New Books in Religion

In mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed the racist and xenophobic rhetoric of Wilders and his supporters, and emphasized the growing tensions between the Netherland’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. In Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) anthropologist and scholar of religion Pooyan Tamimi Arab uses sound to suggest a counter-narrative about the state of the Dutch nation. This exceptional monograph looks at debates over the azan, the Muslim call to pray, to reveal the civic negotiations between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. Tamimi Arab looks to local town halls meetings where community representatives work to find a compromise between the wish for public worship and demands for a discreet practice. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of public worship, Tamimi Arab can expose hidden power struggles. He finds for example, that a dual desire to belong in the nation and to keep a connection to their countries of origin motivates many of those demanding the use of loudspeakers for the azan. In his field work, Tamimi Arab observed how although conflicting needs pose challenges to religious tolerance, tensions were often mitigated on the ground. His account of the process results in a more optimist portrayal of a society in influx than the standard narrative of Europe in the twenty-first century. This makes Amplifying Islam a useful example for scholars who aspire to challenge the privileged status of the text in current scholarship. Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and its activists impact on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Israel Studies, at Northwestern University, plumbs the worldview and theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Jewish Pietists, who flourished in the Rhine Valley and in Regensburg in the 12th and 13th centuries. Professor Shyovitz marshals compelling evidence to show that the Pietists submitted both the natural world and the human body to close and disciplined empirical study. While they were fascinated by inexplicable phenomena, bodily transformation, spells and incantations, and even bodily and effluvia and excrement, the Pietists’ fascination was driven by their effort to forge links between the natural world and their theological worldview. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new book, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York University Press, 2017), Sociologist Erik Love provides a historical and current snapshot of civil rights issues surrounding people from the “middle east” in America. Much like other racial and ethnic categorizations, Middle Eastern is a term that does not fit quite right and is also so broad it is vague, but the concept is used widely in the mainstream media and literature and so Love uses it here to help the reader connect to current events and the language used to talk about this particular demographic group. Love starts off by providing the reader with a clear understanding of the social construction of race and how we see and do not see race as tied to Islamophobia. Relying on sociological concepts and theory, Love uses historical information and examples from other racial groups to shine a light on the civil rights issues for people from the middle east in America, as well as those who are categorized as Middle Eastern even when they are not. The discussion in chapter three would be an excellent excerpt to use in any Sociology classroom to learn and talk more about the social construction of race. In his interview with advocates, Love learns about the strategies and history of these organizations and speaks about the struggles and successes they have had. Through the voices of the advocates, we learn more about the links between other civil rights issues and Islamophobia. This book is clearly written and provides the reader with a solid Sociological understanding of the issues surrounding race and Islamophobia in America. This book will be enjoyed by Sociologists broadly, but especially those studying Race, Ethnicity, or Religion, as well as Civil Rights advocates. This book would be well suited for a sociology of race or religion graduate course, especially at the beginning of the semester because it does a through and clear job of defining concepts and uses clear language to connect ideas. Sarah Patterson is a Family Demographer and is ABD at Penn State. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendent of the Oneida community, teaches writing at the University of Southern California. Her book Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (Picador Press, 2016) is an insightful and beautifully written history of the nineteenth-century Oneida community. Begun in 1848 by the religious visionary John Humphrey Noyes and his followers, Oneida became an experiment in biblical communism, complex marriage, gender equality, non-procreative sex and socialized child rearing as a symbol of universal fellowship. Noyes’ practice of eugenics attempted to produce a generation of spiritual giants and created painful situations for those accused of “sticky love,” having preference for lovers and children. Internal conflicts, outside legal and social pressure brought its demise as an religious community in 1879. A remnant of entrepreneurial descendants built the secular Oneida Community Limited on new industrial and marketing methods. Rejecting the radical sexual ethics of their elders, the younger generation sought to provide a business model of brotherly love through innovative labor relations. The Oneida brand thrived in the America market place until its bankruptcy in 2006. The legacy of the Oneida community continues to fire the imagination for its alternative social arrangements and business innovation. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For the first time in human history, a significant percentage of the world’s population no longer believes in God. While its true that some societies are even seeing nonbelievers outnumber believers, it is extremely unlikely that we will see a total collapse of religion in the foreseeable future. This is why, according to Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, countries across the globe must learn to carefully manage the societal mix of religious and irreligious in order to meet the challenge of this unprecedented demographic shift and new form of sectarian discord. In his book, The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do (Pitchstone Publishing, 2014), Lindsay makes the case for the necessity of a discourse for morality and ethics that does not rely on the competing narratives of the world’s religions. He joins us today to explain how such a language of common morality can be found and why it’s so important. Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay was until very recently the president and CEO of the Centre for Inquiry and its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, where he continues on as a senior research fellow. He has a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University, with a concentration in bioethics, and a JD from the University of Virginia. He also has a background in law and policy related to the exercise or abstention from religious practices in government funded contexts. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema? William Elison, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor at the University of Washington, and Andy Rotman, Professor at Smith College offer a layered analysis of the 1977 blockbuster in Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016). The authors examine the film through each of the narratives three brothers, as well as their mother. All four perspectives offer a new vision of modern India. Through their investigation they explore questions of religion and secularism, Indian nationalism, cinematic genres and Bollywood, politics, urban architectural space, and gender. They also examine the film as a powerful allegory of the nation, where differing religious identities, specifically Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, can produce a generative social harmony. Overall, the authors provide a rich portrait of this amazing film and a useful model for the interdisciplinary analysis of cinema. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Few events in English history are as familiar to people today as the English Reformation, yet the vast amount of attention it has received can distort our understanding of it. In Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2017), Peter Marshall surveys its development over the course of the 16th century in a way that refocuses on its fundamentals as a movement to reform the Catholicism of late medieval England. This Catholicism, as he explains, was not a monolithic belief system but one characterized more by a broad consensus from which calls for reform emerged well before Henry VIIIs famous break with the Catholic Church in the 1520s. Though the reforms were implemented through state policy, the circumstances in which they emerged actually eroded the ability of the government to rule unquestioningly, as the discourse over religious reform and the continually-shifting position of the monarchy towards what form the Christian faith in their realm should take encouraged people to come to their own conclusions as to which creed seemed true. The result by the end of the century was an environment in which Christian pluralism flourished even in spite of the state’s efforts to suppress religious dissent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the Bolshevik revolution. Sloin has written a social history at the grassroots level of Jewish society in Belorussia focusing on the intersections between Jewish radicalism, race and identity formation and political economy. It’s a unique and fascinating contribution to this field of study and a highly readable and insightful account of the transformations in Belorussian Jewish life in this period Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and a member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought. Bilgrami’s research spans issues in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Moral Philosophy, and Political Philosophy. His most recent book is titled Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard 2014). And he is the author of the forthcoming book, What is a Muslim? (Princeton UP).The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as well as detailed cultural and political histories of the many interactions between drugs and religion, specifically Islam. From the beginning of the book the reader expects the story to culminate in the author’s experiential encounter with a visionary plant brew called ayahuasca, indigenous to South America and now popular throughout the globe, as a portal into the spiritual world. The twists and turns leading up to this encounter give the book some amount of narrative suspense, but it’s a page-turner in any case. The reader, during her journey through Knight’s narrative, will learn about how coffee was initially banned by Muslims and how socio-economics allowed wine–although explicitly forbidden by authoritative religious texts–a status over marijuana, which was not explicitly forbidden but still seen as a drug for the lower classes. The reader also learns about philosophical debates over authority to interpret Islamic metaphysical doctrines and how the world of academia functions. That the book’s subtitle includes writing makes itself clear throughout the text as well, and readers who enjoy reflecting on the recreational as well as existential dramas of written language will find themselves gripped by Knight’s process. He wrote the book, moreover, during his transition into a PhD program in religious studies, after already making a name for himself as a successful author of several books. Because of the liminal space from which he writes Tripping with Allah, as well as its artistic precision, the book should appeal to broad audiences and Islamic studies specialists alike. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion