Description
Book SynopsisAt Home and Abroad bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse authors to explore ties across conceptual and political boundaries. They examine the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies.
Trade ReviewThis profound and inspiring volume turns American religion inside out, revealing the often surprising transnational and imperial connections that make it up. By setting all the categories dancing—religion and not-religion, domestic and foreign, theology and law—it illuminates how religious and national identities are mutually constituted. An exciting contribution to reflections on secular modernity. -- Cassie Adcock, author of
The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious FreedomIn fascinating case studies on topics as wide-ranging as yoga and Muhammad Ali, homemaking in Palestine and civic religion in Japan,
At Home and Abroad brings its subject compellingly into view: an inside/outside dynamic in the workings of American religion as an object of export and a vaunted model to the world. The volume explores a tension between religious practice in the United States and the varieties of religion the United States imposes, encourages, or recognizes abroad. The tension inheres in the notion that religion is uniquely perfected at home and has yet to be perfected abroad, an ameliorative project to which the United States is central and from which it is at the same time exempt. In this way, religion operates as an engine of American exceptionalism at home and abroad even when it is in either context 'hard to see.' This stellar collection makes plain that American history is global history and that the operative borderlessness of American religion, whether manifested as freedom, empire, violence, charity, coercion, missions, or claims to self-evident truth, is a driver of both. -- Tracy Fessenden, author of
Religion Around Billie HolidayEngaging with history, biography, and theory, the essays in this collection open new horizons for the study of American religion. Together, they demonstrate that the categories of 'at home' and 'abroad' are enormously generative—both through the distinction and through its failures. Taking us from Puerto Rico to South Africa, from Hawaii to the Philippines, these thoughtful essays are each fascinating in themselves; collectively, they show how the asymmetries between religion 'at home' and 'abroad' illuminate the working of power that always accompanies religious talk and practice. -- Vincent W. Lloyd, author of
In Defense of CharismaAt Home and Abroad is a stimulating collection of essays that makes a major contribution in advancing understanding of how foreign and domestic policies have operated together with respect to religion. Certain to be well received. -- Amanda Porterfield, author of
Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern CorporationEach of the essays breaks new ground...This book is a welcome contribution for scholars of race, religion, political science, and history. * Nova Religio *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Religion, Law, and Politics, American Style, by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Part I: Making Religion American1. A Home, Made Abroad: American Religion from Colonies Through the Civil War, by Evan Haefeli
2. “A Perfect, Irrevocable Gift”: Recognizing the Proprietary Church in Puerto Rico 1898–1908, by David Maldonado Rivera
3. Home Rule: Equitable Justice in Progressive Chicago and the Philippines, by Nancy Buenger
4. America Is Hard to See, by Courtney Bender
Part II: Making Ourselves5. Homemaking in Palestine: Jessie Sampter, Religion, and Relation, by Sarah Imhoff
6. On the Abroad of a Different Home: Muhammad Ali in Micro-Scope, by M. Cooper Harriss
7. Domestic Bones, Foreign Land, and the Kingdom Come: Jurisdictions of Religion in Contemporary Hawaii, by Greg Johnson
8. “Legacy,” by Matthew Scherer
Part III: Inside/Outside9. The Rule of Law, by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
10. Double Standards in a Tripartite World, by Jolyon Baraka Thomas
11. The Cultural Politics of Yoga in India and the United States, by Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke
12. Border Religion, by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Part IV: Abroad13. Established Authorities: Theology, the State, and the Apartheid Struggle, by Melani McAlister
14. In Search of Normcore? Religion at Home and Abroad in Norway, by Helge Årsheim
15. When Home Becomes Abroad, and Abroad Becomes Home: Thinking American Empire Through a New Sudan, by Noah Salomon
Afterword: Double Vision, Double Cross: American Exceptionalism, Borders, and the Study of Religion, by Pamela E. Klassen
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
