New Books in Religion

[Cross-posted from New Books in History]  If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call “secularism”–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn’t whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Yet, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there were those who did not want to belong to one of the “established” (as in “establishment clause”) religions. They–”dissenters”–were seeking their own path to God and they petitioned the state to allow them to do so. Sometimes the lords of the land (and often heads of the church) granted this wish; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they did, reversed themselves, and then reversed themselves again. Given the novelty of “free religion” and “free thinking,” it was hard to know what to do. In any case, the back and forth between officials and religious dissenters opened a space–narrow at first and then gradually widening–in which the faithful could be not only different but, well, not very faithful at all. Listen in.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, wants to change that. Her recent book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011), charts a transition in liberal Protestant self-understanding over the course of the twentieth century whereby “supernatural liberalism,” as Klassen calls it, enabled imaginative shifts between Christianity, science, and secularism. In the process, she explores how Protestants went from seeing themselves as Christians who combined medicine and evangelism to effect ‘conversions to modernity’ among others, including Native Americans and colonized people, to understanding themselves as complicit in an oftentimes racist imperialism. At the same time, they have recombined forms of healing in new ways, drawing on practices such as yoga and reiki in order to continue the search for a universalized type of wholeness – both spiritual and physical. Focusing on Canadian Protestants in the Anglican and United churches, Spirits of Protestantism combines rich historical examples and four years of ethnographic study to show how liberal Protestants have exerted a major influence in public life and even on anthropology itself.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Islamic Studies] There are few concepts commonly associated with Islam and Muslims today that evoke more anxiety, phobia, and paranoia than the veil, commonly translated as the hijab. Seen by many as the most quintessential symbol of the alleged Muslim oppression of women, the veil has for some time represented a subject of tremendous rage, debate, polemics, and fantastical stereotypes. But what is the veil? What is its history? Is the veil primarily an Islamic concept and object? What are some of the problems associated with reducing the veil to religion? What is the genealogy of sensationalized representations of the veil in popular discourse and media? These are among the questions addressed by Sahar Amer, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Sydney, in her brilliant new book: What is Veiling? Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. Remarkably nuanced and thoughtful, this timely book takes readers on a riveting intellectual journey that brings into focus the complexities of the veil as a discursive, political, and material object. Amer moves seamlessly between multiple texts and contexts, while showing the diversity of ways in which Muslims and non-Muslims have approached, contested, embraced, or resisted the veil in different historical conjunctures. Just as there is no one “Islamic” position on the veil, there is no one or predetermined meaning that the veil or veiling carries, Amer argues. Puncturing essentialist and stereotypical narratives about the veil, Amer convincingly argues that while seemingly a purely sartorial object, the discourse on the veil is in fact invested in and embroidered by a multiplicity of normative commitments, hopes, fears, and anxieties, irreducible to any singular history, text, religion, or motivation. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, this book is a must read for novices and experts alike; a helpful summary of the argument after each chapter should prove particularly useful in the undergraduate classroom. In our conversation, we talked about the history of the veil, discussions on the veil in major normative Muslim textual traditions, progressive Muslim reinterpretations of the veil in Islam, the veil and orientalism, competing imaginaries of the veil in Europe and the US today, Islamic fashion, and resistance to conservative understandings of the veil in contemporary art and poetry.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Buddhist Studies] Clark Chilson’s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years.  Although today at least thirty different lineages of secret Shin continue to operate, with a total estimated membership numbering in the tens of thousands, because they have been so successful at hiding (a technique they have perfected over a period of centuries), few scholars are even aware of their existence.  Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that he conducted from 1998 onward and a number of reports written by mainstream Shin monks who infiltrated these groups or researchers who befriended them, Chilson explains why certain groups concealed their doctrines and practices (and even existence) and, more importantly, reveals the long-term consequences that secrecy had on these groups.  In addition, Chilson provides an in-depth theoretical introduction, showing that scholarship on secrecy has too often conflated different types of secrecy (e.g., esotericism and social secrecy), a problem that is particularly vexing in the case of Japanese religion, in which the influence of esoteric Buddhism is so pervasive.  Rather than simply confining such theoretical concerns to the introduction and conclusion, Chilson skillfully weaves issues related to concealment into the fabric of each chapter, explaining how the case studies he presents illustrate this or that function or consequence of secrecy. Chilson distinguishes between two types of covert Shin groups—those that went into hiding due to persecution, and those in which secrecy was an integral element from their very genesis—and outlines the similarities and differences between the two.  While much scholarship on secrecy in religion has focused on why groups have secrets in the first place (e.g., to avoid persecution) and on secrecy’s personal power (e.g., personal authority, or the power to avoid detection), Chilson draws our attention instead to how concealment influences the structure, doctrines, and practices of these groups, and to the way in which secrecy, at first a consciously wielded instrument, is eventually incorporated so thoroughly into a tradition that its power becomes structural, a force controlled by no single person but which pervades the group and becomes central to its identity.  In this way, Chilson answers the question that many readers will want to ask: why did the practice of secrecy continue in persecuted groups once the threat of persecution had subsided? On a fascinating journey that takes us from Shinran’s thirteenth-century admonition of his eldest son for claiming to possess secret teachings, to a twenty-first-century covert Shin leader who worries about the dwindling number of adherents, we hear of secret caves in southern Kyushu used for clandestine worship, dietary proscriptions of chicken and milk, punishment of covert Shin members in northeastern Japan (ranging from promises to abandon covert Shin to crucifixion), and a covert Shin group whose members associated themselves with the Kūyadō and became ordained Tendai Buddhist priests in order to deflect suspicion.  In addition, through access to groups that few scholars have been granted, Chilson describes in detail many of the initiation rituals and teachings at the center of certain covert Shin groups, all the while addressing the ethical dilemmas that researchers studying secret groups face.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in Jōdo shin shū (Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism), secrecy in religion, secret societies, Edo-period regulation of religious groups, modern Japanese religion, and religious identity.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Global Conflict] Michael Cook, a widely-respected historian and scholar of Islam begins his book with a question that everyone seems to be asking these days: is Islam uniquely violent or uniquely political? Why does Islam seem to play a larger role in contemporary politics than other religions? The answers that are provided for these questions, particularly in the media, range from the ludicrous to the islamophobic. Cook, on the other hand, embarks on a much more nuanced and learned attempt at answering the question. His book, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2014), rightly begins with the assumption that if there is something unique about Islam in this regard, the uniqueness of it can only be understood through comparative study of other religions and their engagement with politics. Cook looks at Hinduism and Christianity’s involvement in modern political life and places them alongside Islam, delving deeper into issues of political identity, warfare, and social values. What he finds is interesting, and goes to the heart of almost every debate taking place in a wide variety of fields like religious studies and the sociology of religion. Listen as we talk with him about his book, about contemporary global politics, ISIS and Al-Qaeda, as well as fascinating future projects.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Islamic Studies] Many people have described Muslims modernities as being fundamentally disrupted by individual and civilizational encounters with western society. Wether rejecting or accepting alternative modes of thinking Muslims have responded to these new challenges with increasing regularity for over 200 years. Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) focuses on one of the central tasks for Muslims in the contemporary period, namely the interpretation of scripture and tradition. Jonathan A. C. Brown, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, carefully maps out multiple Muslim interpretive strategies in order to reveal the links and legacies between the pre-modern and contemporary periods. After a detailed explanation of pre-modern schools of thought, attitudes towards scripture, and hermeneutical methods Brown tackles the fragile relationship between text, community, and reader in determining ‘Truth’ in changing circumstances. We see that very often the interpretive methods used to deal with contradictions or discerning boundaries of permissibility were the same but led to divergent answers. Brown interrogates these larger issues through numerous case studies and examples. In our conversation we only scratched the surface of this detailed book. We discussed changing norms by which scripture are judged, women led prayer, the noble lie, tradition betraying or redeeming scripture, Shah Wali Allah, the Arab Spring, Sheikh Muhammad al-Gahzali, authenticity and the use of dubious hadith, verse 4:34 and the role of courts, and the historical precedent  of saying “No” to scripture.

[Cross-posted on New Books in Buddhist Studies] Paul Copp’s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dhāraṇī during the last few centuries of the first millennium.  Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dhāraṇī took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written and inscribed dhāraṇī were used to adorn and anoint the body.  A central theme is Copp’s assertion that the diffuse dhāraṇī practices that appeared centuries prior to the flowering of a high Esoteric Buddhism in the eighth century were not simply a crude precursor to the later development of a fully systematized Esoteric Buddhism, but rather were a set of loosely related practices and ideas that continued to develop alongside Esoteric Buddhism.  Through rich descriptions of dhāraṇī use and interpretation, and liberal use of Dunhuang materials, he shows that dhāraṇī were ubiquitous in all sectors of Chinese Buddhism: before, during, and after the eighth century.  In this way Copp challenges the teleological view of early dhāraṇī-based practices as being but one stage leading to the eventual triumph of a comprehensive Chinese Esoteric Buddhism.  In addition, Copp demonstrates how material dhāraṇī practices were a product of both Chinese and Indic input.   Drawing on archeological evidence, he notes that the way in which dhāraṇī were actually worn reflects Indian precedents, while on the other hand Chinese textual records describe and prescribe the wearing of dhāraṇī in terms borrowed from Chinese practices of wearing amulets, seals, medicines, and talismans.  The book contains thirty-two illustrations of amulets, written dhāraṇī, dhāraṇī stamps, dhāraṇī pillars, and funerary jars that help the reader to better visualize and understand the material practices at the center of Copp’s work.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or wishing to learn more about the history of scholarship on dhāraṇī, Chinese practices of wearing enchanted objects, Chinese interpretations and uses of dhāraṇī (particularly outside of a systematized, ritual-philosophical Esoteric Buddhism), theories about the role of writing and inscription in religious practice, and Chinese Buddhist material culture.

What gets to count as Islam? In the current political climate this question is being repeated in a variety of contexts. The tapestry of various Islamic identities is revealed in an investigation of gender. In The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (Bloomsbury, 2014), Amanullah De Sondy, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, tackles the construction of Muslim manhood in several interpretive traditions. These forms of masculinity – both ideal & reviled – are taken across a wide spectrum of thought, from Islamist perspectives to those challenging patriarchy. Many of the discussions revolve around similar themes, most importantly family, marriage, sexuality, and veiling. Other constructions of masculinity challenge heteronormativity within Muslim identities. The Qur’an is central to many of the interpretations discussed in the book but De Sondy demonstrates that here too we are not presented with a singular and clear ideal of masculinity. Qur’anic descriptions of male prophets, including Adam, Joseph, Muhammad, and Jesus, each complicate a simple narrative of Muslim manhood. In our conversation we discuss hermeneutical strategies, feminists approaches to the Qur’an, notions of love and sexual boundaries, the Mughal poet Mirza Ghalib, gender fluidity, Sufism in South Asia, prophethood, and same-sex love.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Islamic Studies] Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian peoples from the ninth to eleventh century CE in her work The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Memory is the centerpiece of her study. In the first half of her work, Savant’s analysis of memory, known as mnemohistory, coalesces around certain “sites of memory” which can include people, such as Salmān al-Fārisī, places, and events, with particular attention paid to conquest (futūḥ) narratives. These cases demonstrate how Persian identity was woven into the framework of pre-Islamic history and early Islam. However, remembering is not the only aspect that helped shape Persian, Muslim identity; forgetting is an equally important element according to Savant. Forgetting allowed irreconcilable features of Persian identity and history to be limited. The second half of her work highlights important strategies of forgetting, such as the replacing one past with an alternative account or the use of unfavorable elements of pre-Islamic Persia. Savant’s exploration of memory and its impact upon Persian, Muslim identify helps to answer important questions about conversion in early Islam. Readers, both scholars of Islam and historians in general, will find Savant’s work illuminating.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Buddhist Studies] Chün-fang Yü’s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in Taiwan during the last half of the twentieth century.  Based on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews conducted between the mid-1990s and 2013, Yü provides the reader with a vivid picture of daily life in the seminary and a close examination of the Buddhist education classes for laypeople taught by the nuns.  Along the way she explores the appearance of Buddhist seminaries in China during the late Qing and Republican periods, the transformation of Taiwanese nuns from individuals devoted to Buddhist ritual and personal salvation into religious teachers of the Buddhist laity, the changing demographics of the Taiwanese Buddhist nunnery, and the development of curricula that incorporate both traditional Buddhist subjects (e.g., study of the Vinaya) and secular ones (e.g., business management).  Through Yü’s detailed presentations of the instructional materials used to educate both nuns and laypeople, the reader begins to understand the vision that informed the activities of the Incense Light Community as well as the way in which one particular community of nuns dealt with modernization and its concomitant challenges to traditional Buddhist education, practice, and belief.  However, perhaps the most compelling aspect of this work is its ability to draw the reader into the lives of individual nuns and the complex social realities of life as a Taiwanese nun during the past half-century.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in issues of Buddhist modernization, Buddhist and Chinese views of gender, female monasticism, and Buddhist education.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr. Anthony Santoro does an amazing job of objectively presenting opposition to and support of the death penalty and explaining his own opposition to it. At the same time, Dr. Sant0ro explores, primarily through a focus on Virginia, a broad range of perspectives on the death penalty, such as official church statements, Bible studies, a gubernatorial election, and death-row chaplains. Through this religious, political, and profoundly humanistic exploration of the death penalty, Sanatoro argues that the death penalty is not primarily about the victim or the perpetrator, but about us. As such, this volume is both factually informative and thought provoking.

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between ‘Science’ and ‘Religion.’ In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), Rubenstein wonders why there is a proliferation of multiverse theoretical cosmologies by contemporary scientists. While the cosmos are generally considered to be singular and finite many well-respected physicists explain the universe’s complexities as evidence of a multiverse. These explanations argue that our world is just one of the infinite number of universes existing simultaneously. Worlds Without End shows that multiple-world cosmologies have had currency among many thinkers for over 2500 years. What draws philosophers, religious practitioners, and scientists together on these questions is there appeal to metaphysical postulates, which serve as pseudo-theologies for the contemporary age. In our conversation we discuss the Greek philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Atomists, and the Stoics, medieval Christian interpreters such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, the Telescopic discoveries of Galileo, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, the Big Bang debate, cosmic shredding, the fine-tuning problem, dark energy, Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Intelligent Design.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Islamic Studies] In Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall & Progress of Mahometanism­ (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician, Henry Stubbe (1632-76). Matar also gives a substantial introduction to his annotated edition of Stubbe’s text by situating the author in his historical context. Unlike other early modern writers on Islam, Stubbe’s ostensible goals were not to cast Islam in a negative light. On the contrary, he sought to challenge popular conceptions that understood Islam in negative terms, and although there is no evidence that Stubbe entertained conversion, he admits many admirable characteristics of Islam, ranging from Muhammad’s character to the unity of God. The English polymath was well versed in theological debates of his time and therefore equipped all the more to write the Originall, given the benefit of his comparative framework, which in part explains why the first portion of his text devotes itself to the history of early Christianity. Strikingly, however, it seems that Stubbe never learned Arabic, even though he studied religion with a leading Arabist of his time, Edward Pococke. Indeed, one novelty of Stubbe’s work was precisely his re-evaluation of Latin translations (of primary texts) that were already in circulation. Stubbe’s contributions to scholarship also speak to the history of Orientalism—a word that did not yet exist at Stubbe’s time—or how scholars in the “West” more broadly have approached Islam. Stubbe’s Originall offers insights into present-day Western discourses that still struggle—at times with egregious incompetence—to make sense of Islam and Muslims. In this regard, Matar’s detailed scholarly account of Henry Stubbe and his carefully edited version of the Originall remains as timely as ever. Undoubtedly, this meticulously researched book will interest an array of scholars, including those from disciplines of English literature, History, and Religious Studies.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians understood and adapted to the modern world. In particular, these articles focus on locating Christianity within East Asian political, economic, and social contexts and analyzing how Protestantism interacted with these different spheres of human activity. Articles in this anthology cover China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Americans who claim descent from these nations, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, covering such diverse topics as Korean megachurches, Christianity and nationalism in wartime Japan, and social networks in south China. As such, this volume offers a great deal not only those who study Christianity, but to anyone interested in learning more about East Asian history.