WHEN BELONGING INSPIRES—DEATH, HOPE, DISTANCE

Abstract

Notes

1. I leave out the thirteenth essay (by Melani McAlister, on “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Evangelicanism's New World Order”) because its content is much more removed from the direct concerns of the book, though it might logically fit under the rubric “Regional and Global Circuits” used by the editors as the title of Part IV of the book. Its focus really is the Christian Evangelical world in the United States and the uses to which their theology and political ideology uses and needs a strong Zionist state.

2. Asad acknowledges that terrorism exists in other places and fingers Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and Russia, “to name only a few countries,” but I read these lectures as primarily anti-Orientalist in a sense similar to Edward Said's since the publication of his enormously influential and controversial work, Orientalism, in 1978.