Scott Harrower, "God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World" (Lexham Press, 2019)

06/24/19 • 49 min

In God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World (Lexham Press, 2019), the Rev. Dr. Scott Harrower, Lecturer in Christian Thought at Ridley College, takes on the tremendous topic the problem of horrific evil that seems to omnipresent in today’s world. This new book covers topics ranging from pop culture and zombie movies to metaphysics and complex theological thought.

Horror, as Harrower describes it, is the opposite of shalom, but even horrible things can point people to the restorative peace and love of the Trinity. In the interview, we walk through the three-part outline of the book, while sharing his pastoral and medical perspective regarding tragedy and trauma.

This ministerial perspective shines through both the book and the interview, in that complicated and distressing material is handled in a practical and yet gentle way. Philosophers and chaplains alike will appreciate the exploration of topics such as theodicy, the communal effects of suffering, and discussion concerning language and terms having to do with horror.

Will Sipling is a Catholic Studies Scholar fellow, graduate assistant, and MA student at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). Will previously studied for a master’s degree at Dallas Theological Seminary, writing a thesis on sacramental and liturgical theology. His research interests include asceticism and monasticism, ecumenism, and Anglicanism. You can follow his work at williamsipling.com or at @WSipling.

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Rebecca Janzen, "Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture" (SUNY Press, 2018)

Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY Press, 2018) examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen through Mexican culture. Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Mormons emigrated from the United States in the 1880s, left in 1912, and returned in the 1920s. Rebecca Janzen focuses on representations of these groups in film, television, online comics, photography, and legal documents. Janzen argues that perceptions of Mennonites and Mormons—groups on the margins and borders of Mexican society—illustrate broader trends in Mexican history. The government granted both communities significant exceptions to national laws to encourage them to immigrate; she argues that these foreshadow what is today called the Mexican state of exception. The groups’ inclusion into the Mexican nation shows that post-Revolutionary Mexico was flexible with its central tenets of land reform and building a mestizo race. Janzen uses minority communities at the periphery to give us a new understanding of the Mexican nation.

Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University, NYC campus.

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Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic readers disobeyed the book rules of their church in a vast apostasy that raised personal desire and conscience over communal responsibility and doctrine. This disobedience sparked a dramatic contest between lay readers and their priests over proper book behavior that played out in homes, schools, libraries, parish meeting halls, even church confessionals. The clergy lost this contest in a fundamental reordering of cultural power that helped usher in contemporary Catholicism.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.

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