Religion Dispatches
…theological language that no one can call heretical, she also attends yoga classes and has no problem embracing the full meaning of “Namaste” in that context. The folks most likely to be alienated by her book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want it (full disclosure: like me). For these folks, who may be, as she says, “shopping” for a plac…
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…of mine that he has tackled. Monica, who’s twenty-three, may have read one book. The point is, my kids know I’ve written books, but it’s not like they think of their dad in terms of his books. They think of me in terms of what you would expect, everyday interactions. The food that I fixed for them when they were growing up, the stories I read to them, that we spoke Italian at home, that I took them to Italy, that we ran off to California all the t…
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…arketing, Hippie Boy ended up on the New York Times Best Seller list for e-book nonfiction in 2012 and was subsequently acquired by Penguin, which released the book under its Berkley imprint earlier this year. I spoke to Ricks recently about the way religion functions in her memoir and how readers respond to her depiction of it. Hippie Boy has been used in high school curricula for troubled youth. How do they respond to the religious aspects of th…
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…Tone-deaf statements like this one are found intermittently throughout the book, and are perhaps its major weakness. And it’s this narrative that contributes to the impression that Abdul-Rauf is attempting to set himself up as a “good Muslim,” in contrast to other Muslims. While it may not be intentional on his part, it is presented as such by his supporters. Rauf’s discussion of the roots of violence, on the other hand, strikes a different, more…
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…from the author’s Twitter feed @ardenthistorian. The Gotteskrieger in her book’s title has a connotation in German that doesn’t come through in the above translation. The word, Brockschmidt tells me, as used in the German press, refers to Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists such as the Taliban and al Qaeda. “I don’t assert this name on their behalf, this is the name American Christian Nationalists, particularly the more extreme ones, give them…
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…month of fasting for Ramadan. And, of course, the epigraph and title of my book come from Gandhi himself. He said, “My reading of the Qur’an has convinced me that the basis of Islam is not violence but unadulterated peace.” Would you say most of the Muslims who have been involved in nonviolent struggle in the cases you explore in the book chose nonviolence primarily for strategic reasons or because they were committed to it on religious grounds? …
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…so many people across the world, including many who I hope will read this book, are choosing yoga as a part of their everyday regimens, but I also hoped to engage those who reject it outright, sometimes with great hostility. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? I hoped to inform all of Selling Yoga’s readers and to offend some of them. In fact, if this book does not offend at least some readers, it is not properly…
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…ps, perhaps, and included some chapters that weren’t necessary in some old book he wrote. But he stops far short of acknowledging that this “old book” (The Bell Curve) is in fact the work for which Murray is most famous, or that it is, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote back in 1994, “just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.” Of course, as he duly notes, Sullivan is “friends” with Charles Murray and published an excerpt of The B…
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…n Baptist homes, they don’t understand that God is on their side, and this book is trying to say that. This is a valuable book of history. You outline a secret summit in 1994 at the Glen Eyrie conference center in Colorado Springs, Colorado where 55 fundamentalist Christians gathered to discuss the consequences of the “militant homosexual agenda.” What happened there? I compare it to the Nazis creating a solution for the Jews. These guys literally…
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…as also done his share of interviewing, reading, and traveling, though his book is less a comprehensive history than a supposition that the church is, to some extent, a reflection of American values. He also posits a number of broad questions (maybe too broad) about how we define religion in America and about “legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion.” In the interest of objectivity, Urban employs a simultaneous “hermeneutics of resp…
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