“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans under rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law. In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali’s radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali’s teaching, including the many movements it inspired. As Dew shows, Ali’s teachings demonstrate an implicit, yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.

How does viewing the American project through a theological lens complicate and enrich our understanding of America? Theologies of American Exceptionalism is a collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America. Thinking theologically allows authors to revisit familiar themes and events with a new perspective; old and new wounds, enduring narratives, and the sacrificial violence at the heart of America are examined while avoiding both the triumphalism of the exceptional and the temptations of the jeremiad. Thinking theologically also involves thinking, as Joseph Winters recommends, with the "unmourned." It allows for an understanding of America as fundamentally religious in a very specific way. Together these essays challenge the reader to think America anew.

How does viewing the American project through a theological lens complicate and enrich our understanding of America? Theologies of American Exceptionalism is a collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America. Thinking theologically allows authors to revisit familiar themes and events with a new perspective; old and new wounds, enduring narratives, and the sacrificial violence at the heart of America are examined while avoiding both the triumphalism of the exceptional and the temptations of the jeremiad. Thinking theologically also involves thinking, as Joseph Winters recommends, with the "unmourned." It allows for an understanding of America as fundamentally religious in a very specific way. Together these essays challenge the reader to think America anew.

Fiction. Inertia is a force, a powerful force, but it's not the only one. Courtney and Martin know all the words to all the songs on the mix tape of their lives. They have the cynical in-jokes down, the snide asides, the nonchalant pose. But beneath the practiced facade of self-satisfying ennui, these kids are staring down their futures, struggling in soured relationships with lovers and families, and finding out just what it takes to break out, if it's even possible. HERE IS HOW IT HAPPENS."Spencer Dew writes like a quiet maniac who sees the violence under the fa ade of everyday things, and the beauty under the violence. With X-ray vision and fine-tuned prose, Dew discovers insights and absurdities in the Americana of box stores, elite colleges, poetry students, buffet restaurants, historic plaques, alternative radio, conspiracy theorists, installation artists, and lug-headed drug experimentalists. HERE IS HOW IT HAPPENS explores the place where the heartland meets the rust belt meets the precarious bubble of academia, and finds redemption in the purity of longing and the shit coffee of an Amish country diner."--Karen Lillis"