Our Lady of the Exile is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady Charity in Miami. Drawing on a wide range of sources and using both historical and ethnographic methods, the book examines the religious life of the Cuban exiles who visit the shrine. Those pilgrims are diverse, and so are the motives that bring them. At the same time, author Thomas A. Tweed argues, Cuban devotees of the national patroness share a great deal. Most come to pray for their homeland and to recreate bonds with other Cubans, on the island and in the diaspora. The shrine is a place where they come to make sense of themselves as an exiled people. The religious symbols there link the past and present and bridge the homeland and the new land. Through rituals and artifacts at the shrine, Tweed suggests, the Cuban diaspora "imaginatively constructs its collective identity and transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire." While the book focuses on Cuban exiles in Miami, it moves beyond case study as it explores larger issues concerning religion, identity, and place. How do migrants relate to heir homeland? How do they understand themselves after they have been displaced? What role does religion play among these diasporic groups? Building on this study of one exiled group, Tweed proposes a theory of diasporic religion that promises to illuminate the experiences of other groups that have been displaced from their native land. As the first book-length analysis of Cuban-American Catholicism, Tweed's book will be an invaluable resource to scholars and students of not only Religious Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, but also those who study cultural anthropology, human geography, and Latin American history.

Our Lady of the Exile is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady Charity in Miami. Drawing on a wide range of sources and using both historical and ethnographic methods, the book examines the religious life of the Cuban exiles who visit the shrine. Those pilgrims are diverse, and so are the motives that bring them. At the same time, author Thomas A. Tweed argues, Cuban devotees of the national patroness share a great deal. Most come to pray for their homeland and to recreate bonds with other Cubans, on the island and in the diaspora. The shrine is a place where they come to make sense of themselves as an exiled people. The religious symbols there link the past and present and bridge the homeland and the new land. Through rituals and artifacts at the shrine, Tweed suggests, the Cuban diaspora "imaginatively constructs its collective identity and transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire." While the book focuses on Cuban exiles in Miami, it moves beyond case study as it explores larger issues concerning religion, identity, and place. How do migrants relate to heir homeland? How do they understand themselves after they have been displaced? What role does religion play among these diasporic groups? Building on this study of one exiled group, Tweed proposes a theory of diasporic religion that promises to illuminate the experiences of other groups that have been displaced from their native land. As the first book-length analysis of Cuban-American Catholicism, Tweed's book will be an invaluable resource to scholars and students of not only Religious Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, but also those who study cultural anthropology, human geography, and Latin American history.

If, as has been said, exiles, refugees, and emigrants are the defining figures for the twentieth century, the thirteen women of Women in Exile give unforgettable life to the metaphor. Their stories offer a rare and special opportunity to witness the harrowing experience of flight and dislocation and to marvel at the resilience of the human spirit.

In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.

From the moment Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, exile has been a part of the human experience. The circumstances in which individuals or entire peoples are compelled to leave their homeland are as various as they are numerous, and in this book John Simpson has brought together examples of exile from all over the world, and from all periods of history. The emphasis is on personal experience, with writers from Ovid to Solzhenitsyn describing their exile, their emotions, their struggle and their despair. For those who have chosen a life in exile, the response is more mixed: ambivalence about the country they have left and the country they have chosen suffuses the writing of intellectuals seeking freedom of speech, as of ex-pats living in India or Australia. Those persecuted for their faith or their politics rub shoulders with those fleeing from war, or from debt, or even from the weather. Castaways and spies, premiers and princes describe their departure, their reception and sometimes their return, in an anthology that is by turns inspiring, moving, and deeply thought-provoking. With sources ranging from police records, newspaper articles, interviews, letters and memoirs, as well as verse and fiction, and settings as remote as Iran and Russia, China and Palestine, The Oxford Book of Exile provides a fascinating insight into an experience that touches so many, and captures the imagination of us all.

Russell Jeung's spiritual memoir shares the difficult, often joyful, and sometimes harrowing account of his life in East Oakland's Murder Dubs neighborhood and of his Chinese-Hakka history. On a journey to discover how the poor and exiled are blessed, At Home in Exile is the story of his integration of social activism and a stubborn evangelical faith. Holding English classes in his apartment (which doubled as a food pantry for a local church) for undocumented Latino neighbors and Cambodian refugees, battling drug dealers who threatened him, exorcising a spirit possessing a teen, and winning a landmark housing settlement against slumlords with a gathering of his neighbors—Jeung's story is, by turns, moving and inspiring, traumatic and exuberant. As Jeung retraces the steps of his Chinese-Hakka family and his refugee neighbors, weaving the two narratives together, he asks difficult questions about longing and belonging, wealth and poverty, and how living in exile can transform your faith: "Not only did relocation into the inner city press me toward God, but it made God's words more distinct and clear to me...As I read Scriptures through the eyes of those around me—refugees and aliens—God spoke loudly to me his words of hope and truth." With humor, humility, and keen insight, he describes the suffering and the sturdiness of those around him and of his family. He relates the stories of forced relocation and institutional discrimination, of violence and resistance, and of the persistence of Christ's love for the poor.

An extraordinary talent bursts on the fantasy scene with a remarkably engaging novel. Lady Angarred Hashan was raised in exile far from Pergodi, the capital city. Angarred never knew what had caused her father's exile; she only knew that at the age of four, she was brought to Hashan House, an isolated and crumbling manor, and raised by servants. Her mother, she was told, had died. Angarred spent hours in her mother's rooms, handling the fine dresses of Emindal cloth---when she wasn't running wild through the forests and fields. Her father was distant and obsessed with regaining his place at court. The only visitors they ever saw were secretive men and women who brought news of the events at court---news of wars and alliances, of the queen's failure to conceive an heir, of the Princess Roharren's madness and Prince Norue's growing power, and of the disappearance of the magicians. The visitors came and went, plotting revenge for mysterious slights, eating and drinking their way through the storerooms while Hashan House fell down around them. But one day, while hunting in the forest, Lord Hashan was murdered. And Angarred, in her outrage, determined to go to the capital and seek justice from the king---for, surely, the murderer of a lord, even an exiled lord, should be punished! But the naïve young woman finds a swirling world of palace intrigue, a dying queen, and an ensorcelled king. With the help of Mathewar, a handsome but very troubled, magician, she journeys from the crowded streets of Pergodi to the Enchanted Forest, from the deadly land of the Others to the arches of the Giant's Bridge, as she begins to unravel the secrets of the kingdom and her own history.