Religious Imagination Research Articles

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.

Jane Barker’s Conversion and the Forms of Religious Experience

Though Jane Barker’s conversion to Catholicism is often noted, most critics focus on her Jacobitism rather than her specifically religious imagination. This article uses evidence from the recent publication of Barker’s “Poems Refering to the Times” to reveal previously unnoticed traces of her conversion experience in A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723). In that work, conversion appears as a fraught, potentially failed romance. Tracing the formal, thematic, and inter-textual resonances of this moment in Barker’s poetry and in her first novel, Exilius (1713), I argue that Barker depicts conversion as an equivocal process in order to challenge the emergent modern emphasis on autonomy and freedom. Religious belief is a further context, moreover, for understanding Barker’s formal innovations as a novelist. Faith’s ability to fragment consciousness provides a challenge to realistic representation. Building on work that questions the early novel’s necessary connections with realism and with secularity, I argue that Barker’s work is motivated by an effort to find literary forms to represent religious experiences that are unrealistic but not therefore fictive.

New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration by Judith Weisenfeld

Reviewed by: New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration by Judith Weisenfeld Curtis J. Evans Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration. New York: New York UP, 2017. 368 pp. $35.00. Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming is a deeply researched and well-theorized analysis of black religious groups that emerged between the end of the First, and the beginning of the Second World War: Moorish Science Temple of America, Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation (more generally, Black Israelite groups). Emerging in cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Newark, among others, these religious groups had an influence that was greater than their actual [End Page 152] numbers within African American communities. This book is the first work since Arthur Fauset's Black Gods of the Metropolis (1944) to treat them in this comprehensive way, although Weisenfeld does not address Holiness and Pentecostal groups, and takes a much longer historical view than Fauset (who did field work among the various groups). Weisenfeld refers to these religious groups as religio-racial movements, by which she means that they were committed to "understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race" (5). They held a common conviction that people of African descent could only achieve their collective salvation by embracing their true and divinely ordained identity. This self-and-group belief was crucial to their theological beliefs and religious practices. The book is organized thematically, giving us a sense not only of what the leaders of these groups believed and practiced, but also what the lived experience of everyday practitioners was, why they joined, and what they found compelling in these groups. The book is divided into three parts: narratives, selfhood, and community. In the section on narratives, Weisenfeld digs deeply into how geographies of space and time were constructed and understood by these religio-racial movements. In the same section, she looks at their narratives of sacred time and conceptions of divine history. In each case, Weisenfeld shows how these groups, although with different theologies and variant understandings of race, sought to transcend their situation in the United States, where their history and circumstances were circumscribed by racial oppression and an official narrative of subordination based on either explicit claims of racial inferiority or implicit notions of unfortunate enslavement, which, in their view, tethered their history to debasement and shame. In the second part of the book, Weisenfeld examines the ways in which naming practices and adornment and maintenance of the body helped shape participants into "fit" members of each group. The final section looks at their respective understandings of family (with much attention focused especially on Father Divine's Peace Mission's more stringent demands to break from biological families and practice sex-segregated celibate lifestyles for new members) and their conception of space and place, especially how the United States figured in their racial and religious imagination. This book is the most thorough and sophisticated treatment of the emergence and early development of these religio-racial movements. It deepens our understanding of the impact of the Great Migration on black religious life while enriching our knowledge of the debates about black religious identity in this fluid moment. Weisenfeld is careful to note that although she organizes her work around these movements, there is a way in which all religious groups in the United States can be characterized as religio-racial, given the powerful ways in which race has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all Americans. Yet her book focuses particular attention on a set of black religious movements that explicitly called for all black Americans to reject the classification "Negro," which they believed was a false category created and foisted upon them for the purposes of enslavement and subordination. They offered alternative identities both to members and to black people as a whole. Weisenfeld's illuminating and thorough book provides rich details about the various ways in which these movements differed in addressing the problem of race in the United States. Weisenfeld argues that while rejecting...

Der ungebetene Gast

The upsurge of right wing populists and new authoritarian forces fueled the debate on the future of the subject. Following Hegel and Lacan this article analyzes how the renaissance of reactionary ways of subjectification goes hand in hand with a destructive circle of suppression and recurrence. The modern crisis of identity is strongly connected to the figure of the other; at the same time the projections of this other reveal the ambiguity of a subject unable to confine its inner realms. Is it possible that the continuous crisis of the modern subject is based on religious and cultural-historical imaginations of identity? Do we have to get rid of this concept of identity to quit the destructive circle?

The Witch, the Goat and the Devil: A Discussion of Scapegoating and the Objectification of Evil in Robert Eggers’ The Witch

The demise of a child, a tragedy that occurs every few seconds on the face on this planet, marred by starvation and abject poverty, always constitutes a grim mystery, challenging every religious outlook and philosophy. Robert Eggers’ 2015 movie, The Witch, depicts the tragic loss of a baby, in this case posing the additional mystery as to exactly how it occurred. Though the specters of malnutrition and malady haunt this film, the precise circumstances surrounding the child’s fate are left largely to the viewer’s imagination. The film explores the question as to where we can lay blame for ostensibly senseless tragedy. Within its narrative world, and arguably, within the worldview of the religious imagination more broadly, humanity seeks someone or something to blame for horrific events. Recent tragedies and world history attest to the human tendency, in the face of immense suffering, to scapegoat some alleged culprit, perhaps going so far as to allege their complicity with the devil, to directly identify them as Satan—or to more subtly demonize them. No single religion or worldview can boast sole claim to this propensity that to this present day claims lives. The Witch raises the question as to whether culpability for evil resides ultimately with the self, with social structures, with humanity as a whole, with inhuman forces of nature, or within the supernatural realm. The mystery is at its most agonizing when conventional moralizing is befuddled and there is no obvious culprit, no free-willed villain caught with a smoking gun. Eggers’ screenplay sustains the ambiguity that can enshroud tragedy such as the unresolved abduction of a child or sudden infant death, blurring the line between facticity and the archetypal imagery through which the psyche seeks to express that which it cannot explain.

The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown

In his massive Through Eye of a Needle (2012), he focused on wealth, particularly its influx into and impact on Christian experiences and church in waning Western empire; emerging Christian upper-class hoped to lay up treasure in heaven through dramatic renunciation of wealth, care of poor, and giving to church. Picking up theme of treasure in heaven, in this volume Brown explores effect of wealth on other world in Western Christianity in 250–650 C.E. Brown is particularly interested in the manner in which imagined joining of heaven and earth through money was held to affect fate of soul in afterlife (ix), informed by his characteristically careful attention to changing social context and religious imagination of afterlife. According to Chapter Five, historiographical writings of Gregory of Tours in late sixth century revealed yet another development in preaching repentance in light of last judgment.

Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture by David Loewenstein

Reviewed by: Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture by David Loewenstein Mark Rankin (bio) Loewenstein, David. Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. $105 hardback, $50 paperback. In this important book, David Loewenstein investigates the representation of heresy and heretics in literary and polemical works, from the English Reformation during Henry VIII's reign through to the Civil War and the writings of John Milton. Its thesis is two- fold. On the one hand, the language used to describe heresy during this period is highly malleable and protean. Because they dissented from prevailing understandings of religious orthodoxy, heretics were perceived as seditious rebels, or as propagators of dangerous diseases. Heretics' ideas were said to threaten people's souls, and so heretics were viewed as harmful members of the body politic, capable of subverting and eroding the government's authority in both church and state. This language of contagion and sedition associated with the representation of heresy, Loewenstein argues, is constant across this entire period. One of the book's virtues is to demonstrate that Catholics and all kinds of Protestants were represented at one time or another through a uniform discursive register, one based upon irrational fear and anxiety as well as dark fantasies. At the same time, this book shows how the fears and linguistic strategies used to represent heretics themselves fueled creative textual production in numerous works, situated both within and without the canon of early modern English literature. Ultimately this conclusion constitutes the book's most enduring component—namely, that authorial choices made in representing heresy pushed writers into creative and imaginative terrains of composition that they might not otherwise have reached. This book offers readers a remarkable reach, in a chronological and a conceptual sense. It stretches from Thomas More's debate over religious orthodoxy with William Tyndale, during the early 1530s, through to Paradise Lost. Loewenstein includes chapters on the Lincolnshire gentlewoman Anne Askew, whose Examinations (1546–47) record her successive interrogation and torture during Henry VIII"s final years; on John Foxe's influential martyrology, the Actes and Monuments; on representations of Puritan, or forward Protestant, dissent in Elizabethan works such as Thomas Nashe's proto- novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie [End Page 178] Queene (1596); on mid- seventeenth- century heresiographies like Thomas Edwards's Gangraena (first published 1646); on imaginative responses to such works by selected radical Protestant dissenters; and on John Milton's imaginative engagement with the culture of heresy- making, both in his controversial prose and in Paradise Lost. Loewenstein demonstrates that a writer such as Edwards approaches the perceived heresy of unorthodox Independent Protestant "sects" that proliferated in his day, by employing nearly identical language, words and images, as those used by Thomas More to describe the Bible translator and reformer William Tyndale during the 1530s. By bringing together sixteenth- and seventeenth- century texts in this fashion, Treacherous Faith unites the study of English Reformation and Civil War- era literature in very productive ways. Few studies are able to do this. At the same time, Loewenstein convincingly traces a genealogical debate over "toleration" and "blasphemy," two terms related conceptually to the notion of the seditious and dangerous heretic. Both were understood differently in the early modern period than today. Orthodox seventeenth- century Presbyterian writers feared toleration because they viewed it as affording heretics a license to operate. The Quaker James Nayler allegedly blasphemed in 1656 when he rode a donkey into Bristol in reenactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, as told in the New Testament. Hysteria and paranoia in the Parliamentary debate over Nayler, Loewenstein argues, provide "the most striking illustration of the demonizing religious imagination at the very highest political levels" of seventeenth- century England (229). Treacherous Faith parts company with many studies by taking early modern polemical writing seriously and on its own terms. In his account of More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), for instance, Loewenstein documents how More's interest in exploring religious tension through his use of the dialogic form conflicts with his uncompromising religious outlook. Most productive in this section, however, is...

Latin America’s Contemporary Religious Imaginaries

Latin America’s Contemporary Religious Imaginaries

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty

Murder and Rape: Reading Flannery O’Connor alongside Eudora Welty Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty are rarely talked about together, except perhaps in brief statements linking them as southern women writers.1 There is good reason for this, as they are very different types of writers, though both do struggle with a basic question: how does the writer communicate a sense of life’s mysteries, a sense of the ineffable and the transcendent? Exploring how the two writers approached this question, together with their quite different conceptualizations of the mysterious, provides a way to highlight their similarities as well as their differences. Also significant for both writers, though more so for O’Connor than for Welty, is the literary use of violence and the employment of extreme narrative strategies. As I will show, the literary use of violence is the most challenging and most troubling aspect of these two writers’ work, particularly in our increasingly violent era, and may for some readers finally be an insurmountable barrier for accepting each author’s imaginative vision—unless, that is, they are such diehard fans of the writer that they resist thinking through the unnerving implications of her work. O’Connor never swayed from her commitment to portray the world as she saw it as a believer. “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy,” she declares forthrightly in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” adding that “this means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction” (804–05). O’Connor here lays out the key tenets of her fiction and of her position as a writer: that the ultimate meaning, no matter what the surface action, touches upon the divine; that there is no comfortable middle ground—you either make a choice for Christ or the Devil; and that, given the modern temper of unbelief, it is extremely difficult for her to communicate her stark religious vision. How to bridge the great divide she perceived between author and reader remained a central concern for O’Connor throughout her career, one that [End Page 89] she repeatedly agonized over and commented upon. She found no easy answers and she advocated various strategies for overcoming the divide. Over time two concepts became central to what she came to call her “Christian realism” (942). The first was that she had to depict the world as accurately as possible, not glossing over or ignoring aspects of life in order to create a rosy, feel-good view of Christian life and commitment. Drawing inspiration from two of her favorite writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, O’Connor came to see that only by depicting the visible world in all its fullness might the invisible world in all its mystery be glimpsed. Conrad, she notes in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one,” while James championed the idea that “the business of fiction [was] to embody mystery through manners” (“Nature” 80; “Teaching” 124). “The mystery [James] was talking about,” O’Connor observes in “The Teaching of Literature,” “is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery” (124). But revealing mystery by realistically portraying conventional manners, O’Connor realized, was not sufficient for communicating her vision to an unbelieving audience. O’Connor never aspired to be a southern Jane Austen. She knew that she needed to be more confrontational and disruptive, using tactics of narrative manipulation and distortion, what Christina Bieber Lake has chillingly termed O’Connor’s “shock and awe campaign” (27). Most of O’Connor’s readers know her famous comment from “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” that in writing to a largely unbelieving audience, writers of faith had to “make [their] vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and...

Ted Hughes and the Biological Fall

The British poet Ted Hughes offers an undeniably religious vision of the world, combining devotion to a Robert Graves-style goddess figure with an enduring fascination with Christian cosmology and biblical stories. He pursues science, particularly anthropology and palaeontology, with equal interest. These interests intersect in an essay Hughes wrote, ostensibly about William Golding’s novel The Inheritors, in which he attempts to unite a lapsarian reading of the human condition with the (at the time) latest scientific developments concerning human evolution. Taking Hughes’s article as a starting point, I explore the ways in which this lapsarian-evolutionary perspective on humanity informs Hughes’s own creative output, locating resonant Old Testament passages which appear to underwrite his project and providing a critique of his ideas along both scientific and theological lines.

Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences

Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences

Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada eds. by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton

Reviewed by: Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada eds. by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton Alan L. Hayes Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada. Edited by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. vii + 212 pp. Contributors, index. $29.95 CAD, $32.95 USD, paper. The phrase "mixed blessings" signals that Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Canada should be seen as highly diverse, with long-term consequences that were sometimes beneficial and sometimes damaging. This theme is explored in an introduction and nine independent essays touching on a variety of periods, Indigenous nationalities, and historical figures, and reflecting different authorial points of view. Twelve authors have contributed; only two identify as Indigenous. Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada originated in a conference at the University of Saskatchewan in 2011. The conference was particularly timely, the participants knew, since Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had just begun to take stock of the legacy of the country's Indian residential schools. Indeed, the TRC saw the influence of Christianity as mixed, as Siphiwe Dube argues, the churches had run residential schools as instruments of repression and cultural assimilation, but Christian faith and caring were helping many of the survivors find healing and comfort. Dube notes that some Indigenous critics of the TRC denied any positive benefit of Christianity at all, and were dismayed that the TRC had invited the churches to participate and that its work was being shaped by Christian notions of repentance and forgiveness. The subtitle of the book is a problem, as Amanda Fehr recognizes explicitly in her chapter, and as other writers acknowledge [End Page 127] implicitly. It assumes a binary opposition between Christianity and Indigeneity, making "encounter" necessary. But did such a binary opposition ever exist? Christianity did not always come from outside the Indigenous context. Many elements of Christianity were already part of Indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous Christian evangelists and teachers often preceded the Euro-Canadian missionaries. Indeed, sometimes Jesus appeared to Indigenous peoples independently of the Europeans, as he did to the Stó:lo of British Columbia, as Fehr observes. The authors also reject other simple binary oppositions such as political and spiritual, colonizers and victims. In this postcolonial approach, the editors understand their work as following "an interpretive shift well underway in the United States." Two chapters take us to the Great Plains. Tasha Beeds shows how Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961) of Saskatchewan bridged Cree and Church of England. Fluently bilingual, he both published Cree stories and preached sermons as an Anglican priest. He was also a leading advocate for Indigenous rights through the League of Indians, until his English bishop stopped him. Jean-François Bélisle and Nicole St.-Onge rescue Louis Riel (1844–85), the rebel leader of two uprisings in the Canadian prairies, from the interpretation of English Canadian historians that his religious commitments were esoteric at best, if not lunatic. Riel's political agenda to protect Métis land rights should be joined to, not separated from, his millenarianism and his religious vision for civil government. This vision, so far from being idiosyncratic, was linked to a transnational conservative Roman Catholic movement, and it squared with the Métis experience of the Catholic Church. Like most if not all collections of essays, this one is uneven in quality, but overall it succeeds in challenging the generalizations and stereotyping that have dominated many past narratives of Christian Indigeneity in Canada. [End Page 128] Alan L. Hayes Wycliffe College University of Toronto Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Let’s get physical

The consensus in philosophical and scientific circles is that physicalism is the most warranted position to adopt. With respect to the academic study of religion, physicalism underwrites two complementary approaches, one widely recognized and the other underappreciated in the field at large. While the cognitive science of religion (CSR) enjoys widespread recognition, the ethology of religion does not. This paper employs ethology to explain two submissive behaviours ritual practitioners often perform, that is, ocular aversion and rump presentation. Significantly, the means of submission reflect the practitioner’s perceptions of the intimidating agents’, e.g., deities’, organ of intimidation. As it is in the animal kingdom, so too in the religious imagination, dominant others, especially males, will use their eyes or their phalluses to intimidate.

PANENTHEISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE: A GOOD MATCH?

AbstractIs panentheism a metaphysical and religious understanding of the divine and of the world that aligns better with science than classical theism? In order to address this question, I'll present brief descriptions of theism, pantheism, and panentheism, and of religious visions as integrating models of the world and models for the world. In this respect, science has its limitations. The conclusion that I will argue for is that naturalistic varieties of theism, pantheism, and panentheism do equally well with respect to the natural sciences, and hence that there is no argument from science that favors a panentheistic metaphysics. There may be philosophical or religious arguments that make one prefer one position over another. Science can be involved in the choice for one interpretation of a religious‐metaphysical view such as panentheism. Thus, science might play a role in the development of positions, once chosen, and hence in intra‐religious competition, even though it cannot be decisive on fundamental choices in metaphysics.

Beyond the Temple and the Cave: William James, E.J. Pratt, and Christian-Spiritualist Syncretisms

Although the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt had lifelong attachments to the Methodist and then United Church, critics have struggled to reconcile the various aspects of Pratt's religious vision as they materialize in his writing. Focusing on one largely ignored aspect of that vision, this article examines Pratt's mystical and spiritualist poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. More precisely, it considers Pratt's blending of spiritualist and Christian thought in relation to the syncretistic, non-dogmatic, anti-institutional notion of “personal religion” advanced in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, thus illuminating at once both Pratt's religious commitments and a seldom-discussed point of contact between James's philosophy and modernist literature. Ultimately, this article argues that, as a result of his exposure to James and to spiritualism in the crucible of Toronto's liberal Protestant milieu, Pratt – like many other writers of his time – began to move beyond the polarities of personal and institutional religion.

Sacrum i przestrzeń. Hierotopia wyspy Kefalonia (wstępne rezultaty badania pilotażowego)

The Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural heritage of Greek islands and peninsulas is still a blank slate for most Europeans. Only a few scholars from outside Greece focus their scientific studies on artefacts and anything which could be considered as so-called intangible cultural heritage of the humanity. The objective of the study was to investigate the hierotopy of the religious heritage of Cephalonia. I was interested in whether the island has hierotopic spaces, saturated with special power and the resulting special creation in the islanders’ minds. I searched for the beliefs about the origins of these places, extraordinary events, or the related sacred figures and organizations of spaces in the places used by Cephalonians for religious worship. The article uses qualitative methods of scientific research applied from the emic perspectives (free interviews, explicit and implicit participatory observation, photographic documentation and analysis of visual material). The research also focused on the secondary (historic and ethnographic) sources as well as on resources available on the Internet. The study has shown that an important role in Cephalonians’ religious imagination is played by the insular nature of the region and the elements: the sea surrounding the land and the earthquakes which cyclically strike the island. These specific natural conditions have given birth to local legends and hierotopic creations of places of religious worship. They have formed the pantheon of the holy figures, whose presence is emphasized by the specific hierotopy of the places of religious worship built on the island.

Buying an Afterlife: Mapping the Social Impact of Religious Beliefs through Consumer Death Goods

Choosing to have a body embalmed, the choice of interment locations and type, including the selection of a particular casket, are all deeply intertwined with various understandings of the afterlife, and views of the body after death. Consumer choices in these cases are often determined by imagined embodiment, and are determined in part by non-rational consumer choices based on religious upbringing and belief. In turn, diasporic and religious identity can be reinforced and solidified through consumer choices that then fulfill religious imaginations of post-death embodiment. This article traces the relationship of two consumer death goods—embalming and caskets—in the contemporary United States, examining both the implicit and explicit relationships these products have with religious worldviews, mapping the social impact of religious beliefs on consumer death choices.

CENSORING THE KISHKOPHONE: RELIGION AND STATE POWER IN MUBARAK'S EGYPT

AbstractHow do states produce religion and how can the study of state censorship cast light on this phenomenon? This article examines the logic by which two Egyptian government bodies, the Ministry of Culture and the Islamic Research Academy, censored the sermons of a premier Islamist preacher, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1999), between 1987 and 1993. To do so, it draws on two distinct sets of sources: a sixteen-volume printed edition of Kishk's sermons published in Egypt and MP3s of original performances recorded initially by audiocassette. While previous studies on religion and state power in the Middle East emphasize the strategies by which states use religion to assert their interests, this article uses the censorship of a leading antiregime preacher to probe the undertheorized distinction between claiming and producing religion. A focus on the strategies, in turn, casts light on both the internal diversity of religious visions within the Egyptian state and on the subtle, yet significant, ways in which state actors not only censor but also are shaped by their Islamist challengers.

ISIS, Crabgrass, and Religious Imaginaries

A review of seven recently published books on the rise of ISIS shows how it emerged after the Iraq War due to American policy, Iraqi Sunni alienation, the Syrian Assad regime's policies, and factional competition. But ISIS is unique in its use of social media for recruitment. Furthermore, the content of the ISIS message is religious, relying on Salafi teachings, apocalyptic imagery, and the legitimacy of a Caliphate. As with crabgrass, the most effective long-term anti-terrorism policy is prevention rather than eradication. But responding to the religiously inspired “imaginaries” of ISIS will require more inspired religious alternatives and savvier cyber-monitoring.

Francesca BuglianiKnox and DavidLonsdale, eds., Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, xii + 268pp. £60.00

International Journal of Systematic TheologyVolume 19, Issue 3 p. 384-386 Review Francesca Bugliani Knox and David Lonsdale, eds., Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, xii + 268pp. £60.00 Trevor Hart, Trevor Hart Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, University of St AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author Trevor Hart, Trevor Hart Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, University of St AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 July 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/ijst.12239Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume19, Issue3July 2017Pages 384-386 RelatedInformation