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Deeb & Harb, “Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut”

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut by Lara Deeb (Scripps College) and Mona Harb (American University of Beirut). The publisher’s description follows.bookjacket

South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi’i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more politically involved, to the religious leaders worried that Lebanese youth are losing their moral compasses, Leisurely Islam provides a sophisticated and original look at leisure in the Lebanese capital.

What makes a café morally appropriate? How do people negotiate morality in relation to different places? And under what circumstances might a pious Muslim go to a café that serves alcohol? Lara Deeb and Mona Harb highlight tensions and complexities exacerbated by the presence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun. The authors elucidate the political, economic, religious, and social changes that have taken place since 2000, and examine leisure’s influence on Lebanese sociopolitical and urban situations.

Asserting that morality and geography cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, Leisurely Islamoffers a colorful new understanding of the most powerful community in Lebanon today.

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van der Veer, “The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India”

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India by Peter van der Veer (Utrecht University). The publisher’s description follows.

bookjacket

The Modern Spirit of Asia challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. He traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled.

The Modern Spirit of Asia moves deftly from Kandinsky’s understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang. Van der Veer, an outspoken proponent of the importance of comparative studies of religion and society, eloquently makes his case in this groundbreaking examination of the spiritual and the secular in China and India.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Rienzi on the Abercrombie & Fitch Case

At the Becket Fund’s blog, Mark Rienzi has an interesting analysis of the Abercrombie & Fitch case I discussed last week:

The decision is important for two reasons.  First, it is a reminder that, in a religiously diverse country, people of different faiths will have different needs.  Some workers need to wear headscarves, some need Saturdays off, some cannot assist with abortions or capital punishment.  The sensible response to most of these differences is to accommodate them—to recognize that our society is filled with wonderful differences, and to find ways to work around those differences without kicking people out of their jobs.

The case is also important for arguments the Administration chose not to make.  It did not argue that Ms. Khan had forfeited her religious freedom rights when she voluntarily went to work for a profit-making company.  It did not say that she would only have religious liberty if she cabined her job search to Muslim religious organizations.  It did not say that because she was earning money in the commercial marketplace she had somehow forfeited her right to conduct herself in accordance with her religion.

Read the whole thing.

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Treasure, “The Huguenots”

This month, Yale University Press publishes The Huguenots, by Geoffrey Treasure.  The publisher’s description follows. Huguenots

Following the Reformation, a growing number of radical Protestants came together to live and worship in Catholic France. These Huguenots survived persecution and armed conflict to win—however briefly—freedom of worship, civil rights, and unique status as a protected minority. But in 1685, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished all Huguenot rights, and more than 200,000 of the radical Calvinists were forced to flee across Europe, some even farther.   In this capstone work, Geoffrey Treasure tells the full story of the Huguenots’ rise, survival, and fall in France over the course of a century and a half. He explores what it was like to be a Huguenot living in a “state within a state,” weaving stories of ordinary citizens together with those of statesmen, feudal magnates, leaders of the Catholic revival, Henry of Navarre, Catherine de’ Medici, Louis XIV, and many others. Treasure describes the Huguenots’ disciplined community, their faith and courage, their rich achievements, and their unique place within Protestantism and European history. The Huguenot exodus represented a crucial turning point in European history, Treasure contends, and he addresses the significance of the Huguenot story—the story of a minority group with the power to resist and endure in one of early modern Europe’s strongest nations.

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Roberts, “Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism”

This month, Columbia University Press publishes Encountering Religion: encountering religionResponsibility and Criticism After Secularism by Tyler Roberts (Grinnell College).  The publisher’s description follows.

Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between “secular” and “religious” to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. The artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical “academic study of religion” and an ideological and authoritarian “religion,” he argues, only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, Roberts calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of “encounter” and “response,” illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. 

To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds, and scholars must confront questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. Roberts refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. In humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious, and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Radio Program on God and Government

Here is a radio program where I recently appeared as a guest called “Interfaith Voices.” The program is organizing a substantial series for the next several months on “God and Government” whose aim is to explore church-state relations in different countries.

This episode kicks the series off and considers the United States and Canada. There was a broad spectrum of views represented: the other guests are Professors Jacques Berlinerblau (Jewish Civilization, Georgetown) and Lori Beaman (Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa). The editing process cut out some of the more interesting disagreements, but what remains gives a strong flavor of the discussion.

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The Top Five New Law & Religion Papers on SSRN

From SSRN’s list of most frequently downloaded law and religion papers posted in the last 60 days, here are the current top five.  Since last week, Douglas Laycock remains at #1, Perry Dane remains at #2, Elizabeth Sepper remains at #3, Richard Garnett remains at #4, and Patrick McKinley Brennan remains at #5.

1. Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars  by Douglas Laycock (U. of Virginia, School of Law) [258 downloads]

2. Doctrine and Deep Structure in the Contraception Mandate Debate by Perry Dane (Rutgers, School of Law) [232 downloads]

3. Contraception and the Birth of Corporate Conscience  by Elizabeth Sepper (Washington U., School of Law [148 downloads]

4. ‘The Freedom of the Church’: (Towards) an Exposition, Translation, and Defense by Richard W. Garnett (Notre Dame Law School)  [135 downloads]

5. ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ Comes Home to Roost? Same-Sex Union, the Summum Bonum, and Equality by Patrick McKinley Brennan (Villanova U., School of Law) [78 downloads]

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Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”

do muslimNext month, Harvard University Press will publish Do Muslim Women Need Saving by Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University).  The publisher’s description follows.

Frequent reports of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse have given rise to a consensus in the West, a message propagated by human rights groups and the media: Muslim women need to be rescued. Lila Abu-Lughod boldly challenges this conclusion. An anthropologist who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, she delves into the predicaments of Muslim women today, questioning whether generalizations about Islamic culture can explain the hardships these women face and asking what motivates particular individuals and institutions to promote their rights.

In recent years Abu-Lughod has struggled to reconcile the popular image of women victimized by Islam with the complex women she has known through her research in various communities in the Muslim world. Here, she renders that divide vivid by presenting detailed vignettes of the lives of ordinary Muslim women, and showing that the problem of gender inequality cannot be laid at the feet of religion alone. Poverty and authoritarianism–conditions not unique to the Islamic world, and produced out of global interconnections that implicate the West–are often more decisive. The standard Western vocabulary of oppression, choice, and freedom is too blunt to describe these women’s lives.

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? is an indictment of a mindset that has justified all manner of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of rescuing women from Islam–as well as a moving portrait of women’s actual experiences, and of the contingencies with which they live.

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“Religion and Regimes: Support, Separation, and Opposition” (Tamadonfar et al., eds.)

religion regimesNext month, Lexington Books will publish Religion and Regimes: Support, Separation, and Opposition, edited by Mehran Tamadonfar (U. of Nevada) and Ted G. Jelen (U. of Nevada).  The publisher’s description follows.

This work is a collection of essays that describe and analyze religion and regime relations in various nations in the contemporary world. The contributors examine patterns of interaction between religious actors and national governments that include separation, support, and opposition. In general, the contributors find that most countries have a majority or plurality religious tradition, which will seek a privileged position in public life. The nature of the relationship between such traditions and national policy is largely determined by the nature of opposition. A pattern of quasi-establishment is most common in settings in which opposition to a dominant religious tradition is explicitly religious. However, in some instances, the dominant tradition is associated with a discredited prior regime, in which a pattern of legal separation is most common. Conversely, in some nations, a dominant religion is, for historical reasons, strong associated with national identity. Such regimes are often characterized by a “lazy monopoly,” in which the public influence of religion is reduced.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: “Is Europe Joining the International Religious Freedom Bandwagon?” (Sept. 18)

On September 18, the Berkley Center at Georgetown will host a panel discussion, “Is Europe Joining the International Religious Freedom Bandwagon?”:

Growing international threats to religious freedom are coming under increasing scrutiny by Western democracies. Long a foreign policy emphasis in the United States, and more recently in Canada, the crisis in international religious freedom (IRF) is gaining greater attention in Europe, especially in Italy and the United Kingdom. Can these nations be effective in promoting international religious freedom? Will their own domestic struggles with religious freedom handicap their efforts abroad?

CLR Forum Guest Commentator Pasquale Annicchino will be a panelist. Details are here.