New Books in Religion

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011). It’s a powerful read! West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.” This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention. In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT Press, 2011), Robert Barsky casts a great deal more light upon Harris’s story. Exploring his involvement in the Avukah student group in the 1930s and 40s, Barsky shows how Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but also shaped the destinies of several influential thinkers. He also traces the course of the revolutionary programme of linguistic enquiry that Harris laid out, inspired by the example of theoretical physics, and how this ongoing work came to be regarded as eccentric by practitioners of the dominant contemporary research trends. In this interview, we discuss the utopian ideals of socialist Zionism, and the influence of Harris upon Chomsky’s political thought. We look at the contradictory facets of Zellig Harris as an individual. And we consider whether rationality is an unreasonable assumption, when it comes to inter-personal dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Recent events revolving around the Qur'an, such as the accidental burning of it in Afghanistan or the intentional provocations of radical American Christian pastors, suggest that Westerns often still fail to understand the role of the Qur'an in Muslims lives. On occasion, the mere suggestion of having Westerners read the Qur'an in order to gain a better understanding of its message has incited anger and lawsuits, as was the case at the University of North Carolina in 2002.The inability to bridge these cultural differences and the many inherent challenges the Qur'an possesses inspired Carl W. Ernst, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, to write his new book How to Read the Qur'an: A New Guide, with Select Translations (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). He wondered how should the non-Muslim read the Qur'an? This comprehensive introduction presents a literary historical approach that enables the reader to understand how the Qur'an's initial audience encountered it through a chronological reading, traditionally understood through the early Meccan, later Meccan, and Medinan periods of Muhammad's career. It introduces a reading that understands the structure and form of the text as informing the meaning. Thus, Ernst examines the symmetry and balanced composition of verses, the tripartite structure of certain chapters, intertexuality within the Qur'an, and uses rhetorical analysis and ring composition as a means to approach and understand seemingly contradictory religious claims. Ernst's text is engaging and informative while achieving its goal of making the Qur'an accessible to the non-Muslim. His new book will certainly motivate a future group of Qur'anic studies scholars and will allow the uninitiated reader to better understand what the previously veiled text says about the cosmos and Muslims position in it. 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, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine (Twelve, 2011), Eric Weiner, former correspondent for both NPR and the New York Times, confronts his spiritual side after a medical emergency takes him too close to death. Weiner’s quest to understand faith carries him across the globe, from Las Vegas, where he gets to know a few Raelians a little more closely than he’d like, to Turkey, where he practices whirling with Sufi dervishes. In our interview, we talked about whether his frequent jokes are a defense mechanism of some kind, why his Hebrew school experience lacked meaning, how the Rinpoche insulted Cher, and why people seem to need to find some type of divine meaning in life. Read all about it, and more, in Weiner’s amusing new book.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity. In her new book, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (University of California Press, 2011), she challenges the myth that Western rule secularized non-Western societies. Pedagogy for Religion focuses on missionary schools and their influence in Bengal from roughly 1850 to the 1930s. Sengupta’s conclusions are drawn from reading what she calls the “mundane aspects of schooling,” rather than high religious discourse. The replication of religious, gender, and social identities, as they were established through textbooks, objects, language, and teachers, redefined modern definitions of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Altogether, Sengupta demonstrates that modern education effectively deepened the place of religion in colonial South Asia. However, this contemporary return to religion was not a “backward” or “irrational” resurgence of religious beliefs and practices. Religion was transformed into the carrier of modernity and education became the means for recreating religious identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the early background of the temple-parishioner system in Tokugawa Japan to a modern context in which the emergence of new funerary forms has re-defined what post-mortem embodiment means, in terms of relationships, fear, materiality, and nature. In this exceptionally rich an sensitively wrought study, Rowe re-conceptualizes what it looks like to study Buddhism in modern Japan by weaving an account from texts, objects, voices, and personal experience. It is also a fascinating read, full of surprising stories and insights. We covered many topics in the course of our wide-ranging interview, including the changing conception of the “family” in Asian studies, what it’s like to be the head of parking at an eternal memorial grave, the physicality of death, and why choosing a head temple priest both is and is not like Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn’t.” This was how one of the Soviet Union’s most famous jazz singers and actors, Leonid Utyosov, concluded his memoirs. Utyosov was referring to his ironic relationship with the city of his birth and the source of so much of his material over the years: the city of Odessa, which he both ridiculed for its decadence and celebrated for the magic of its legends. Nostalgia and paradox are at the center of a new book by Jarrod Tanny, Assistant Professor of History at UNC Wilmington, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Indiana University Press, 2011). As the title indicates, the book is immersed in Jewish language — particularly Jewish humor — and Tanny delivers readers an inspired analysis of Odessa’s role in Soviet history as a city that fueled cultural irreverence throughout the humorlessness of the Tsarist and Soviet ages. Given the rather grim reputation left by Russian monarchy and communism, Tanny’s book is a refreshing and essential reminder that levity has played a central role in Soviet (and now Russian and Ukrainian) identity. City of Rogues and Schnorrers is at times a story of indirect resistance, but it’s also a chronicle of the evolution of Jewishness, first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. And more than a narrative only about Jewishness, Tanny’s book studies the cultural infusion that occurred in Old Odessa, explaining how Soviet culture at large came to take pride in Odessa’s mythology as a national treasure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When most people think of Buddhism they begin to imagine a lone monk in the forest or a serene rock garden. The world of ghosts, amulets, and magic are usually from their mind. They may even feel some aversion to the notion that the meditative calm of monks from the East could have anything to do with these superstitious ideas and practices. Justin Thomas McDaniel, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, challenges many of theses preconceived ideas about what constitutes the substance of modern Buddhism in Thailand. In his new book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (Columbia University Press, 2011), McDaniel begins his journey of contemporary Buddhism at one of the regular funerals for our lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak). Despite the compelling nature of this scene, as a skilled linguist and practicing scholar-monk for many years, McDaniel never imagined that he would be examining the supernatural world of ghost stories. However, after living in Thailand for several years as an academic and practitioner he realized that the specter of modern Thai Buddhist practices and believes would not leave him alone. McDaniel has catalogued much of hat he has found about Thai Buddhism on his wonderful project in digital humanities, the Thai Digital Monastery. Instead of looking for Buddhism, he let Buddhists tell, show, describe and recount what they do, chant, hold, and value. McDaniel uses the story of the lovelorn ghost and the magical monk, who we find out, is the infamous Somdet To, as an opening to explore the various aspects of contemporary religious Buddhist practices and how they shape Thai society. The six degrees of separation (from Somdet To) takes us through an erudite analysis of biographies, hagiographies, film, statues, amulets, murals, texts, magic, chants, and photographs, in the coproduction of religious knowledge. While McDaniel’s book is a key contribution to Thai, Theravada, and modern Buddhism, it is also valuable in the study of religion more generally. His approach provides a template for the “pragmatic sociological study of cultural repertoires,” which examines what a particular person carries, recites, and respects, how they do something, how they say they do something, and the material and social contexts they do it in. This allows us as researchers to unshackle our study from the expectations of certain terminology. He also problematizes a number of other categories, such as, magic, cult, localization, folk, popular, local, syncretism, synergy, domestication, hybridity, and vernacularization, by demonstrating their limited usefulness when attempting to describe a Thai monastery, shrine, liturgy, or ritual. These innovative moves in methodology should be motivational to others in the field more generally. Overall, McDaniel produced a highly readable and enjoyable portrait of Buddhism in contemporary Thailand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals. Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal. This requires, in part, that liberal democratic governments must seek to govern on the basis of reasons that all citizens could endorse. However, the freedoms secured by liberal democratic institutions give rise to a plurality of religious and moral doctrines, and thus a morally and religiously diverse citizenry. Liberal democratic states, then, must try to govern on the basis of noncontroversial principles, and must avoid governing on the basis of contentions moral and religious ideas. Religious principles are notoriously controversial among liberal democratic citizens; consequently, it is widely thought that a liberal democratic government must not employ controversial religious reasons when deciding policy. Hence the familiar commitment to the separation of church and state, and the corresponding idea that government must be neutral when it comes to the Big Questions of human life. Yet the idea that politics and religion should be kept separate seems to be a controversial moral idea in its own right. For many religious believers, faith informs every aspect of their lives, including the political and social aspects. Hence the claim that their religious commitments are inappropriate sources of guidance in political matters strikes many religious citizens as deeply objectionable, perhaps even a violation of their right to free religious exercise. A central challenge for liberal democratic political theory, then, is to justify the separation of church and state (or religion and politics) to religious citizens in a way that does not rely upon controversial moral ideas. In Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Audi proposes a novel and forceful account of the proper role of religious conviction in democratic politics. This account provides the basis for an attractive conception of the separation of church and state, and a compelling vision of civic virtue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

You’ve got to be pretty creative to get anything like “holy war” out of the New Testament, what with all that trespass-forgiving, cheek-turning, and neighbor-loving. By all appearances Jesus didn’t want his followers to fight for their faith, but rather to die for it as he had. And during the first three centuries of Christianity–in the time of the Roman persecution–that’s just what they did. “To die in Christ is to live,” wrote the Apostle Paul. And it seems a lot of early Christians believed him for they sought martyrdom. Jesus passively gave his life; and they passively gave theirs. What could be more fitting? All this passivity makes the Crusades seem very strange indeed. If Christ’s message was one of peace, what in the world were Christians doing taking up arms in the his name? In his excellent Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse(Basic Books, 2011), Jay Rubenstein explains that the reason they did so had everything to do with the conviction that the world was going to presently end. The Crusaders fervently believed that the closing chapter in temporal history upon them and that they had a role in bringing it to the right conclusion. They didn’t know exactly what that role was, but there were good hints in ancient scripture and contemporary signs. Everyone agreed that, whatever part the Crusaders were to play, it involved liberating Jerusalem from the infidels. So off they went. Since they were on a holy mission–in fact the last holy mission before Christ’s return–the ordinary rules did not apply. The Crusaders forced Jews to convert or else die (many were murdered). They killed Muslims indiscriminately. They made sport of desecrating the bodies of their victims. They even roasted some on spits and ate them. That’s right: they roasted and ate them. It was like something out of the Book of Revelations. Which made sense, because the Crusaders believed they were in the Book of Revelations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion