"Religious Literacy" -- A New York Times Bestseller
Do you get tongue-tied when asked to name the Twelve Apostles? Do you think Adam's wife was Joan of Arc? If so, join the crowd. The United States is one of the most religious places on earth, but it is also a nation of religious illiterates. Many Protestants can't name the four Gospels, many Catholics can't name the seven sacraments, and many Jews can't name the first five books of the Bible. And yet politicians and pundits continue to root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed, or misinterpreted, by the vast majority of American citizens. This is in my view a major problem in contemporary civic life. "Religious Literacy," which will be published by HarperSanFrancisco on March 1, 2007, explores this problem, pinpointing key moments in U.S. history that spawned our current epidemic of religious illiteracy and offering practical solutions to remedy this problem, including mandatory religion courses in the public schools. The book also includes a Dictionary of Religious Literacy with key terms, beliefs, characters, and stories that every American needs to know in order to make sense of religiously inflected debates: from abortion and gay marriage to Islamic terrorism and the war in Iraq.
Everybody who's taken high school American history knows that the United States is a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of religions in which Muslims and Methodists, Buddhists and Baptists live and work side by side. This book (which I edited) explores how four religious communities in this nation of religions (Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs) are shaping and being shaped by American values. Instead of taking U.S. religious diversity as a proposition to be proved, this volume's contributors take it as a starting point. The United States is, as Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark once put it, "a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists, as well as Christians." But how is this diversity affecting U.S. public life? Contributors explore how how religious diversity is changing the public values, rites, and institutions of the nation and how those values, rites, and institutions are affecting religions that are centuries old yet relatively new to America. Contributors include James Davison Hunter, Gurinder Singh Mann, Vasudha Narayanan, and Robert Thurman.
This book first took shape when I started noticing American Hindus celebrating Christmas and Buddhists referring to Jesus as a bodhisattva. This happened around the same time that George W. Bush was referring to Jesus as his favorite philosopher. The book that emerged out of these curiosities looks at the many ways that Americans, both Christians and otherwise, have made Jesus over in their own image, eventually turning him into a national icon. Along the way it contends that the United States is a "Jesus nation" in which virtually everyone reveres Jesus, yet everyone reveres him in their own way.
