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Religion is often viewed as a universally ancient element of the human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered its religion only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, this book tells the story of this discovery and how it transformed a community's relations to its past and to its members, as well as to those outside the community. And, as the book demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity. The book shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its development. Showing us that to become a modern, ethical subject is to become religious, this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity.

This ethnography probes the ethos and attitude created by radio disc jockeys on the bi-national Caribbean island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten. Examining the intersection of Christianity, calypso, and capitalism, the book shows how a multiethnic and multi-religious island nation, where livelihoods depend on tourism, has managed to encourage all social classes to transcend their ethnic and religious differences. In the analysis, the book discusses the island DJs, whose formulations of Christian faith, musical creativity, and capitalist survival express ordinary people's hopes and fears and promote tolerance.

In Critical Christianity, Courtney Handman analyzes the complex and conflicting forms of sociality that Guhu-Samane Christians of rural Papua New Guinea privilege and celebrate as “the body of Christ.” Within Guhu-Samane churches, processes of denominational schism—long relegated to the secular study of politics or identity—are moments of critique through which Christians constitute themselves and their social worlds. Far from being a practice of individualism, Protestantism offers local people ways to make social groups into sacred units of critique. Bible translation, produced by members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a crucial resource for these critical projects of religious formation. From early interaction with German Lutheran missionaries to engagements with Summer Institute of Linguistics to the contemporary moment of conflict, Handman presents some of the many models of Christian sociality that are debated among Guhu-Samane Christians. Central to the study are Handman's rich analyses of the media through which this critical Christian sociality is practiced, including language, sound, bodily movement, and everyday objects. This original and thought-provoking book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology and religious studies.

This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.

Violence has been a central feature of America's history, culture, and place in the world. It has taken many forms: from state-sponsored uses of force such as war or law enforcement, to revolution, secession, terrorism and other actions with important political and cultural implications. Religion also holds a crucial place in the American experience of violence, particularly for those who have found order and meaning in their worlds through religious texts, symbols, rituals, and ideas. Yet too often the religious dimensions of violence, especially in the American context, are ignored or overstated—in either case, poorly understood. This book corrects these misunderstandings. Charting and interpreting the tendrils of religion and violence, this book reveals how formative moments of their intersection in American history have influenced the ideas, institutions, and identities associated with the United States. Religion and violence provide crucial yet underutilized lenses for seeing America anew—including its outlook on, and relation to, the world.

American environmentalism historically has been associated with the interests of white elites. Yet religious leaders in the twenty-first century have helped instill concern about the earth among groups diverse in religion, race, ethnicity, and class. How did that happen and what are the implications? Building on scholarship that provides theological and ethical resources to support the “greening” of religion, God and the Green Divide examines religious environmentalism as it actually happens in the daily lives of urban Americans. Baugh argues that the spread of religious environmentalism in the United States has relied not simply on the “ecological dimensions” of scriptures, theology, and religious traditions, but also on latent assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class. By carefully examining negotiations of racial and ethnic identities as central to the history of religious environmentalism, this work complicates assumptions that religious environmentalism is a direct expression of theology, ethics, or religious beliefs.

This book explores the meaning of “soul” in sacred and profane incarnations, from its biblical origins to its central place in the rich traditions of black and Latin history. Surveying the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, philosophers, and theologians, the book shows how their understandings of the “soul” revolve around narratives of justice, liberation, and spiritual redemption. The book contends that biblical traditions and hip-hop emerged out of experiences of dispossession and oppression. Whether born in the ghettos of America or of the Roman Empire, hip-hop and Christianity have endured by giving voice to the persecuted. This book offers a view of soul in living color, as a breathing, suffering, dreaming thing.

Even though they are immersed in sex-saturated society, millions of teens are pledging to remain virgins until their wedding night. How are evangelical Christians persuading young people to wait until marriage? This book looks closely at the language of the chastity movement and discovers a savvy campaign that uses sex to “sell” abstinence. Drawing from interviews with evangelical leaders and teenagers, the book examines the strategy to shift from a negative “just say no” approach to a positive one: “just say yes” to great sex within marriage. The book sheds new light on an abstinence campaign that has successfully recast a traditionally feminist idea—“my body, my choice”—into a powerful message, but one that the author suggests may ultimately reduce evangelicalism's transformative power. Focusing on the United States, the study also includes a comparative dimension by examining the export of this evangelical agenda to sub-Saharan Africa.

This book is a mythology—not a history or a biography—inasmuch as the author’s interest is in tracing the myths Chavez created about himself and those told about him, paying particular attention to the variations of the story. Rather than weigh in on the differences, the author probes the meaning of the incongruity. The book moves theoretically from religious poetics to religious politics. It argues for Chavez as a religious border crosser—“nepantla spirituality”—and frames his movement as engaged with American civil religion.

The connection between popular culture and religion is an enduring part of American life. With 75 percent new content, the third edition of this multifaceted and popular collection has been revised and updated throughout to provide greater religious diversity in its topics and address critical developments in the study of religion and popular culture. Ideal for classroom use, the book gives increased attention to the implications of digital culture and the increasingly interactive quality of popular culture. It provides a framework to help students understand and appreciate the work in diverse fields, methods, and perspectives. The book contains an updated introduction, discussion questions, and other instructional tools.

Why do religion and science often appear in conflict in America's public sphere? This book examines the results from the first-ever study to combine large-scale empirical analysis of some of our foremost religion and science debates with in-depth research into what Americans actually want in the public sphere. The surprising finding is that apparent conflicts involving religion and science reflect a more fundamental conflict between media elites and ordinary Americans over what is good debate. For elite representatives, good debate advances an agenda, but, as the book shows, for many Americans it is defined by engagement and deliberation. This hidden conflict over what constitutes debate's proper role diminishes the possibility for science and religion to be discussed meaningfully in public life. Challenging our understanding of science, religion, and conflict, this book raises profound questions about the future of the public sphere and American democracy.

This book explores the life and work of two brothers, a scientist and an artist, who changed the way we think about science, religion, and the future of our species. As an evolutionary biologist and conservationist, Julian Huxley argued that we must accept responsibility for our future evolution, and coined the term Transhumanism to promote this idea in the 1950s. While Aldous Huxley explored the dystopian dangers of manipulating human nature in his most famous work of literature, Brave New World, his less noted writings on religion, ecology, and human consciousness may in fact have been more influential in the long run. These proved to be powerful catalysts for the environmental and human potential movements that proliferated across the industrialized world in the decades following 1945. While they often disagreed about the role of science and technology in human progress, Julian and Aldous Huxley both believed that the future of our species would depend on a saner set of relations with each other and with our environment. Their common concern for ecology has given their ideas about the outlook for Homo sapiens an enduring resonance in the face of climate change and mass extinctions. The amphibian metaphor that both brothers used to describe humanity highlights not only the complexity and mutability of our species but also our ecologically precarious situation.