Kecia Ali: In Search of the Real Muhammad
Depending on whom you ask, Muhammad may be either the last prophet or merely an ambitious man. Now, in The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard, Sept.; Reviews, p. 20), Kecia Ali, associate professor of religion at Boston University, tries to fill in the missing pieces and shape a complete portrait of the founder of Islam.
The book has two target audiences, Ali says—colleagues who study religion and Islam, and laypeople, Muslim and otherwise. Muslims and non-Muslims often view each other as “decadent” or “repressive,” but they really are speaking the same language, says Ali. They just don’t know it, because so many of today’s ideas about Muhammad have been influenced over the past two centuries by Western thought.
“Supporters and critics both assume they know the story of his life,” says Ali, adding that her purpose isn’t to prove anyone wrong, but to show the diverse aspects of Muhammad’s life and how the story has changed over time.
For early Muslim authors, for example, Muhammad’s first marriage to the prosperous widow Khadija served as a key point on his journey to becoming a prophet, while non-Muslim authors cited it as evidence of his calculating ambition, says Ali, noting that today the marriage is seen instead, by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors, as a portrait of Muhammad as a man and husband.
Ali, who converted to Islam in college, is president of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics, and previously published Sexual Ethics and Islam (2006); Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010); and Imam Shafi‘i: Scholar and Saint (2011).
Though scholars debate whether drawing an accurate picture of the historical Muhammad is possible, a standard narrative, drawing on a handful of early Muslim sources, has come to dominate nearly all accounts of his life, she says. Previously, Muslim thinkers wrote about Muhammad in a variety of genres with attention to his cosmic role and glory. Christian writers did not attempt to retell his life in full, but tried to refute his doctrines by denigrating his reputation.
From medieval speculation about whether Muhammad was demon possessed to early modern questions about whether he actually received divine revelation, views of Muhammad changed dramatically over the centuries. The Enlightenment led to a new perspective on religious figures, she says, and from about the mid-19th century on, accounts of his life, both pro and con, are virtually indistinguishable.
Today’s Muhammad, she writes, is a “shared creation illustrating not a clash of civilizations but a common, if contested, modernity.” —Lauren Yarger
Lynn Davidman: Refugees from Orthodoxy
Imagine entering a world you have glimpsed but barely understand, a culture you have been instructed to reject, among people you might have been taught to think of as morally inferior. Imagine no longer belonging in the company of those who claim to embody the will of God by their words and actions. This is the experience of those who find themselves no longer able to obey the dictates of their Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities and must “come out,” leaving behind everything and everyone they have known.
In her new book, Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews (Oxford, Nov.), Lynn Davidman, the Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, reports a series of conversations with “defectors” from Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox communities. What causes the dissonance between their personal worldview and the idealized worldview of their community? What makes them abandon their obedience to sacred communal rules and compels them to leave their communities?
In Becoming Un-Orthodox, Davidman concludes that the things that define us religiously—which can shift and fail—are not just beliefs but habitual practices that symbolize the values of the community, such as ritual bathing, particular modes of dress, and rules of comportment. She observes that those who leave ultra-Orthodoxy go through similar stages of divesting themselves of such observances. Those practices no longer make sense, and they begin to adjust their behavior to the rules of the wider culture.
Davidman’s interest in the topic is deeply personal: she is herself ex-Orthodox, although she was raised Modern Orthodox in the 1950s and ’60s, in a denomination that was then more liberal than any form of Orthodoxy is today. When her mother died when Davidman was very young, she began to question her faith and over time became vocal about the moral hypocrisy she saw in the community. Finally, during her undergraduate years at Barnard, Davidman decided to live in the dormitories, as many other college students did. She says, “I wanted a life of my own, but to my father this choice amounted to leaving my family, and he believed I was already too heavily influenced by general culture.” Her decision finalized the break in Davidman’s own commitment to Orthodoxy. She was disowned and disinherited, left to navigate life on her own.
Her courage must have been considerable, but as wrenching as her situation was, says Davidman: “I had not grown up isolated from the general culture like Haredi Jews were. I knew how to comport myself and could negotiate a way to finish my education.” By contrast, Davidman writes of one young Haredi woman who told her, “It wasn’t clear to me how you left. I mean how you physically did it. Where you went. How you got money. How you even had the right clothes to go.... I didn’t know a soul outside of my community.” Davidman’s own struggles inform this moving collection of stories of those who, in leaving their ultra-Orthodox life behind, needed courage of an even higher order. —Chana Thompson Shor
Terryl Givens: Unlikely Messenger of Mormonism
If anyone had told Terryl Givens 30 years ago that he would one day be a renowned scholar of Mormon thought, he might have laughed. But while his articles on Byron and Romanticism seem like distant memories, Givens’s early work in comparative literature laid the groundwork for a flourishing career as an intellectual historian of Mormonism. His new book, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundation of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (Oxford, Nov.; Reviews, p. 20), is the culmination of that groundbreaking work.
In his first book, The Viper on the Hearth, published in 1997, Givens, professor of religion and literature and James A. Bostwick Chair of English at the University of Richmond, plumbed how depictions of Mormonism in popular fiction shaped cultural understandings of the faith and its vexed relationship to American society. “That book altered the trajectory of my career,” Givens says, “for I realized I could use the tools of literary analysis to begin to look at religious texts, especially the Book of Mormon, and their impact on culture.”
In the years since, Givens has approached the history of the Mormon faith not through the lens of theological analysis but with close readings of the scriptures of Mormonism, producing such books as By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (2003) and The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (2009).
In contrast to his earlier books, which focused on the history and development of the Book of Mormon itself, Wrestling the Angel Givens unearths in that scripture key elements of Mormon theology—a cosmology that locates human identity in a premortal world; a view of human life as an enlightening ascent rather than a catastrophic fall
Theology has never found a comfortable place in Mormon thought, Givens points out—the religion is focused more on prophets and revelation than on dogma. But through his close readings of the Book of Mormon, Givens says it became apparent it contained any number of theological topics. “Mormonism doesn’t have a magisterium or an official catechism,” he says. “I had to sift out doctrines, dogmas, and practices.”
Wrestling the Angel is Givens’s examination of Mormon religious history and theological development through the Book of Mormon. “[It] is the most widely distributed book in American history,” he notes, “and by looking at its reception and its impact on culture we can have a better informed study of Mormon thought.” Wrestling the Angel is an intellectual history, Givens says, an attempt to situate the development of that thought in the wider history of ideas of the 19th century.
Givens says his training in comparative literature equips him to ask broad questions about the relationship of scriptural stories to cultural ideas, and his work in literary analysis of texts enables him to probe specific themes and meanings embedded in the stories. “I’m really happy that my training as an intellectual and literary historian allows me to be at the intersection of such an exciting and growing interest in the Mormon faith.”—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
Jennifer Harvey: Letters to White Christians
Jennifer Harvey knows it’s complicated being a white scholar working on the fraught subject of race. Her third book on the topic is Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Eerdmans, Nov.). “Anyone who is white and working within a set of visibly anti-racist commitments worries about getting it wrong,” says Harvey, who is an associate professor of religion at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church. “My job is to show as much authenticity as I can. If I’m wrong, someone will tell me, and I’ll respond.”
Harvey’s title, Dear White Christians, is intended to be a direct challenge. In the book, she says, “I’m urging people to stop asking the same questions we’ve been asking for 40 years, like, ‘How can white communities become more diverse?’ If we knew our history we’d know that the African-American community answered this back in the ’60s.” Instead, Harvey encourages church communities to engage in what she calls “concrete repair of racial harm,” which “might mean that white churches in Ferguson, Mo., give their time and energy to holding the police department accountable.”
Harvey’s interest in issues surrounding race began while she was an undergraduate in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “I became very serious about what it meant to follow Jesus,” she says. “To me, following Jesus meant thinking about homelessness, and racial and gender justice. By the time I graduated, racial justice was something that kept me awake at night, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
During college Harvey encountered liberation theology and fell in love with the work of James Cone, the Charles A. Briggs distinguished professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. That prompted her to attend Union, where she began to contend with her whiteness. “I had teachers and student peers who said, ‘That’s great you love liberation theology and want to talk about the Black Christ. But you’re white. What does that mean to you? You can’t talk about it the same way we do.’ ”
Harvey does worry about the excessive attention given to white people who write about race; it is misplaced, in her opinion. “White scholars willing to talk about race get attention for saying the same things that scholars of color have been saying for a long time,” she notes.
Writing about race and whiteness has often pulled Harvey into controversy, because of the events in Ferguson most recently, but also because some of her Huffington Post blog posts have gone viral, particularly the August 2013 post, “For Whites (Like Me) on White Kids,” which got 10s of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. Addressing “Dear Parents of White Children,” Harvey argued that white parents must stop using the “sugary” language of color blindness with their kids. Children can see that people are not all the same, and parents should stop pretending they are, she wrote.
Harvey has decided to expand those thoughts: “My next project is underway and it’s a book for the parents of white children.” Asked whether she’ll ever tire of the subject, Harvey says, “I suspect I’ll be writing about race and whiteness for the rest of my life.” —Donna Freitas
Peter Kreeft: Philosophical Persuasion
A philosophy professor meets a Christian woman at a religious conference. During their brief conversation, she says she is worried about her brother, a young man who is smart, kind, inquisitive—and an atheist. Would the professor please write to her brother and try to persuade him of the existence of God?
So begins the imagined conversation, known in academic lingo as a “supposal,” between Peter Kreeft and the young man he calls “Michael” in his new book, Letters to an Atheist: Wrestling with Faith (Rowman & Littlefield, Oct.). The young man is real, as was the encounter between Kreeft and Michael’s sister. Although he never contacted Michael personally, and the letters that compose the book never got posted, emailed, received, or answered, Kreeft offers them to readers, who he invites to “become Michael,” to read and consider for themselves.
Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College, where he has taught since 1965. He is also the author of more than 70 books, about half of which are for a general audience (the other half are for scholars).
Raised an evangelical Christian in the Dutch Reformed branch of Protestantism, Kreeft converted to Catholicism at age 21. Though he has “questioned God, both intellectually and personally,” he says he has never stopped being a theist, or one who believes in God. “There was no rebellion or disillusionment” at the root of his conversion, Kreeft notes. In fact, “I am more, not less, evangelical as a Catholic than I ever was as a Protestant.”
But despite his consistent belief, “there were many times when I questioned God, both intellectually and personally,” he says. “The two are not mutually exclusive—doubts are the ants in the pants that keep faith alive and moving.”
Kreeft’s comfort with doubt led him, in Letters to an Atheist, to dive into some of the most difficult-to-resolve reasons many people don’t believe in God, such as the existence of evil in the world and violence committed in the name of religion. He also delves into reasons to believe, such as miracles, love, and what he sees as a highly compatible relationship between religion and science.
The tone of the book is conversational, warm, and intended to read as an exchange “between friends,” something Kreeft says distinguishes his book from the work of the popular but controversial “new atheists,” whose writing he calls “purely polemical” and “shallow and unmoving compared with the classic atheists Hume, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Sartre.”
Kreeft’s book is, he says, simply the result of a request he received at a conference—a request he took very seriously because he believed he could be of help to this young man and others on the idea of God, which he says is the most important in human history.
“We don’t know the stakes” of the theist-atheist debate, he says. “That’s why they are infinitely high: because they may be—we just don’t know—the difference between heaven and hell.” —Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Lerone A. Martin: Pulpits of Wax
In the early half of the 20th century, many black preachers discovered a new tool—the phonograph. Sermons recorded on vinyl (or, at first, wax) enabled them to reach beyond their local churches and market their sermons to other eager listeners. The records often outstripped the sales of those by popular blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, and while many preachers went to places like Chicago to get record deals, record company executives began traveling from church to church in the rural South in search of the next celebrity preacher. In Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (NYU, Nov.; Reviews, p. 20), Lerone A. Martin illuminates this little-known chapter in American cultural history.
Martin, a postdoctoral research fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, understands this desire for the spoken word. “I grew up in a home where we watched preachers on TV, and my mom would always be ordering tapes of the sermons to listen to over and over again,” says Martin. When he got to graduate school, Martin was so intrigued by the pioneering use of media by black preachers that he focused his dissertation on Rev. James Gates and the phonograph records that made him a celebrity beyond his home church in Atlanta in the ’20s and ’30s.
In Preaching on Wax, Martin widens his view from one preacher to analyze the culture-shifting technology of vinyl recordings: “I tried to make the phonograph the main character,” he says. In the years before WWII, especially in the rural South, a number of forces drove black preachers to records rather than the radio to reach listeners, Martin says. Most people could afford a phonograph, and it did not need electricity to run. Radios were expensive—they might cost around $50—and many people did not yet have electricity. In addition, most radio stations worried they would lose revenue if advertisers found their products associated with black preachers.
The phonograph and the preachers’ records helped shaped modern African-American religion in significant ways, Martin argues. Examining this phenomenon “helps us to see that our own contemporary experience of religion, media, and commodification is not new,” he says. A preacher like T.D. Jakes, for example, uses television, film, books, and audio not only to reach a lot of consumers, but also to ground his authority as the pastor of a larger flock beyond his own church. Looking at the advent and development of preaching on phonograph records, Martin says, “helps us to think about celebrity and the way it bestows authority upon these religious leaders.” —Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
