It has been fascinating to read Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy at a time when national boundaries—not to mention political…
Solid ground (“Idioms of the left”)
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.
Social drama, universalisms’ political violence, and transnational law
In a perhaps somewhat contrapuntal response to the provocation to see the broader world differently than we may otherwise, as…
Bigging Bosnia up
As a book about the lives of “Arab” fighters in Bosnia this is a fascinating study. Its problems arise from…
Irredeemable enemies
Representation of the non-Western Islamist fighter has long had to deal with the Eurocentric and asymmetrical nature of international relations.…
Texts, tales, transits: Archival method and the politics of listening
[Darryl] Li could not have set out a more difficult methodological task. To write an “ethnographic history from below–one that…
Is Europe Christian?—An introduction
Olivier Roy introduces his argument in Is Europe Christian?, that the real break between contemporary European culture and Christianity is…
What Europe?
[Olivier] Roy’s Is Europe Christian? reinforces the exhortation not to judge a book by its cover (or title), because ultimately…
The Universal Enemy—A reply
In the few months since its publication—and notwithstanding the emergence of a global pandemic that has irrevocably altered imaginations of…
Questions of power and privilege in Europe’s relationship with Christianity
It is not whether Europe is Christian or not that matters. What matters is who is asking the question and…
Are societies religious? (Or is there a better question?)
As I read Roy, he reserves a place for a religion that is not admixed with other types of things,…