Writing about the image of the “Muslim” at America’s founding, Denise Spellberg writes how debates on religious tests for office…
From the Founders to Trump: The legalities of “Muslims”
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
From Jefferson to Jeffersonian battles
Among the scholars who have most inspired my work as a political scientist are multiple historians—whether intellectual, legal, or religious.…
Spirit in the Dark—An introduction
Josef Sorett (Columbia University) introduces a critical exchange centered on his new book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of…
Josef Sorett and the idea of a racial aesthetic
Josef Sorett’s Spirit in the Dark is a marvelous book, not least of all due to its meticulous, incisive, and…
Don’t play that song, Nathan Scott
I welcome Spirit in the Dark for the seriousness with which it opens new prospects for the study of religion and literature…
How much a spirit cost
I first connected with the work of Josef Sorett when he published this strong-voiced call to make hip hop a serious subject…
The archaeology of a discipline and the discipline to come
Michael Allan’s groundbreaking new book In the Shadow of World Literature gives us one of the most moving and powerful…
“Only a human encounter . . .”
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan writes the initial response to Nadia Marzouki's Islam: An American Religion in this summer book forum.
Worlding with the Rosetta Stone
Throughout his study, Allan's sensitive attention to forms and practices transports us to the constitutive limits of world literature. Questions…
Criticism and catastrophe
Rather than a cosmopolitan space where all national literary traditions can finally cohabitate on an equal footing, world literature is…