Sociologist Jeffrey Guhin spent a year and a half embedded in four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. At first pass, these communities do not seem to have much in common. But under closer inspection Guhin finds several common threads: each school community holds to a conservative approach to gender and sexuality, a hostility towards the theory of evolution, and a deep suspicion of secularism. All possess a double-sided image of America, on the one hand as a place where their children can excel and prosper, and on the other hand as a land of temptations that could lead their children astray. He shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the secular world, both in school and online. Guhin develops his study of boundaries in the book's first half to show how the school communities teach their children who they are not; the book's second half shows how the communities use "external authorities" to teach their children who they are. These "external authorities" - such as Science, Scripture, and Prayer - are experienced by community members as real powers with the ability to issue commands and coerce action. By offloading agency to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and 143 formal interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to sociology, religious studies, and education.

Al-Minhaj Al-Sawi is a milestone work, the first work of its kind for many centuries. It is a compendium of Prophetic Hadiths, categorised under a number of headings and compiled with clear relevance to the lives and situation of Muslims in the modern age. The work is authenticated by a rigorous and detailed process of Takhreej - referencing each hadith to its sources - from a study of over 300 authentic works of hadith. This work will be useful for academics in many relevant fields, whether researching the basis of orthodox Sunni belief and practice, or examining the contemporary Muslim response to religious extremism. It is split into 2 volumes: Prophetic Virtues and Miracles and Righteous Character and Social Interactions. The first part Prophetic Virtues and Miracles will prove invaluable to readers who wish to understand, in the light of the most authenticated and sourced classical Islamic materials, the responsibilities of Muslims in modern age, and the rights of others, and will provide clarity in relation to the Prophet Muhammad's virtues and life, his methods of worship and spiritual practice and other aspects of his Sunnah.

In this groundbreaking book, based on in-depth ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli brings to light the little known, and often marginalized, lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Her book offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today, exploring a phenomenon she terms vernacular asceticism. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of primarily "unlettered" female sadhus who come from a variety of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that the female sadhus whom DeNapoli knew experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways and construct their lives as paths of singing to God. While the sadhus have combined ritual initiation with institutionalized and orthodox orders of asceticism, they also draw on the non-orthodox traditions of the medieval devotional poet-saints of North India to create a form of asceticism that synthesizes multiple and competing world views. DeNapoli suggests that in the vernacular asceticism of the sadhus, singing to God serves as the female way of being an ascetic. As women who have escaped the dominant societal expectations of marriage and housework, female sadhus are unusual because they devote themselves to a way of life traditionally reserved for men in Indian society. Female sadhus are simultaneously respected and distrusted for transgressing normative gender roles in order to dedicate themselves to a life of singing to the divine. Real Sadhus Sing to God is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and, thus, create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as the sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation." The book also examines the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts. It brings together two disparate fields of study in religious scholarship-yoga/asceticism and bhakti-through use of the orienting metaphor of singing bhajans (devotional songs) to understand vernacular asceticism in contemporary India.