If Bad-Ass Nuns Ruled the World
What inspired you to write If Nuns Ruled the World? Around 2009 I started spending a…
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Political Hinduism: India’s Disenchanted Religion
What inspired you to write A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of…
Read MoreThe Explanation for Everything
Ten questions for the author of a novel inspired by a landmark Intelligent Design case discusses what it’s like to create a Darwinian blowhard, and more.
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The “One True Christian” of His Age?
What inspired you to write Spider in a Tree? I live in Northampton, Massachusetts, across the…
Read MoreThe Battle To Define ‘Avatar Spirituality’
A new book of essays on the meaning of Avatar, is a down-in-the-dirt wrestling match between those who resonate with it and those who hate a film that’s been labeled pro-civilization and anti-civilization, pro-science and anti-science, un-American and too American, feminist and misogynistic, leftist and neoconservative, and pagan, atheistic, theistic, and animistic.
Read MoreA Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality
What inspired you to write Through the Door of Life? Early in my gender transition…
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America Does Not Have a Religious Identity
A new book by a Constitutional scholar argues that the founding document does not protect religion—it protects religious freedom.
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The Racial Politics of Atheism
The absence of historical and sociological context for atheist politics, and its disconnection from social justice activism, will keep it in the lily-white one-percent column.
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Waging Patience, Not Violence
For several years after 9/11, it was one of my favorite pastimes to browse the bookstores in airports in particular to check out the latest screed that had been published on the topic. All of this stoked a desire in me to write a book-length monograph soberly exploring the many dimensions of jihad as evident in different genres of Arabic language primary sources and to anchor these understandings in specific historical circumstances.
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Islam, Essential to America?
This book is my own effort to equip myself to talk about and engage with the nation’s fastest growing religion, to offer a snapshot of one of its most influential institutions, and to tell the stories of the students and scholars who have taken up the challenge of this experiment in American education.
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