New Distributed Titles Fall 2009 - Oxbow Books

Faith-Based War
From 9/11 to Catastrophic Success in Iraq
by T Walter Herbert
The Bush administration was prompted to invade
Iraq by a religious vision that blinded them to the
realities of the struggle against terror, and propelled
them into moral and political catastrophe. The
White House embraced a version of Christian nationalism
in which the President serves as the agent
of God’s wrath to punish evildoers, in keeping with
a tradition that descends from the Massachusetts
Bay Puritans, who considered themselves a “chosen people” occupying a “promised land.”
As native peoples resisted Puritan encroachment at the frontiers of expansion, they were
marked as devils incarnate, fit for total destruction. A modern version of this imperialist
vision was invoked on 9/11, when the social and political conditions giving rise to the
terrorist atrocity were forgotten, and sanctimonious wrath against evildoers ruled the
White House response.
224p, Equinox Publishing, December 2009, Religion and Violence.
paperback, 9781845531621, $26.95; hardback, 9781845531614, $95.00(s)
Introducing Religion
Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z Smith
edited by Willi Braun and Russell T McCutcheon
religious studies
It’s Just Another Story
The Politics of Remembering the Earliest Christians
by Willi Braun
With one eye on the motives for and the manners of the production of early Christian narratives of Christian
beginnings, and the other eye on modern scholarly and popular motives for and manners of appropriating
the early Christian narratives, this book offers a bifocal meditation on the historiographical practices and
problems entailed in the concept of Christian “origins”. The story of Jesus, fixed just so by elaborate techniques
of producing stories that present themselves as histories, is an example of early and modern past-making
for purposes that are not in the past but for which the past as a constructed ideal is valuable currency in the
contest for social and political identity and power in the present.
160p, Equinox Publishing, November 2009, Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest & Construction.
paperback, 9781845530099, $28.95; hardback, 9781845530082, $85.00(s)
Ritual Making Women
Shaping Rites for Changing Lives
by Jan Berry
This volume looks at the way in which
women’s making of ritual has emerged
from the rapidly developing field of
women’s spirituality and theology. The
author uses ethnographic material
drawn from her personal experience in
working with individuals and groups to
show how the construction of ritual is a
practice that uses story-making and embodied action to empower women.
She argues that ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is a
contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional
distinctions of private and public. She includes stories of women who have
created or participated in their own rituals to mark significant changes and
transition in their lives, and reflects on these in the light of ritual theory.
256p, Equinox Publishing, December 2009, Gender, Theology and Spirituality.
paperback, 9781845534158, $29.95; hardback, 9781845534141, $90.00(s)
New in paperback!
To mark the contribution of one of the most influential theorists of religion, thirty-one leading scholars of religion from around the world
put their minds together to work on problems of introducing “religion”: as a category of human social practices, as a term that must
be subject to scholarly theorizing, as a subject that must be carefully presented to students in the classroom. The claim of this volume
is that the disciplined, cross-cultural and comparative study and teaching of religion in the academy is closely tied to the multi-level
task of “introducing” (in the Latin sense of introducere) religion, of taking religion inside the academic discourses in the humanities and
social sciences, of taking students inside religion as a set of ordinary human practices rather than initiating them into a sanctum of
extraordinary knowledge about extraordinary things.
352p, 3 illus, paperback, 9781845536527, $29.95, Equinox Publishing, September 2009.
Also available in hardback (2008), 9781845532307, $95.00(s)
www.dbbconline.com 5