Religion

Religious Imaginaries
The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter
By Karen Dieleman

Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics.

Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean
Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast
Edited by Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson
· Afterword by Susan F. Hirsch

A breakthrough study of the underexamined lived experience of Islam, sexuality, and gender on the Swahili coast.

Paths toward the Nation
Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961
By Joseph L. Venosa

In the early and mid-1940s, during the period of British wartime occupation, community and religious leaders in the former Italian colony of Eritrea engaged in a course of intellectual and political debate that marked the beginnings of a genuine national consciousness across the region.

Invisible Agents
Spirits in a Central African History
By David M. Gordon

Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions.

Religious Imaginaries
The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter
By Karen Dieleman

Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics.

African Gifts of the Spirit
Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement
By David Maxwell

This book considers the rise of born-again Christianity in Africa through a study of one of the most dynamic Pentecostal movements. David Maxwell traces the transformation of the prophet Ezekiel Guti and his prayer band from small beginnings in the townships of the 1950s into the present-day transnational business enterprise, which is now the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God.

Closing Arguments
Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
By Clarence Darrow
· Edited by S. T. Joshi

Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America’s greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.”

Islam and the State in Indonesia
By Bahtiar Effendy

Since the unraveling of Western colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, Muslim nations have struggled to reconcile Islamic ideas and political movements with the state. In Indonesia, in particular, Islam and the state have long been at an impasse. While the ritual dimension of Islam has been allowed to flourish, political Islam has been defeated by various means.Islam

The London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, 1799–1999
Historical Essays in Celebration of the Bicentenary of the LMS in Southern Africa
Edited by John de Gruchy

Compiled to mark the bicentenary of the London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, this volume provides an assessment of the work and legacy of the Society, which played a critical role in the politics and societies of the subcontinent and whose leading figure—like David Livingstone, Robert Moffat, and John Philip—were major historical actors in their day.Contributors

African Entrepreneurship
Muslim Fula Merchants in Sierra Leone
By Alusine Jalloh

Between 1961 and 1978, Muslim Fula immigrants from different West African countries became one of the most successful mercantile groups in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. African Entrepreneurship, published by Ohio University Press on December 31, 1999, examines the commercial activities of Fula immigrants and their offspring in Sierra Leone.

Ancient Sisterhood
The Lost Traditions of Hagar and Sarah
By Savina J. Teubal

In this fascinating piece of scholarly detective work, biblical scholar Savina J. Teubal peels away millenia of patriarchal distortion to reveal the lost tradition of biblical matriarchs. In Ancient Sisterhood: The Lost Traditions of Hagar and Sarah (originally published as Hagar the Egyptian), she shows that Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, was actually lady-in-waiting to the priestess Sarah and participated in an ancient Near Eastern custom of surrogate motherhood.Ancient

Dictionary of Indonesian Islam
By Howard M. Federspiel

Drawing from an extensive list of writings about Indonesian Islam that have appeared over the past fifteen years, Federspiel defines approximately 1,800 terms, phrases, historical figures, religious books, and place names that relate to Islam and gives their Arabic sources.This dictionary will be indispensable to English–speaking students and researchers working in Indonesian or Southeast Asian studies.

The Church and Revolution in Nicaragua
By Laura Nuzzi O'Shaughnessy and Luis Hector Serra

This volume addresses the complex issue of the Christian response to the Nicaraguan revolution from a perspective generally sympathetic to the Sandinista’s goals. Luis Serra, himself a Latin American who has worked with the peasantry, argues that the institutional Church has now become a major autonomous source of opposition to the revolution.

Ritual Cosmos
The Sanctification of Life in African Religions
By Evan M. Zuesse

In the West we are accustomed to think of religion as centered in the personal quest for salvation or the longing for unchanging Being. Perhaps this is why we have found it so difficult to understand the religions of Africa. These religions are oriented to very different goals: fecundity, prosperity, health, social harmony.

Sarah the Priestess
The First Matriarch of Genesis
By Savina J. Teubal
· Foreword by Raphael Patai

The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two different written sources based on two independent oral traditions.