Where Religion Lives

The past two decades have witnessed pervasive anxieties in US Muslim communities around a perceived crisis of faith. As Zaid Adhami argues in this richly textured ethnography, these concerns are fundamentally about the pressures and dilemmas of authenticity-what it really means to be a Muslim. While discussions about authenticity in Islam typically focus on maintaining tradition and competing claims to "true Islam," Adhami focuses instead on the powerful idea of being true to one's own self and what it means to have genuine belief. Drawing on extensive conversations with American Muslims and careful readings of broader communal discourse, Adhami shows that this drive for personal authenticity plays out in complicated ways. It can produce deep doubt while also serving as the grounds to affirm tradition. It can converge with revivalist modes of piety, but it can also prompt emphatic challenges to communal orthodoxies. Through vivid storytelling and sensitive analysis, Adhami illuminates why religious doubt is often a source of intense anxiety in today's world and how people maintain their faith despite such unsettling uncertainty.

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted sites in the city, and it moves within an urban environment routinely marked by violence and death. While based in Catholic traditions, devotion to souls is as complex and multifaceted as religion itself in Brazil, where African, Portuguese, and other cultural forms have blended and evolved over centuries. Michael Amoruso's insightful work uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.

The overall rate of incarceration in the United States has been on the rise since 1970s, skyrocketing during Ronald Reagan's presidency, and recently reaching unprecedented highs. Looking for innovative solutions to the crises produced by gigantic prison populations, Florida's Department of Corrections claims to have found a partial remedy in the form of faith and character-based correctional institutions (FCBIs). While claiming to be open to all religious traditions, FCBIs are almost always run by Protestants situated within the politics of the Christian right. The religious programming is typically run by the incarcerated along with volunteers from outside the prison. Stoddard takes the reader deep inside FCBIs, analyzing the subtle meanings and difficult choices with which the incarcerated, prison administrators, staff, and chaplains grapple every day. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research and historical analysis, Brad Stoddard argues that FCBIs build on and demonstrate the compatibility of conservative Christian politics and neoliberal economics. Even without authoritative data on whether FCBIs are assisting rehabilitation and reducing recidivism rates, similar programs are appearing across the nation-only Iowa has declared them illegal under non-establishment-of-religion statutes. Exposing the intricate connections among incarceration, neoliberal economics, and religious freedom, Stoddard makes a timely contribution to debates about religion's role in American society.

In this immersive ethnography, Tony Tian-Ren Lin explores the reasons that Latin American immigrants across the United States are increasingly drawn to Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism, a strand of Protestantism gaining popularity around the world. Lin contends that Latinos embrace Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that believers may achieve both divine salvation and worldly success, because it helps them account for the contradictions of their lives as immigrants. Weaving together his informants' firsthand accounts of their religious experiences and everyday lives, Lin offers poignant insight into how they see their faith transforming them both as individuals and as communities. The theology fuses salvation with material goods so that as these immigrants pursue spiritual rewards they are also, perhaps paradoxically, striving for the American dream. After all, Lin observes, prosperity is the gospel of the American dream. In this way, while becoming better Prosperity Gospel Pentecostals they are also adopting traditional white American norms. Yet this is not a typical story of smooth assimilation as most of these immigrants must deal with the immensity of the broader cultural and political resistance to their actually becoming Americans. Rather, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism gives Latinos the logic and understanding of themselves as those who belong in this country yet remain perpetual outsiders.

Millions of tourists visit Washington, D.C., every year, but for some the experience is about much more than sightseeing. Lauren R. Kerby's lively book takes readers onto tour buses and explores the world of Christian heritage tourism. These expeditions visit the same attractions as their secular counterparts-Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the war memorials, and much more-but the white evangelicals who flock to the tours are searching for evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation. The tours preach a historical jeremiad that resonates far beyond Washington. White evangelicals across the United States tell stories of the nation's Christian origins, its subsequent fall into moral and spiritual corruption, and its need for repentance and return to founding principles. This vision of American history, Kerby finds, is white evangelicals' most powerful political resource-it allows them to shapeshift between the roles of faithful patriots and persecuted outsiders. In an era when white evangelicals' political commitments baffle many observers, this book offers a key for understanding how they continually reimagine the American story and their own place in it.

Exploring a contemporary Judaism rich with the textures of family, memory, and fellowship, Jodi Eichler-Levine takes readers inside a flourishing American Jewish crafting movement. As she traveled across the country to homes, craft conventions, synagogue knitting circles, and craftivist actions, she joined in the making, asked questions, and contemplated her own family stories. Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more, Eichler-Levine shows: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world. The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, as Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people. Craftmaking is nothing less than an act of generative resilience that fosters survival. Whether taking place in such groups as the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework or the Jewish Hearts for Pittsburgh, or in a home studio, these everyday acts of creativity-yielding a needlepoint rabbi, say, or a handkerchief embroidered with the Hebrew words tikkun olam-are a crucial part what makes a religious life.

This fascinating book takes readers inside the world of faith-based progressive community organizing, one of the largest and most effective social justice movements in the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, Jack Delehanty shows how organizers use religion to build power for change. As Delehanty convincingly demonstrates, religion is more than beliefs, doctrines, and rituals; within activist communities, it also fuels a process of personal reflection and relationship building that transforms people's understandings of themselves, those around them, and the political system. Relational practices like one-on-one conversation and public storytelling take on new significance in faith-based community organizations. Delehanty reveals how progressive organizers use such relational practices to help people see common ground across lines of race, class, and religious sect. From this common ground, organizers work to develop and deploy shared ideas of moral citizenship that emphasize common dignity, equity, and prosperity and nurture the sense that public action is the only way one can live out religious faith.

How do secular politics work to manage the emotional, affective, and embodied nature of religion in the public sphere? Drawing on an expansive transnational ethnography in France and Canada and assessing contemporary French and Québécois governmental legislation on secularism and immigration, Jennifer Selby considers expectations for secular bodies and sensibilities among men and women of Algerian origin. In her subjects' evocative narratives of longing and belonging, Selby charts how secular sensibilities emerge in marriage partner preferences, family relationships, rituals, dress, and more. Selby reveals how these sensibilities develop and respond to legal and other forms of state authority, with legacies of colonialism in France and Québec playing a substantial role. In demonstrating how secularism is expressed and experienced around intimate relationships and civil marriage, Selby persuasively argues that romance is a crucial contact zone for the politics of secularism. Her study invites readers to wrestle with their own entanglements in state and cultural expectations of secular bodies and the liberal fictions of separation between the religious and public spheres.

In “Haitian Vodou”, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in this richly textured book, that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange. This innovative book centers on fashion and other forms of self-presentation, yet it draws together many strands of thought and practice, showing how religion is a multisensorial experience of engagement with what the gods want and demand from worshippers. Nwokocha's ethnographic work will challenge and enrich readers' understandings not only of Vodou and its place in Black religious experience but also of religion's entanglements with gender and sexuality, race, and the material and spiritual realms.