posted by The Editors of The Immanent Frame
As the summer months draw to a close, we’ve turned again to a handful of our contributors, asking: What are the best books and essays on religion, secularism, and public life that you’ve come across this summer? What are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University
Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University
Edward E. Curtis, IV, Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Gender and Religion, Arizona State University
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University
David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame
Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine
John Lardas Modern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marhsall College
Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University
John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University
Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University
One of the best books I read over the summer was William T. Cavanaugh’sThe Myth of Religious Violence, which argues that it is by constructing “religion” as inherently divisive and prone to violence—as something to be quarantined, expelled, or defeated by means of state power—that the secular state legitimates itself. Violence is projected outward, onto the barbarians outside the wall, thereby deflecting attention from the violence inherent in the nation-state itself.
In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, another of the books I read this summer, Wendy Brown argues that the gradual detachment of sovereignty from the nation-state under conditions of globalization motivates increasingly aggressive appeals to theological power. But since the state cannot contain the religions it mobilizes—these are generally transnational, breaching the very borders the state seeks to defend—such appeals only hasten the erosion of its sovereignty.
Is “religion” the invented problem to which the nation-state claims to provide the solution—something to be walled out? Or is it the very ground of the state’s (contested) legitimacy—something to be walled in? If “religion” functions ideologically as both the imagined exterior of the “secular” state and the imaginedinterior of its national life, it should come as no surprise that debates over the proper “place” of this protean formation show no sign of abating.
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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University
Another summer, and another level of madness is revealed in American public life. Perhaps inevitably, given my research interests, I have responded to this summer din by making less time for my explorations of jazz and American religions, turning again to the discursive formations of American political religions (okay, not completely: I also conducted immensely rewarding interviews with George Lewis, Ned Rothenberg, Ellery Eskelin, and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, among others). In my attempts to elaborate a genealogy of the rhetorics of persecution and victimizations in political religions, I have immersed myself in David Barton’s manifestos, James Dobson’s jeremiads-cum-child-rearing manuals, and anti-Sharia statutes. But when not watching Barton’s video chats about Founder piety and reading Islamophobic legislation, my thinking about technologies, assertions of victimization, information densities, and emotions has been stimulated greatly this summer by several sources.
Nearly two years after Mary-Jane Rubenstein recommended Michel Serres’ Genesis to me, I finally got around to this wondrous meditation on noise, multitude, and reason. Occupying a genre all its own, Serres’ slim volume theorizes turbulence, tombs, crowds, and apparitions, all of which helps give shape and language to the sheerly overwhelming experience of living in our common din. Nearly as suggestive was Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint, which I was also long overdue to read. A dazzling study of how “[a] certain circularity structures an intimate public,” Berlant reads the complex proximity of agonisms and affective space, fantasies of normalcy and blaring outrage, suffering and sentimentality. But perhaps most provocative, and unexpectedly so, was my latest rereading of Melville’s Billy Budd and Other Stories. We know, of course, of Melville’s abiding preoccupation with metaphor and illusion as the engines of our self-understanding. But as I pondered Rick Perry’s prayers, Michelle Bachmann’s heated promise to reduce gas prices to two dollars a gallon, and the fervent imaginations of Barack Obama’s demoniac misdeeds that seem now ubiquitous, I was entranced by “The Piazza” and “The Encantadas” specifically. We read of illusions, as sailors push away from social convention—and the obligations of shared space and vision—into the realm of the fantastic. Indeed, one of these anonymous sailors says to the exotic, perplexing Marianna, “Yours are strange fancies,” to which Marianna replies, “They but reflect the things.” And of these fancies, we read in “The Encantadas” of how “the stage of politics in this unhappy nation may be somewhat imagined, from the circumstances that all who were not of the body-guard were downright plotters and malignant traitors.” It is hard to avoid the truth that we live choked by the “strange fancies” of others, their very evident thingness the embodiment of the fantastic that defines us.
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Edward E. Curtis, IV, Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Some of the books that I read this summer were for my fall course on Islam and Modernity. I breezed through sociologist Charles Kurzman’s new book,The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. Kurzman writes an effective polemic for educated readers that simultaneously takes on the conservative/liberal belief that Muslim terrorism is a huge problem and the leftist argument that if the U.S. only changed its foreign policy there wouldn’t be any Muslim terrorism. I hope the book has the kind of impact to which it aspires in the world of the D.C. think-tank. Another of my books, Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East, is a readable account of the ways that Orientalism has affected U.S. scholarship and foreign policy concerning Muslims and Arabs. In The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World, a book written primarily for students who don’t know much about Islam, Mohammed Ayoob debunks the idea that Islam is both religion and state, or din wa dawla, as many Islamists and orientalists argue. Most of the textbook uncovers the many differences of opinion, political strategy, and religious belief among self-proclaimed Islamic states Saudi Arabia and Iran, Muslim democracies Indonesia and Turkey, Islamic political parties Hamas and Hizbullah, and transnational Muslim organizations al-Qaeda and the Tabligh Jamaat. Finally, I read Anne Rasmussen’s Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, learning not only about women’s roles in performing Indonesian exceptionalism and religious nationalism, but also delighting in the Islamic music and Qur’anic recitations that she both analyzes and gives examples of on the book’s website.
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Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Gender and Religion, Arizona State University
I spent several days in early June packing up my office for a move across campus, and how unexpectedly strange an experience that turned out to be, how oddly predictive of the plots I’d go on to download as fiction for the rest of the summer. The new space was more welcoming but smaller, with bigger windows and fewer shelves, so the task at the outset seemed to be to set aside the books I could do without. But soon it became to decide what I could possibly justify keeping: those yellowed paperbacks of Husserl and Kierkegaard, with my teenaged annotations (so true!!) in ballpoint? Decades of print journals? The doorstop-OED, complete with magnifying glass, that everyone I’d known in grad school had scored with a book club membership years earlier? Concordances, articles, definitive editions: everything that had not become interred in the era that produced it seemed now to be had by clicking. Then there was all the other paper: essays and exams that went unclaimed for years, lecture notes in longhand, drawers of manilla files. And the miscellaneous scraps I shook from the spines of old books: postcards, invitations, handwritten notes, souvenirs less of particular connections than of the ways that almost all of us have stopped communicating. Some universities now have a ponderous designation, “brick-and-mortar,” for classes that actually take place with real people in a room, as though the whole face-to-face business had become irremediably airless and fraught. What couldn’t be found or done more easily, more deftly, online? A lot of us were moving out of the building at the same time, and the hallways became nearly impassable with high, haphazard stacks of all we were discarding. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. We got a little giddy with it. We’d started the work, some of us, with headphones on, but soon were cranking up the dusty speakers we’d probably also leave behind.
The novels I finally fired up on my Kindle to read on vacation—Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and Dana Spiotta’sStone Arabia—were ripped straight from the best-of lists I’d scanned quickly while packing. It’s meant as description, not detraction, to say that each of these books somehow seemed to blur into the other three, in much the way that Egan’s loosely interlinked chapters come by the final pages to occupy the same, dazzling novel. A character in one book could plausibly go tripping into any other, blink a few times, and find himself in the same perilous mash-up, the shared predicament, to paraphrase Zadie Smith, of 1.0 humans trying to make sense of a 2.0 world. Even the soundtrack across three of the four is nearly the same: the music of the last five decades—its genius, its all-senses-of badness, and the often seamy business of selling it—belongs to these novels not only as background but as protagonist, anti-hero, and driver of plots, a token of resilience and a cautionary tale, a carrier throughout of the otherwise muted fear that what was happening to music post-Napster was what would happen to literature, was what had already happened to life.
Read more at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/08/31/reflections-on-summer-reading/