Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism

Antoun and Hegland have produced a grab bag of essays covering a variety of disciplines and subjects, some useful others not. Starting from the premise that "the thoughtful observer of current events and trends can find ample evidence to suspect a fresh resurgence" of the three major monotheisms, the editors seek to find the common factors. The resulting essays includes some fine insights (for example, on the decline of Muslim piety in Iran since Khomeini took power), one or two excellent efforts (especially John O. Voll's essay on the Muslim perception of the "failure of the West"), some egregious theorizing (especially Eric Davis's doctrinaire Marxist analysis of Egypt and Israel), and an awful lot of standard social science patter. Despite many of the authors' efforts to draw parallels between the monotheisms, one comes away from the volume with no clear sense of common causes and only a few shared manifestations. For graduate students and faculty.