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Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…aring the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that…

Fight the Power: How to Read, and Re-Read, the Book of Revelation

By Wil Gafney

…ainst empire and it shouldn’t be appropriated by the powers that be.” This book is a book of rebellion. It’s a book of challenge to the people in power, and that is the way it has been understood in very powerful movements in this country. If we were going to reinterpret this text today, if Christianity is in the American sense, in the global sense, is an empire with which to be contended, who might be the people rebelling be? Who would John belon…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…has exacerbated it. When you were writing, what hopes did you have for the book? What hopes can you have for a book? How has its reception lived up to that? It’s still early. I don’t know where the book is traveling right now. Over the years I’ve written in so many different areas. Hegel says that the owl of Minerva only takes flight at twilight. You can only begin to understand something as you look back. I didn’t set out to write about all this…

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…y. In France, where it was published soon after it appeared in Israel, the book became a bestseller. Sand was given the Prix Aujourd’hui—a prestigious literary prize awarded to the best nonfiction book of the year. As French history is Sand’s field, and he is thoroughly at home in French language and culture, his television and radio appearances were quite successful. But the French Jewish establishment was quite critical of the book. From Brookly…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…ican-American print is having something of a renaissance right now, with a number of books, conferences, and journal special issues devoted to the topic emerging in the past few years. So it could seem (and some have claimed) that this is a newly invented field. But this is not at all the case. My book depends upon the work of pioneering scholars who have sometimes been ignored in the rush to stake “new” academic territory. I wrote The Black Press…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…ce are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the city’s layout reoriented participants with its semi-circular streets running from A to L. This year the letters marked various rites of passage: Anniversary, Birthday, Coming Out, Divorce, Engagement, Funeral, Graduation, Hajj, Initiation, Journey, Kindergarten, and Liminal. Bisecting the rites of passage streets were cross str…

Coming Out Twice: Sexuality and Gender in Islam

By Susan Henking

…slim-majority countries have written to me asking if they can purchase the book as an internet file or an e-book, because their country censors book purchases and deliveries through the post. I have not yet worked this out with the publisher Oneworld Publications, but hope to do so, considering the political situation in many Muslim-majority countries and the tenuous privacy that people have within their families. I believe that—for better or for…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…nts run rampant, the Pentagon has been following its enemies’ lead. Second-best to the terrorists in chaoplexity is the army of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan on the Pentagon’s payroll. Often impervious to both military regulations and local laws, these companies have operated with tremendous latitude, forging business and security relationships on the ground that will make them very difficult to extract should the politicians ever wa…