Nadia Marzouki’s Islam: An American Religion is one of the most exciting books I have read on Islam in the…
On the evolution and impact of anti-Muslim polemics
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.
Future fanatics of world literature?
While this future world literature is hospitable—more broadly, to aspiring critics, and, in a more specialized sense, to literary scholars…
Islam: An American Religion and the paranoia of anti-Muslim politics
When is a discussion, debate, polemic, or rant about Islam and Muslims not really about Islam and Muslims? If it’s…
The contested worlds of world literature
Reading Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of World Literature, I thought of two competing ways to understand political impasses. On…
For the love of literature—A critique
No intervention in literature studies could be more urgent than the one offered in Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of…
In the Shadow of World Literature—A reply
In what follows, I have hopes of acknowledging my debt to the various participants of the forum from whom I…
Holy attention as art
Importantly, Marno reminds us not to confuse holy attention with religious experience, experience in the sense of suddenly experiencing something…
Attention and distraction, prayer and poetry
What is holy attention? Does its holiness have to do with the manner with which one attends, the object of…
Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu—An introduction
In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, rather than looking for people doing religion, I looked for people using religion. The variety of…
The stakes of attention
When we think of the ways of “generating an experience of full attentiveness” in devotional contexts we often tend to…