Honorable Mention, 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies Association Winner, 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, presented by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section of the American Anthropological Association Finalist, 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions An examination of the religious importance of food among Caribbean and Latin American communities Before honey can be offered to the Afro-Cuban deity Ochún, it must be tasted, to prove to her that it is good. In African-inspired religions throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, such gestures instill the attitudes that turn participants into practitioners. Acquiring deep knowledge of the diets of the gods and ancestors constructs adherents’ identities; to learn to fix the gods’ favorite dishes is to be “seasoned” into their service. In this innovative work, Elizabeth Pérez reveals how seemingly trivial "micropractices" such as the preparation of sacred foods, are complex rituals in their own right. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Chicago among practitioners of Lucumí, the transnational tradition popularly known as Santería, Pérez focuses on the behind-the-scenes work of the primarily women and gay men responsible for feeding the gods. She reveals how cooking and talking around the kitchen table have played vital socializing roles in Black Atlantic religions. Entering the world of divine desires and the varied flavors that speak to them, this volume takes a fresh approach to the anthropology of religion. Its richly textured portrait of a predominantly African-American Lucumí community reconceptualizes race, gender, sexuality, and affect in the formation of religious identity, proposing that every religion coalesces and sustains itself through its own secret recipe of micropractices.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? In Heaven's Kitchen, Courtney Bender takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year she worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, Bender traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. She also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw their own spiritual lives. Filled with vibrant storytelling and rich theoretical insights, Heaven's Kitchen shows faith as a living practice, reshaping our understanding of the role of religion in contemporary American life.

Exploring the meaning of a Buddhist story, this book is a testimony of faith in the urgent relevance of India's spiritual traditions to the future of life on Earth, and it is an inquiry into the meaning of some central notions of these traditions. The value of spiritual traditions and of life itself is at stake here. In the Introduction, Ramchandra Gandhi raises the Ayodhya issue to international and universal levels. In the text, he offers a solution on the local and national levels. The temple mound in Ayodhya --the sacred hill on which the present Babri Masjid was built, also known as "Sita's Kitchen"--was originally a sacred place of the Adivasis (the aboriginal inhabitants of the subcontinent). It was sacred to the Goddess, the great nurturing earth, the fecund source of all life, the aboriginal presupposition of all later religions. As an aboriginal place sacred to the Mother Goddess, the hill in Ayodhya brings together all religions. Rather than a source of conflict, Ayodhya should become a meeting ground for the divergent religious traditions of the world to see their ultimate harmony. In the Buddhist story, the principal female character is an adivasi named Ananya ("not other"). The opposing sides come to see their oneness in Ananya. The frame-story is taken from the Vinaya-pitaka of the Pali Canon. It is the Bhaddavaggiyavatthu or "The Story of the Group of Well-Off Ones."

This is what we dream of: to be so swept away, so poleaxed by a book that the breath is sucked right out of us. Brace yourselves. May 1565. Suleiman the Magnificent, emperor of the Ottomans, has declared a jihad against the Knights of Saint John the Baptist. The largest armada of all time approaches the knights' Christian stronghold on the island of Malta. The Turks know the knights as the "Hounds of Hell." The knights call themselves "The Religion." In Messina, Sicily, a French countess, Carla La Penautier, seeks passage to Malta in a quest to find the son taken from her at his birth twelve years ago. The only man with the expertise and daring to help her is a Rabelaisian soldier of fortune, arms dealer, former janissary, and strapping Saxon adventurer by the name of Mattias Tannhauser. He agrees to accompany the lady to Malta, where, amid the most spectacular siege in military history, they must try to find the boy—whose name they do not know and whose face they have never seen—and pluck him from the jaws of Holy War. The Religion is the first book of the Tannhauser Trilogy, and from the first page of this epic account of the last great medieval conflict between East and West, it is clear we are in the hands of a master. Not since James Clavell has a novelist so powerfully and assuredly plunged readers headlong into another world and time. Anne Rice transformed the vampire novel. Stephen King reinvented horror. Now, in a spectacular tale of heroism, tragedy, and passion, Tim Willocks revivifies historical fiction.

A comprehensive theological framework for assessing the significance of eating, demonstrating that eating is of profound economic, moral and theological significance.

Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Why are religious obligations that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other obligations of conscience are not? In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.

This collection of essays examines religion in the American South across three centuries--from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The first collection published on the subject in fifteen years, Religion in the American South builds upon a new generation of scholarship to push scholarly conversation about the field to a new level of sophistication by complicating "southern religion" geographically, chronologically, and thematically and by challenging the interpretive hegemony of the "Bible belt." Contributors demonstrate the importance of religion in the South not only to American religious history but also to the history of the nation as a whole. They show that religion touched every corner of society--from the nightclub to the lynching tree, from the church sanctuary to the kitchen hearth. These essays will stimulate discussions of a wide variety of subjects, including eighteenth-century religious history, conversion narratives, religion and violence, the cultural power of prayer, the importance of women in exploiting religious contexts in innovative ways, and the interracialism of southern religious history. Contributors: Kurt O. Berends, University of Notre Dame Emily Bingham, Louisville, Kentucky Anthea D. Butler, Loyola Marymount University Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Jerma Jackson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Lynn Lyerly, Boston College Donald G. Mathews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jon F. Sensbach, University of Florida Beth Barton Schweiger, University of Arkansas Daniel Woods, Ferrum College