At Home and Abroad

At Home and Abroad

The Politics of American Religion

  • Author: Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman; Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • Serie: Religion, Culture, and Public Life
  • ISBN: 9780231198981
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231552905
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2021
  • Month: March
  • Language: English
From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities.

At Home and Abroad bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries. They bring into sharp focus the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies. Contributors break down the categories of domestic and foreign and inquire into how these taxonomies are related to other axes of discrimination, asking questions such as: What and who counts as “home” or “abroad,” how and by whom are these determinations made, and with what consequences?

Offering a new approach to theorizing the politics of religion in the context of the American nation-state, At Home and Abroad also interrogates American religious exceptionalism and illuminates imperial dynamics beyond the United States.
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Religion, Law, and Politics, American Style, by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
  • Part I: Making Religion American
    • 1. 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 Ourselves
    • 5. 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/Outside
    • 9. 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: Abroad
    • 13. 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

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