In Europe, the increasing presence of Islam has often provoked concerns about a threat to security and liberal democracy. Jonathan Laurence’s The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims challenges these ideas and shows how the transformation of a new generation into European Muslims has consisted of a complex mix of achievements and tensions. The book recently received a terrific review in The Economist. Jonathan was kind enough to answer a few questions about his unique look at European Islam, the debates surrounding it, and the connection to the Arab awakening:

Q: Anders Breivik was recently declared insane by the court. His act of violence is widely condemned, but aren’t his anti-multiculturalist views fairly widespread?

For Breivik, the year is 1683 and an Islamic empire is storming the Gates of Vienna. Some of the views in his Internet-age manifesto are popular, although what he did in Oslo and Utoya is of course condemned. An Italian politician from a party in government spoke approvingly of the Norwegian’s belief that Europe had “given up on its cultural identity without a fight.” In December, a poll showed 76% of the French public thinks Islam is “progressing too much.” So the vocal concern over Islam’s growth and Muslims’ integration is no longer the exclusive domain of the far right. It has become ritual for heads of government to declare the failure of multiculturalism, a catchall description increasingly taken to mean the arrival of Muslims in Europe. Breivik may be legally insane, but he is not alone in thinking that Europe is at a turning point vis-à-vis its growing Islamic minorities.

Timur Kuran, author of ‘The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law
Held Back the Middle East’ was a guest on BBC World Service The Forum on Sunday.

The programme asked three distinguished Professors of Economics for their views on how to solve the
current economic crisis. Other guests were Danny Quah from London School
of Economics and Lord Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy
at Warwick University. The programme is available to listen to from this
link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lzhr8

We invite you to browse and download two new catalogs featuring great books by great authors.

In the religion catalog you can check out the Lives of Great Religious Books series with books by Garry Wills, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Martin E. Marty. You will also find new books from Robert Wuthnow, Paula Fredriksen, Mark Chaves, Leora Batnitzky, Peter Schäfer and Timothy Matovina – just to name a few.

Follow the link to the religion catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/rel12.pdf

In the anthropology catalog look for new books by Chloe Silverman, Peter Benson, Junko Kitanaka, Stephen J. Collier, Duana Fullwiley, and Marcia C. Inhorn. Forthcoming this May are books by Partha Chatterjee, Thomas Blom Hansen, and a book by Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. Be the first to check them out in the catalog.

Follow the link to the anthropology catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/anthro12.pdf

Both catalogs have many more new titles and your favorites now in paperback. Enjoy browsing.

Kristen Ghodsee’s “Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria” has won the 2011 John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize from the Bulgarian Studies Association. This award is established for the most outstanding recent scholarly book within any area of Bulgarian studies.

“Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.

Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region’s state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women’s embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks’ new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria’s Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.”

This is the most recent in a slew of prizes for “Muslim Lives,” which has also won the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize, the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Congratulations to Amy Hungerford, whose book “Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960″ has been shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Textual Study of Religion.

We would also like to congratulate Mark Valeri, whose book “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America” was shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion.

“In order to give recognition to new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion, the American Academy of Religion offers Awards for Excellence. These awards honor works of distinctive originality, intelligence, creativity and importance; books that affect decisively how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted.”

Check out the announcement of the 2011 winning books here.

Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Congratulations to PUP author Mark Valeri, whose book “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America” has been awarded the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. The prize recognizes “the best book published in the two previous calendar years, originating in the North American scholarly community, which presents original research on [...]

We have jumped into the high tech world of apps twice now. This is our first offering, based on the best-selling PUP version of The I Ching or Book of Changes. You can read more about the app here, purchase a copy here, or watch the video below to learn more about how to use the app.

“This Scientology watcher is beside himself with joy,” writes Tony Ortega at the Village Voice web site. What is the cause of such celebration, you might ask? Well, Ortega explains that, “in the past couple of days, we’ve received not one but TWO new advance copies of new books on Scientology.”

And one of them is a PUP title! The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Hugh B. Urban will be available in bookstores in August and the timing couldn’t be better as there is a new expose publishing this summer called Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman. While the two books will likely be quite different in style and tone, they are a perfect pair for anyone who wants to learn more about Scientology and perhaps herald an era of increased study of Scientology.

Maybe you were lucky enough to be there, or perhaps you caught it live on C-Span, but Martin Marty was interviewed at the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Lit Fest over the weekend. You can watch the program here: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/Dietr&showFullAbstract=1.

Marty was on hand to discuss the new series The Lives of Great Religious Books and specifically his new book in that series, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has steadily gained prominence through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but his most famous book — Letters and Papers from Prison — was never really conceived of as a book. It is, as the title suggests, a collection of letters and papers smuggled out of prison, addressed to loved ones and intellectual colleagues. These papers were hidden away and only collected into their current form posthumously–a process Martin E. Marty describes in this article at Berfrois:

“Only a zealous and informed scavenger could have found and assembled scribbled fragments which eventually became the published prison letters by the best-remembered German cleric who gave his life in the anti-Nazi cause,” writes Marty. “There was no manuscript of the book which later appeared in many languages around the world. The gallows took its author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he had a chance to shape a book.”

Marty notes that merely possessing one of the letters could have been a crime or have lead Nazis to conspirators, so, how did these letters survive?

According to Marty, they were secreted “in various hard-to-find locales, including in gas-mask canisters hidden in the garden of Dietrich’s mother; while others were tucked into scattered books and files.”

Fortunately, Eberhard Bethge, a friend of Bonhoeffer’s, “was farseeing enough to recognize that though his friend was writing sometimes casual notes, there were also more formal little treatises which might be cherished by scholars and others who were left behind….So Bethge saved all that he could, even though he had to report regretfully in the book he edited that…in order to protect some people mentioned in the letters, he had no choice but in haste to burn some of them. So the trail of letters ended abruptly, a fact that contributed further to the apparently random character of the book.”

Read the rest of Marty’s article here: http://www.berfrois.com/2011/05/martin-e-marty-on-bonhoeffer/

Religion Dispatches Magazine Online’s Lauri Lebo has a good suggestion for what to do this coming Saturday when, according to Harold Camping, true believers will ascend to heaven while the rest of the Earth heads towards destruction: throw a party!

Apparently many atheists (and believers who don’t think the Rapture is coming in two days) have decided to ring in the purported end of the world with a celebration.  Lebo has a few tips for a successful judgement day bash, including appropriate drinks to serve (such as the “Death in the Afternoon,” a Hemingway favorite) and what time to start your festivities (6 p.m. is allegedly when the Rapture will begin).

Interestingly enough, the reported information about the rapture includes not just a specific start time, but a prophesy that there will be “a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth.” If this sounds familiar, it may be because historically earthquakes have figured into the apocalyptic predictions of many civilizations. Read Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur with Dawn Burgess to find out more!

(And please, be careful with that absinthe!)