Borícua Muslims
Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their “authenticity” is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow Borícua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.
Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. Borícua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality—a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, Borícua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.
Engaged Spirituality
This open access book is a testimony to the power of telling good stories, revealing that the sharing of good religious stories helps advance vital conversations around some of the most critical issues of our time.
Written by reporters and researchers who worked for five years with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, this book focuses on some of the greatest challenges to the contemporary human experience; from education, health care and socioeconomic development to environmental justice, gender and sexual equity, and interreligious dialogue. It draws on compelling profiles of spiritually engaged humanitarians to chronicle individuals' efforts to fix what is wrong, and suggests how readers might find their own solutions in exemplary stories.
The power and humanity of these portraits showcases how articles of faith, religious values, and spiritual commitments can help reimagine the way we engage the tangible, troubling realities of contemporary life. Originating from different traditions and diverse corners of the globe, these stories help dispel discouragement about the state of the world and instead inspire readers to take positive action to address our shared global challenges.
The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean
Winner of the Religion News Association's Award for Best Nonfiction Religion Book!
The "Muslim World" is often narrowly conceived as tied to the Middle East and North Africa, or more broadly as encompassing Africa’s Sahel region, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of the Balkans. But what about Latin America and the Caribbean? It is this question that inspired Ken Chitwood's book.
Chitwood traces the story of Muslims in Latin America and the Caribbean: their deep roots in the region, as well as the current connections among the multiple networks of people, ideas, economies, politics, and religion that extend across the Americas and beyond. Moving from pre-Columbian encounters to the present day, his rich account leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of an integral, but little recognized, part of the Americas and global Islam.