Wow! One for the wish list. A six-volume extravaganza on the history of evil, with units on antiquity, the medieval age (yes, that’s medieval evil), the early modern period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early twentieth century, and mid-twentieth century to today.

It seems that evil became more plentiful in the last 120 years, since two separate volumes of the series were required to document and discuss it. Or perhaps there is simply more to say about more temporally proximate evils. At any rate, this excellent looking new series, edited by Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro, is published by Routledge. Below is the description of the volume about antiquity.

This first volume of The History of Evil covers Graeco-Roman, Indian, Near Eastern, and Eastern philosophy and religion from 2000 BCE to 450 CE. This book charts the foundations of the history of evil among the major philosophical traditions and world religions, beginning with the oldest recorded traditions: the Vedas and Upaniṣhads, Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhism, and continuing through Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian schools of thought. This cutting-edge treatment of the history of evil at its crucial and determinative inception will appeal to those with particular interests in the ancient period and early theories and ideas of evil and good, as well as those seeking an understanding of how later philosophical and religious developments were conditioned and shaped.

“In God We Trust.” The association of divinity with money has strong roots in the American church-state experience. This new work, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford UP), by Devin Singh, explores this and many other connections and associations between the economic and the religious.

This book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West. Examining the religious and theological sources of money’s power, it shows how early Christian thinkers borrowed ancient notions of money and economic exchange from the Roman Empire as a basis for their new theological arguments. Monetary metaphors and images, including the minting of coins and debt slavery, provided frameworks for theologians to explain what happens in salvation. God became an economic administrator, for instance, and Christ functioned as a currency to purchase humanity’s freedom. Such ideas, in turn, provided models for pastors and Christian emperors as they oversaw both resources and people, which led to new economic conceptions of state administration of populations and conferred a godly aura on the use of money. Divine Currency argues that this longstanding association of money with divine activity has contributed over the centuries to money’s ever increasing significance, justifying various forms of politics that manage citizens along the way. Devin Singh’s account sheds unexpected light on why we live in a world where nothing seems immune from the price mechanism.

When most people think of the Crusades, they have in mind the Third Crusade. The one involving Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, and the contest for Jerusalem (ultimately a failed exploit from the Christian side of things), and (less seriously) Sir Walter Scott, Robin Hood, the Merry Men, and so on. And so this new military history about one of the most famous battles of the Third Crusade, The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and the Battle that Decided the Third Crusade (Yale UP), by John D. Hosler, looks to be a useful new source on this important conflict.

Here’s an interesting new book on a group of Christian intellectuals of the post-War period, grappling with the implications of the War for social life in its aftermath. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (OUP), by Alan Jacobs, also the author of this book on thinking and speaking to one another in an age of fracture.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another’s ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.