New Books in Religion

For many Muslim communities particular religious identities were formulated or hardened within colonial realities. These types of cultural encounters were structural for the various Muslim tribes in the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao and Sulu during the turn of the twentieth century. In Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), Michael Hawkins, Assistant Professor of history at Creighton University, demonstrates the dramatic consequences of this short historical moment for Filipino Muslims. Between 1899-1913, professional ethnographers and military officers worked to represent Filipino Muslims as noble primitive warriors. Various communal identities were fused into a singular construction, the Moro. Moro identity was constructed in the American imagination to serve colonial civilizing agendas. Ultimately, this period served as a crucial moment for Filipino Muslim identity and is looked back upon with nostalgia. In our conversation we discussed imperial historicism, colonial legitimacy, taxonomy and classification, capitalism, slavery in American and Moro society, communal remembrance, frontiers, and Islamic authenticity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Timothy Michael Law, Lecturer in Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, offers a thorough chronicle of the creation and afterlife of the Septuagint in When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford University Press, 2013). Through this narrative Law also interrogates broader concerns, such as the ways we examine canons and scriptures during this period, translation in the ancient world, authorial intentions, and audience receptions. The book covers the role the Septuagint in the Bible’s lengthy history up until the present and demonstrates how our contemporary engagement with it can illuminate numerous shadowy paths in Religious Studies. In our conversation we discussed Hellenistic Judaism, apocrypha, Jerome, the Hebrew Bible, Origen’s Hexapla, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical citation, Augustine, the Protestant reformation, Eusebius, and academic writing for public audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P. Young shows in his fascinating exploration of this issue in his Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate (Oxford University Press, 2013). In this well-researched work, Dr. Young shows why many Catholics missionaries, including those who were not French, were willing to look to French protection in China, and how that impeded the growth of an indigenous, acculturated church. Dr. Young also tells the fascinating story of how a few missionaries, sympathetic to Chinese aspirations and wishing to build a truly Chinese Catholic Church, worked with the Vatican in an attempt to undermine the French Protectorate. As readers of this fine book will find, the merely partial success of this project has echoes that still reverberate in China today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“In no other instance,” notes Yaacov Ariel, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “have members of one community of faith considered another group to hold a special role in the divine course of human redemption and to be their God’s first nation.” This theological concept underpins An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (NYU Press, 2013), Ariel’s most recent monograph, published in 2013 with New York University Press. It weaves together various strands of evangelical-Jewish relations from the US, England, and Israel. Ariel also takes his study beyond most others on the topic by bringing together chapters on politics, the state of Israel, and Christian Zionism with those on less studied aspects, including evangelical responses to the Holocaust, missionary work, and Messianic Judaism. An Unusual Relationship synthesizes more than a hundred years of history in lucid and readable prose and will appeal to general audiences, as well as specialists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Vahid Brown and Don Rassler‘s Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a meticulously researched and remarkably detailed exposition of the Haqqani network’s growth and ongoing importance among Pakistani militant organizations. Beginning with an expansive history of the Haqqani family’s background, and subsequent emergence as a critical lynchpin in the Pakistani – and by extension US – anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan, the book goes on to cover the Haqqanis’ present operations, including its involvement in attacks on NATO, Indian, and government forces in Afghanistan. By shedding light on a group that, while sometimes mentioned in news media, is largely unknown to non-specialists, Fountainhead of Jihad is a major scholarly contribution to the subject of South Asian extremism. The book is in large part based on fascinating primary source material, much of it gleaned from seized documents contained in the US military’s HARMONY database, and media produced by the Haqqanis and other militant actors. Those interested in Pakistani intelligence’s relationship to extremism, the past and future of militancy in South Asia, and  terrorist modus operandi more generally, will all benefit from a close reading of Fountainhead of Jihad. After reading the book, I also believe that some familiarity with the Haqqani network is a prerequisite to understand the emergence and continued existence of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. While insurgency rages on in Syria and Iraq, and attention on South Asian terrorism has waned somewhat, I have little doubt that the Haqqanis will continue to be a key actor in the “Great Game” between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India long after the demise of ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusrah, and other more recent additions to the Sunni militant scene. Among both scholars and practitioners, the counter-terrorism community would be well advised to have a thorough understanding of the Haqqanis, and I suspect there is no better source to acquire this understanding from than Fountainhead of Jihad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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 KÅ«yadÅ 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 shÅ« (Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism), secrecy in religion, secret societies, Edo-period regulation of religious groups, modern Japanese religion, and religious identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion