Michael Altman’s contribution to our historical understandings of American ideas about foreign religions is to note the ways in which…
Constructing Indian religion in Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu
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.
Devout death
Marno's argument about the philosophical import of holy attention puts death in a curious position. Death becomes a cognitive problem…
India in the American imagination: Historicizing the politics of representation
Continuing to reinforce the centrality of white Protestant capitalist culture to American identity sometimes requires Americans to turn their hostile…
Prayer to no end
Sightings of a bridge between philosophy and religion by way of cognitive technē are among this book’s most exciting contributions.…
Death Be Not Proud—A reply
What I suggest in my book is that Donne’s sermon, like many other discussions of attention and distraction in early…
Comparison and classification in American religious history
The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and, even more spectacularly, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 reveal the power of the…
Sharia Compliant—An introduction
Observing and participating in Muslim conversations on Islamic law through a decolonial lens led me to see that debate as…
Hacking and “common sense”
When the ulema in Northern Nigeria did not hack the fiqh but rather simply reproduced medieval codes in greatly reductionist…
Law, authority, and tradition
Rumee Ahmed’s Sharia Compliant: A User’s Guide to Hacking Islamic Law is a unique book in that it tackles some…
Islamic law as “code”: Language, system, power
Ahmed situates hacking as faithful work for the Muslim, and also as deeply anchored in Islamic jurisprudential traditions. Fiqh (Islamic…