University of Michigan Press Blog

UM Press author declared not guilty of trespass charges from 2010 event

University of Michigan Press author and activist/performance artist Reverend Billy Talen was found not guilty of Criminal Trespass in the Third Degree on Thursday, October 20th.

Talen and The Stop Shopping Choir, directed by Savitri D, entered the lobby of the UBS Bank in midtown Manhattan on Black Friday 2010 dressed as angels. Savitri D, Bill Talen and editor Alisa Solomon are the authors of The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping.

Shortly after singing songs that highlighted the bank’s corrupt financial interest in coal extraction organizations using mountaintop removal, Talen was arrested, charged, and faced up to three months in jail.

'Teaching about Religions' author favors balanced religious courses in public schools

Emile Lester is author of Teaching about Religions, a brand-new book on religious education in public schools from the University of Michigan Press. He speaks here about how religions can be incorporated into a public school curriculum.

Recent attempts by Texas state school board members to accommodate conservative Christian concerns in the social studies and science curriculums have produced predictable handwringing among many liberals and secularists.  These groups have responded by emphasizing the need to teach evolution only and insulate the public school curriculum from conservative Christian biases.

These groups’ concerns are not unwarranted.  Still, in Teaching Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools, I argue their concerns are based on a misconception about the religious divide in America, and their response is only likely to deepen this divide.  Public schools would better live up to democratic ideals of respect and neutrality by providing a limited and balanced discussion of crucial conservative Christian views.

Reverend Billy returns with the "Church of Earth-a-lujah" in a series of appearances

"After ten years we ARE a church, if a post-religious one."

Every Sunday starting January 30th, Reverend Billy, the revivalist preacher created by performance artist Bill Talen, is inviting readers to revel in the glory of the Reverend's worship-show, "The Church of Earth-a-lujah."

Reverend Billy is the subject of The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping by Savitri D and Bill Talen. The Reverend has attracted an international following as he has railed in white suit and clerical collar against the evils of excessive consumerism and corporate irresponsibility.

Hosted every Sunday at 7:30 PM at "Theater 80" - 80 St. Mark's Place in New York's East Village, the spectacular is described as "an urban study of indigenous wisdom, wrapped with a distortion of Jimmy Swaggart and a radical gospel choir from around the world."

Do U.S. Donors Drive Israeli Politics? Author Contributes to New York Times Israel / Palestine Aid Debate

Part of a full article originally posted July 7, 2010, at The New York Times (Below: Israel Map: Sending Money to the Settlements--click to view.)

The Diaspora’s Influence, by Yossi Shain

Yossi Shain is a professor of political science and the director of the Aba Eben Program of Diplomacy at Tel Aviv University and a professor of comparative government at Georgetown University. He is the author of Kinship and Diasporas in International Affairs.

"As early as Hellenic and Roman times, politically motivated charitable donations from sources abroad have played a role in international politics, particularly in the Middle East. Members of all sorts of ethnic and religious communities, including Jews, who settled in the Hellenic world, felt no tension between duty to Jerusalem, the symbolic and real embodiment of their faith, and loyalty to their place of domicile.

Attachment to Jerusalem manifested itself in yearly tithes for the maintenance of the Temple, paid by Mediterranean Jews after the Seleucid and Ptolemaic overlords ceased subsidies. The historian Erich Gruen has written that the overseas contributions brought great wealth to the Temple, a gesture that did not signify a desire for return. On the contrary; it signaled that the return was not necessary.

In our time, money from the diaspora to influence national identity and finance conflict in the country of origin is a common phenomenon in many parts of the world. But financial transfers come not only from kin communities; non-kin organizations and individuals may see the conflict affecting their own international vision or even identity.

The One-State Solution for Israel and Palestine, by Virginia Tilley

(Op-ed originally published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 25 no. 21.)

by Virginia Tilley, author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, now available in paperback (ISBN: 978-0-472-03449-9) and ebook (ISBN: 978-0-472-02616-6).

"For some years, most people sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations – or simply alert to their durability and the political dangers they pose – have assumed that a stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would require the formation of a Palestinian state in the (dwindling) areas not yet annexed by Israel, in what is left of British Mandate territory. This old staple of the Palestinian national movement was even belatedly approved by Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush. The Palestinian Authority itself was set up by the Oslo process as a pre-statal entity, intended to establish by stages an independent Palestinian cabinet and parliament, as a prelude to sovereignty over (a disarmed, landlocked, dependent) Palestine. Most recently, a courageous coalition of Israeli and Palestinian professionals has tried to imbue the two-state solution with new energy by formulating a detailed agreement – the so-called Geneva Accords. All these efforts have referred, vaguely or specifically, to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements, without which a Palestinian state would make no territorial sense.

France to Vote on Ban of Islamic Full Veil in Public: Prominent Turkish Sociologist Examines Veiling of University Women

As France's Lower House of Parliament prepares to vote on a controversial bill that would ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil in public, check out University of Michigan Press title The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, (Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-06630-8) by prominent Turkish sociologist Nilufer Gole, who examines the veiling of young university women and the cultural cleavages between the Islamic and Western worlds. 

Nilüfer Göle examines the complex relationships among modernity, religion, and gender relations in the Middle East. Her focus is on the factors that influence young women pursuing university educations in Turkey to adopt seemingly fundamentalist Islamist traditions, such as veiling, and the complex web of meanings attributed to these gender-separating practices. Veiling, a politicized practice that conceptually forces people to choose between the "modern" and the "backward," provides an insightful way of looking at the contemporary Islam-West conflict, shedding light on the recent rise of Islamist fundamentalism in many countries and providing insight into what is a more complex phenomenon than is commonly portrayed in accounts by Western journalists.

Helen Thomas Retires, Israeli and Palestinian Tensions Do Not

Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas retired yesterday, amidst controversy surrounding her statements on video that "Israel should get the hell out of Palestine," and tensions in the Middle East continue after Israeli forces boarded an aide ship bound for Palestine and Iran faces tough new sanctions from the UN. Three University of Michigan Press books, now available in paperback and for classroom use, explore Israel's foreign policy, the organization of modern political Islam, and the delicate balance of security the Middle East faces this century. Click on the covers below to learn more:

 

PROFESSORS: Request exam copies here.

Related: Read University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole's reaction to Octavia Nasr committing Twittercide with post praising Hezbollah leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.

Irene Thomson on BookTV Saturday to discuss 'Culture Wars' and answer questions

Irene Taviss Thomson, author of Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas, will be on BookTV Saturday. Her discussion and Q&A at Fairleigh Dickinson University was taped by the show a few weeks ago and will be broadcast Saturday at 8:45 a.m. Eastern time on C-SPAN2.

The book examined articles in four news magazines, plus a wealth of public speeches and other written materials, to determine that how people identified themselves (Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative) did not accurately predict how they would feel about hot button issues such as religion, homosexuality, sexual conduct, and abortion.

You can watch the show online here.

"Lead Burrito" Roman Tomb Find By UM Press Authors Could Contain Body of Gladiator or Christian Dignitary

Published: National Geographic.com, Christine Dell'Amore, March 29, 2010.

A 1,700-year-old sarcophagus found in an abandoned city near Rome could contain the body of a gladiator or a Christian dignitary, say archaeologists who are preparing to examine the coffin in the lab. Found in a cement-capped pit in the ancient metropolis of Gabii, the coffin is unusual because it's made of lead—only a few hundred such Roman burials are known. Even odder, the 800 pounds (362 kilograms) of lead fold over the corpse like a burrito, said Roman archaeologist Jeffrey Becker [co-author with Nicola Terranato of upcoming UMP release Roman Republican Villas, available June 2011]. Most lead sarcophagi look like "old-fashioned cracker boxes," molded into a rectangular shape with a lid, he said. The coffin, which has been in storage since last year, is about to be moved to the American Academy in Rome for further testing. But uncovering details about the person inside the lead coffin will be tricky.

Podcast: Professor Paula Abrams Explores Landmark Pierce v. Society of Sisters Case

originally published as Lewis & Clark News, Feb. 11, 2010

Lewis & Clark law professor Paula Abrams has devoted her career to constitutional issues such as equality, reproductive rights, and the tensions between environmental and human rights approaches to population policy. In her latest book, Cross Purposes: Pierce v. Society of Sisters and the Struggle over Compulsory Public Education, she journeys into new constitutional terrain—the rights of parents.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN: PODCAST

Cross Purposes delves into the 1925 Supreme Court case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which sought to address the fundamental question: Do parents have the right to determine how their children should be educated?

This landmark case has affected how children are educated in this country today.  The underlying story, including the political and social impetus behind the case, also sheds light on how the U.S. government and citizens act when national security issues seem to threaten their way of life.