[Difflugia]

I went looking for free books and found a rather random assortment.

A Year of Living Prayerfully by Jared Brock
B&N
Amazon
Kobo

This first ebook is a mainstream Christian response to A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically, which was a tongue-in-cheek look at trying to follow all of the instructions in the Bible that started the ongoing trend in "Year of Living..." books. It looks to be self-published ("Steward Publishing" only seems to publish this ebook), but the original was published by Tyndale.

Saints volume 1: The Standard of Truth by the LDS Church
B&N
Amazon

The LDS Church is in the process of publishing a four-volume history of the Church called Saints. This first volume was published in September 2018. The book is free right now, but I can't tell if it's temporary (some sites list a non-zero "retail price"). The second volume can be read online, but doesn't look to be otherwise available.

Another Mormon find is the first six volumes in an in-progress New Testament translation from Brigham Young University. According to the introductions:

Each volume in this series contains a new working translation of the New Testament. Calling this a new “rendition” clarifies that it does not seek to replace the authorized KJV adopted by the LDS Church as its official English text. Rather, it aims to enhance readers’ understanding conceptually and spiritually by rendering the Greek texts into modern English with LDS sensitivities in mind. Comparing and explaining the New Rendition in light of the KJV then serves as one important purpose for each volume’s notes, comments, analyses, and summaries. This effort responds in modest ways to the desire President J. Reuben Clark Jr. expressed in his diary in 1956 that someday “qualified scholars [would provide] ... a translation of the New Testament that will give us an accurate translation that shall be pregnant with the great principles of the Restored Gospel.”

There's no actual commentary or justification for particular translation choices. Each volume is just a new translation of one of the books.

The Gospel according to Mark: A New Rendition by Julie M. Smith
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Testimony of Luke: A New Rendition by Eric D. Huntsman and S. Kent Brown
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes and Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Epistle to the Ephesians: A New Rendition by Phillip Abbot
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Epistle to the Hebrews: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes, Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Revelation of John the Apostle: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes and Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

I found three Open Access academic books that look interesting.

Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours by Sharon Farmer
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

I also found a PDF on a hosting server. It's a scan with OCR that looks like it was done by the publisher, but the CC license means it's a legal download in any case.

Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby—all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the cult and produced new legends and rituals to strengthen their corporate interests.

Since the basilica and the abbey differed in their spiritualities, structures, and external ties, the canons and monks elaborated and manipulated Martin's cult in quite different ways. Farmer shows how one saint's cult lent itself to these varying uses, and analyzes the strikingly dissimilar Martins that emerged. Her skillful inquiry into the relationship between group identity and cultural expression illuminates the degree to which culture is contested territory.

Farmer's rich blend of social history and hagiography will appeal to a wide range of medievalists, cultural anthropologists, religious historians, and urban historians.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia edited by Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes
Springer Link (DRM-free epub and PDF)
Amazon

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

Juxtaposes case studies from Melanesia and Africa in order to better compare, contrast, and illuminate the effects of and engagements with PentecostalismFocuses on chief themes of Pentecostalism and witchcraft while also bringing in discussions of globalization, visibility, movements of capital, and embodiment

Presents rich and detailed case studies while also offering up wide-ranging theoretical analyses and critiques of established thinking/concepts

The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community by Tom Boylston
Luminos Open Access (DRM-free epub, PDF, mobi)
Kobo
Amazon

The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.