Courtney Bender

Yoga and Rebirth in America: Asian Religions are Here to Stay

New movies, store names, and organizations herald a growing interest among Americans in Asian religions. Beyond the fads, sociologists are finding that these Eastern faiths, along with their practitioners and centers, play an increasingly important role in American spiritual life.

Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America's Divisions By Paul Lichterman Princeton University Press, 2005. 331 pages.

identities often separate Buddhism and Thai culture. Cadge found a variety of achieved identities among the people in the convert group. Some thought of themselves as Buddhists, others simply as students of meditation, others as followers of several non-Christian traditions, others as having dual religious identities – as Jewish and Buddhist or Christian and Buddhist, while others did not choose any religious identity. Cadge uses her findings to criticize Christian Smith’s sub-cultural identity theory of religious growth. Smith argues that religions with strong boundaries and a sense of conflict with the larger society will grow. In contrast, Cadge claims that the groups she studied attract people because they are weakly bounded (see pp. 151-2, 164, 240). “It is because of these loose boundaries that Christian Smith’s sub-cultural identity theory does not account for the religious growth and strength of these two organizations or of Buddhism in America more broadly.” (p. 170) In a few places, Cadge describes the changes within the Buddhist groups as examples of Americanization. But similar developments are occurring among Buddhists in the United States, other Western countries and in Asia. Modernization theory could have been used to distinguish global changes in Buddhism in response to modernity from adaptations specifically to American culture. Heartwood is a well-written book that could easily be read by undergraduates or others with some minimal knowledge of Buddhism. Besides being required reading for those engaged in the study of Buddhism, it will also be of interest to students of new religions or those concerned about explaining religious growth.

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American context but with some cross-cultural comparisons. The volume’s final essays by Richard Wood, Milagros Peña, and Omar McRoberts consider religion and socioeconomic inequality with primary attention to faith based organizing, advocacy groups, and congregations. Taken together, the chapters in this volume are an excellent overview of current research and thinking in the sociology of religion. With appropriate supplemental case materials, this book could be the central text in an upper level undergraduate course in the sociology of religion and will be a valuable resource for lecture writing. This volume will also be core reading for graduate students and should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the sociological study of religion in the United States.

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This in-depth survey provides a vivid overview of the religious world of the Baby Boomers. The authors worked with a national sample of persons confirmed in the Presbyterian Church, examining the religious faith of Baby Boomers and exploring the reasons they gave for leaving or staying in the church. The authors identify eight types of young adults--half of them churched and the other half unchurched. Their findings provide some unexpected results.