The Diaspora Of The Gods

Many Hindus today are urban middle-class people with religious values similar to those of their professional counterparts in America and Europe. Just as modern professionals continue to build new churches, synagogues, and now mosques, Hindus are erecting temples to their gods wherever their work and their lives take them. Despite the perceived exoticism of Hindu worship, the daily life-style of these avid temple patrons differs little from their suburban neighbors. Joanne Waghorne leads her readers on a journey through this new middle-class Hindu diaspora, focusing on their efforts to build and support places of worship. She seeks to trace the changing religious sensibilities of the middle classes as written on their temples and on the faces of their gods. She offers detailed comparisons of temples in Chennai (formerly Madras), London, and Washington, D.C., and interviews temple priests, devotees, and patrons. In the process, she illuminates the interrelationships between ritual worship and religious edifices, the rise of the modern world economy, and the ascendancy of the great middle class. The result is a comprehensive portrait of Hinduism as lived today by so many both in India and throughout the world. Lavishly illustrated with professional photographs by Dick Waghorne, this book will appeal to art historians as well as urban anthropologists, scholars of religion, and those interested in diaspora, transnationalism, and trends in contemporary religion. It should be especially appealing for course use because it introduces the modern Hinduism practiced by the friends and neighbors of students in the U.S. and Britain.

A New God examines the worship of a Hindu deity known as Muneeswaran in contemporary Singapore. Sinha's exploration provides an ethnographic documentation of urban-based Hindu religiosity in contemporary Singapore and makes an important contribution to the global study of religion in the diasporas.

God is at work among refugees everywhere. Will you join? Refugee Diaspora is a contemporary account of the global refugee situation and how the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ is shining brightly in the darkest corners of the greatest crisis on our planet. These hope-filled pages of refugees encountering Jesus Christ presents models of Christian ministry from the front lines of the refugee crisis and the real challenges of ministering to today’s refugees. It includes biblical, theological, and practical reflections on mission in diverse diaspora contexts from leading scholars as well as practitioners in all major regions of the world.

Chauncey Williamson is in trouble. He's about to graduate from Dartmouth with a Classics major, no job, no love life and no clue how to get either. And someone is manipulating him to sabotage both endeavors. A solution appears out of the rubble of a terrorist attack. He's been warned to never trust the Deus ex Machina, but hey, he's desperate. So takes a job unknowingly facilitating money laundering through an ingenious Music publishing business. Learning he's descended from Greek gods explains but doesn't solve his problems. Fortunately, the Olympians have sent a guardian angel to help him. They're nothing like he thought. Since the bombing of the Parthenon in 1686 the Olympian gods have wandered the West, looking for a supportive home from which to support the arts, foster democracy and worship a power greater than themselves. They've operated out of Nashville since that city built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in 1898 representing their roles in academia and supporting rock music. But they're having their own problems assimilating into the modern world, and Chauncey's nemesis plans to buy Nashville's Parthenon so he can destroy it and kill the gods who need it for maintaining immortality. But the Olympians have been planning a sting for 3000 years. And Chauncey is along for an adventure for the ages. The Diaspora is the first installment of Chauncey's adventures protecting the gods while learning the real scope behind how Classical Mythology survived Europe's Middle Ages, what Williamsburg tavern keeper guided the American Revolution, and how Chauncey's supposedly boring parents helped craft one of Rock and Roll's most iconic lines..

Banning Black Gods is a global examination of the legal challenges faced by adherents of the most widely practiced African-derived religions in the twenty-first century, including Santeria/Lucumi, Haitian Vodou, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Islam, Rastafari, Obeah, and Voodoo. Examining court cases, laws, human rights reports, and related materials, Danielle N. Boaz argues that restrictions on African diaspora religious freedom constitute a unique and pervasive form of anti-Black discrimination. Emphasizing that these twenty-first-century cases and controversies are not a new phenomenon but rather a reemergence of colonial-era ideologies and patterns of racially motivated persecution, Boaz focuses each chapter on a particular challenge to Black religious freedom. She examines issues such as violence against devotees, restrictions on the ritual slaughter of animals, limitations on the custodial rights of parents, and judicial refusals to recognize these faiths as protected religions. Boaz introduces new issues that have never been considered as a question of religious freedom before—such as the right of Palo Mayombe devotees to possess remains of the dead—and she brings together controversies that have not been previously regarded as analogous, such as the right to wear headscarves and the right to wear dreadlocks in schools. Framing these issues in comparative perspective and focusing on transnational and transregional issues, Boaz advances our understanding of the larger human rights disputes that country-specific studies can overlook. Original and compelling, this important new book will be welcomed by students and scholars of African diaspora religions and discerning readers interested in learning more about the history of racial discrimination

In Strangers to Family Shively Smith reads the Letter of 1 Peter through a new model of diaspora. Smith illuminates this peculiarly Petrine understanding of diaspora by situating it among three other select perspectives from extant Hellenist Jewish writings: the Daniel court tales, the Letter of Aristeas, and Philo's works. While 1 Peter tends to be taken as representative of how diaspora was understood in Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian circles, Smith demonstrates that 1 Peter actually reverses the most fundamental meaning of diaspora as conceived by its literary peers. Instead of connoting the scattering of a people with a common territorial origin, for 1 Peter, diaspora constitutes an "already-scattered-people" who share a common, communal, celestial destination. Smith's discovery of a distinctive instantiation of diaspora in 1 Peter capitalizes on her careful comparative historical, literary, and theological analysis of diaspora constructions found in Hellenistic Jewish writings. Her reading of 1 Peter thus challenges the use of the exile and wandering as master concepts to read 1 Peter, reconsiders the conceptual significance of diaspora in 1 Peter and in the entire New Testament canon, and liberates 1 Peter from being interpreted solely through the rubrics of either the stranger-homelessness model or household codes. First Peter does not recycle standard diasporic identity, but is, as Strangers to Family demonstrates, an epistle that represents the earliest Christian construction of diaspora as a way of life.

"I'm extremely impressed by Johnson's book. Diaspora Conversions offers an outstanding combination of theoretical acuity, erudition, and ethnographic prowess. It is bound to become highly influential in the study of religion in motion."—Manuel A. Vasquez, co-author of Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas "Johnson's work bursts through the present conversations on African diaspora and brings us onto entirely new ground, shattering simplistic ideas and replacing them with critical distinctions. This smart and talented ethnographer succeeds in combining detailed and rich ethnographic fieldwork with an unrelentingly critical and sophisticated analysis. Johnson's work brings to life one of the most central, perhaps the most central, classic question of African American anthropology: "How is Black culture constituted, even through dislocation and displacement?"—Elizabeth McAlister, author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora "Diasporic Conversions convincingly breaks new ground by showing how the meaning of 'homeland' is fundamentally a product of historically situated and contested forms of collective imagination. What will make Johnson's book a benchmark in the study of the African diaspora, and diasporic situations more generally, is that it is not just a richly documented and rigorously argued ethnography, but a genuine anthropology of historical consciousness."—Stephan Palmié, author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition

The author focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. He describes how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, he corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place.

The Letter of James has been greatly underestimated. Some have regarded it as no more than a random set of wisdom sayings with minimal theology. Many have dismissed it as too late a writing to be interesting for the beginnings of Christianity. In this Guide Margaret Aymer sets out to counter such assessments. The key focus of the letter of James, a homily in form, is its impassioned argument for living 'unstained by the world' in the Diaspora. Against the charge that James is theologically weak, Aymer focuses on its theology of God's divine singularity and im-mutability, and of God's relationship to the community as father and benefactor. These are theological foundations for its emphasis on praxis, that is, community actions of be-lief, humility and mutual care. James's community does not live in a utopia. The letter of James takes its stand against empire, not least in regard to wealth, though it is in alignment with empire over matters of gender and power. Divine power is envisioned as an al-ternative power to that of the Romans, though in some re-spects it can seem equally brutal. Aymer concludes by focusing on those addressed by James's homily, the exiles in diaspora. Engaging the psychology of migration, she unpacks the migrant strategy underlying James's call to living 'unstained'. But that leads into a fur-ther issue that arises once James becomes part of a scrip-ture. What might it now mean, she asks, for twenty-first century people to take seriously a separatist migrant dis-course not only as an interesting ancient writing but as a scripture, a lens through which its readers can glimpse the possibilities for how lives are to be lived, and how contem-porary worlds can be interpreted and engaged?