books in Christian Studies” page. These pages are updated regularly.