Illuminates how African Muslims drew on Islam while enslaved, and how their faith ultimately played a role in the African Disapora Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously-researched, groundb ...
"Sylvan's thesis furnishes far more of the same valued experiences than is usually realized: ritual activity, communal ceremony, a philosophy and worldview, a code for living one's life, a cultural identity, a social structure, a sense of belonging, and crucially, Sylvan argues encounters with the numinous."— Journal of Religion Most studies of the religious significance of popular music focus on music lyrics, offering l ...
For centuries, Jews have been known as the «people of the book.» It is commonly thought that Judaism in the first several centuries CE found meaning exclusively in textual sources. But there is another approach to meaning to be found in ancient Judaism, one that sees it in the natural world and derives it from visual clues rather than textual ones. According to this conception, God embedded hidden signs in the world that could be read by human b ...
Winner, 2015 Book Prize from the Southern Jewish Historical Society [/b] Finalist, 2015 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies Winner, 2014 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies from the Jewish Book Council [b] The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successfu ...
In The New American Zionism, Theodore Sasson challenges the conventional view of waning American Jewish support for Israel. Instead, he shows that we are in the midst of a shift from a «mobilization» approach, which first emerged with the new state and focused on supporting Israel through big, centralized organizations, to an «engagement» approach marked by direct and personal relations with the Jewish state. Today, growing numbers of American ...
Over fifty years ago, Will Herberg theorized that future immigrants to the United States would no longer identify themselves through their races or ethnicities, or through the languages and cultures of their home countries. Rather, modern immigrants would base their identities on their religions. The landscape of U.S. immigration has changed dramatically since Herberg first published his theory. Most of today’s immigrants are Asian or ...
In the years between the Harlem Renaissance and World War II, African American playwrights gave birth to a vital black theater movement in the U.S. It was a movement overwhelmingly concerned with the role of religion in black identity. In a time of profound social transformation fueled by a massive migration from the rural south to the urban‑industrial centers of the north, scripts penned by dozens of black playwrights reflected cultur ...
In an era where church attendance has reached an all-timelow, recent polling has shown that Americans are becomingless formally religious and more promiscuous in their religiouscommitments. Within both mainline and evangelicalChristianity in America, it is common to hear of secularizingpressures and increasing competition from nonreligioussources. Yet there is a kind of religious institution that hasenjoyed great popularity over the past thirty ...
