Drawing on her own experiences, Tumi Mampane provides deep insights into the daily lives of women in a South African Pentecostal community. Equally, she relates those insights to Black/African feminist and womanist theory. Her autoethnographic study exposes the complexities and contestations that exist not only in Charismatic discourses, but also in the relationships that the community's women    More >

Russia's Muslims, numbering some 15 million, constitute far from a homogeneous sociopolitical group. So ... What does it mean to be a Muslim in Russia today?  How is the image of Islam constructed, and how do the country's Muslims—and non-Muslims—perceive and react to it? These are the questions that gave rise to this book. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the    More >

Winner of the Religion News Association's Award for Best Nonfiction Religion Book! The "Muslim World" is often narrowly conceived as tied to the Middle East and North Africa, or more broadly as encompassing Africa’s Sahel region, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of the Balkans. But what about Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It is this question that inspired Ken    More >

The premise of this new text is straightforward: Religion matters in world politics. Therefore, to comprehend the world around us, we need to understand how and why religion matters, analyze the interaction in a systematic way, and have a framework in which to fit facts and events that we cannot yet anticipate. The goal of Religion and Politics on the World Stage is to provide the information and    More >

Christian fundamentalists. Hindu nationalists. Islamic jihadists. Buddhist militants. Jewish extremists. Members of these and other religious groups have committed horrific acts of terrorist violence in recent decades. How is this possible? How do individuals use their religious beliefs to justify such actions? How do they manipulate the language and symbols of their faith to motivate others to    More >

While existing scholarship addresses the influence of religious affiliation on political attitudes and behaviors in the United States, a number of puzzling questions remain unanswered. In response, Matthew Miles demonstrates that a more complete conceptualization of religion as a social identity can help to explain many of those puzzles. As he explores the impact, both positive and negative, of    More >

Honorable mention for ISA's Religion and International Relations Section Book Award! The debate continues unabated: Is political Islam decipherable through the tenets of the Islamic tradition—or is it a tool of secular actors who shrewdly misuse religious references? Is it an expression of modernity, or a return to the past? Eschewing these dichotomies, Jocelyne Cesari demystifies the    More >

What exactly is Islamism? And what explains its violent expansion in recent decades? Why are Islamists so determined to change the world order? Are there similarities between Islamism and classical totalitarian regimes and ideologies? Will it fail, as those regimes did in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—or can it adapt effectively to changing realities? What are the fundamental strengths    More >

How did the vast Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Balkans to the Sahara, endure for more than four centuries despite its great ethnic and religious diversity? The classic work on this plural society, the two-volume Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, offered seminal reinterpretations of the empire's core institutions and has sparked more than a generation of innovative work since it    More >

When it was first published in 1980, Judith Laikin Elkin's foundational book on the Jewish communities of Latin America quickly became the standard resource on the topic. This new edition, the first in fifteen years, brings the story up-to-date, incorporating the events of recent decades and reflecting new insights provoked by the changing political, cultural, and economic conditions    More >

Long assumed to be an unchanging and unquestioned bulwark of established power and privilege, religion in Latin America has diversified and flourished, while taking on new social and political roles in more open societies. How did this change occur? Why did churches in the region embrace new ideas about rights, sponsor social movements, and become advocates for democracy? Are further changes on    More >

If a church resists rules, rituals, and dogma, what holds it together? Josh Packard explores the inner workings of the Emerging Church, revealing how a movement that rejects organizational trappings and embraces a do-it-yourself ethic has managed to create a distinctive place for itself at the margins of mainstream Christianity.         Packard demystifies the    More >