Shows how the fashion industry in the mid- to late twentieth century created a particular way of seeing religion as fashionable From cross necklaces to fashion designs inspired by nuns’ habits, how have fashion sources interpreted Christianity? And how, in turn, have these interpretations shaped conceptions of religion in the United States? Religion in Vogue explores the intertwined history of Christianity and the fashion industry. Using a diverse range of fashion sources, including designs, jewelry, articles in fashion magazines, and advertisements, Lynn S. Neal demonstrates how in the second half of the twentieth century the modern fashion industry created an aestheticized Christianity, transforming it into a consumer product. The fashion industry socialized consumers to see religion as fashionable and as a beautiful lifestyle accessory—something to be displayed, consumed, and experienced as an expression of personal identity and taste. Religion was something to be embraced and shown off by those who were sophisticated and stylish, and not solely the domain of the politically conservative. Neal ultimately concludes that, through aestheticizing Christianity, the fashion industry has offered Americans a means of blending traditional elements of religion—such as ritual practice, miraculous events, and theological concepts—with modern culture, revealing a new dimension to the personal experience of religion.

How the fashion industry has contributed to religious change From cross necklaces to fashion designs inspired by nuns’ habits, how have fashion sources interpreted Christianity? And how, in turn, have these interpretations shaped conceptions of religion in the United States? Religion in Vogue explores the intertwined history of Christianity and the fashion industry. Using a diverse range of fashion sources, including designs, jewelry, articles in fashion magazines, and advertisements, Lynn S. Neal demonstrates how in the second half of the twentieth century the modern fashion industry created an aestheticized Christianity, transforming it into a consumer product. The fashion industry socialized consumers to see religion as fashionable and as a beautiful lifestyle accessory—something to be displayed, consumed, and experienced as an expression of personal identity and taste. Religion was something to be embraced and shown off by those who were sophisticated and stylish, and not solely the domain of the politically conservative. Neal ultimately concludes that, through aestheticizing Christianity, the fashion industry has offered Americans a means of blending traditional elements of religion—such as ritual practice, miraculous events, and theological concepts—with modern culture, revealing a new dimension to the personal experience of religion.

For many Westerners, the veil is the ultimate sign of women’s oppression. But Elizabeth Bucar’s take on Muslim women’s clothing is a far cry from this attitude. She invites readers to join her in three Muslim-majority nations as she surveys pious fashion from head to toe and shows how Muslim women approach the question “What to wear?” with style.

From the author of Refuge, a magical novel about a young Iranian woman lifted from grief by her powerful imagination and love of Western culture. Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music. So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of. Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate.

American Muslim religious liberty lawyer Asma Uddin has long considered her work defending people of all faiths to be a calling more than a job. Yet even as she seeks equal protection for Evangelicals, Sikhs, Muslims, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics alike, she has seen an ominous increase in attempts to criminalize Islam and exclude Muslim Americans from those protections.Somehow, the view that Muslims aren’t human enough for human rights or constitutional protections is moving from the fringe to the mainstream—along with the claim “Islam is not a religion.” This conceit is not just a threat to the First Amendment rights of American Muslims. It is a threat to the freedom of all Americans.Her new book reveals a significant but overlooked danger to our religious liberty. Woven throughout this national saga is Uddin’s own story and the stories of American Muslims and other people of faith who have faced tremendous indignities as they attempt to live and worship freely.Combining her experience of Islam as a religious truth and her legal and philosophical appreciation that all individuals have a right to religious liberty, Uddin examines the shifting tides of American culture and outlines a way forward for individuals and communities navigating today’s culture wars.

Modest fashion is a young, fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar retail sector. What do we mean by Modest Fashion? Who are the personalities and companies driving this industry?

The chairs have come in and the crisp yellow thwock of the ball being hit says somehow, now that it's fall, I'm a memory of myself. My whole old life— I mourn you sometimes in places you would have been. —October The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds—the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places— and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.