Books by Loren D . Lybarger
Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities ... more Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Palestinian Chicago charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects they have had on identity across religious, political, class, gender, and generational lines. The perspectives that emerge through this rich ethnography challenge prevailing understandings of secularity and religion, offering critical insight into current debates about immigration and national belonging. (See https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520337619/palestinian-chicago for buying options and for the open-access link.)
Endorsements:
"Loren Lybarger's book provides the first in-depth examination of an important Palestinian-American community in a major US city. Based on painstaking research and extensive interviews, this book constitutes a welcome contribution to our understanding of both the Palestinian diaspora and an important US immigrant community."—Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
"In this groundbreaking and beautifully written book, Loren Lybarger centers the voices of a wide array of Palestinians—Muslim and Christian, religious and secular, immigrant and American-born, politicized and not. Palestinian Chicago brings forth the complex, dynamic, and fluid ways members of this community navigate identity and belonging in today's world."—Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
"Palestinian Chicago masterfully transforms existing understandings of Palestinian identity, resistance, and diaspora. By situating secular nationalism and Islamism within the changing realities of race, class, gender, generation, and space, Lybarger reveals the complex ways Palestinian politics take on local form in Chicago. Palestinian Chicago is an extraordinarily valuable text for anyone interested in History, Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, Religious Studies, and Middle East Studies and the themes of displacement, diaspora, race, identity, and resistance."—Nadine Naber, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
"Palestinian Chicago is a compelling work that complicates the secular in Palestine and the Arab world, in diaspora, and in the United States."—Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
This review of my book, Identity and Religion in Palestine, is by Weldon C. Matthews of Oakland U... more This review of my book, Identity and Religion in Palestine, is by Weldon C. Matthews of Oakland University
This review of my book by Stephen C. Poulson of James Madison University was published in Politic... more This review of my book by Stephen C. Poulson of James Madison University was published in Politics and Religion, December 9, 2009
This remarkable book examines how the Islamist movement and its competition with secular-national... more This remarkable book examines how the Islamist movement and its competition with secular-nationalist factions have transformed the identities of ordinary Palestinians since the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, of the late 1980s. Drawing upon his years living in the region and more than eighty in-depth interviews, Loren Lybarger offers a riveting account of how activists within a society divided by religion, politics, class, age, and region have forged new identities in response to shifting conditions of occupation, peace negotiations, and the fragmentation of Palestinian life.
Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians.
Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.
Reviews:
"Lybarger, a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee, lived and worked among the Palestinian villagers and refugee camp inhabitants in the Israel-occupied West Bank and Gaza for several years when he gathered the material for this book...Observations and conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with men and women, members or supporters of diverse political factions. The author¹s account presents the human face of this wide range of orientations."--D. Peretz, Choice
"[T]his book is a major contribution to our understanding of the recent developments in Palestinian identity. It is easy to imagine historians several decades from now drawing on this book to recover the political debates that took place in Palestinian society on the eve of the second Intifada and at the turn of the twenty-first century."--Weldon C. Matthews, Journal of Islamic Studies
"[A]n original and discerning study."--Khaled Hroub, Journal of Palestine
"The book's achievement lies not in its creditable interviews or riveting narrative, though these are a boon; rather, it resides in the ability to convey advice for the future through these mediums. Islamist groups have become an innate element of Palestinian society, and whether they will become a positive or negative force within the peace process depends on the international community's approach toward negotiations for a viable Palestinian state."--K. Luisa Gandolfo, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
"Loren Lybarger's Identity and Religion in Palestine does a masterly job of communicating the rich texture of life that lies behind this widely misunderstood label. . . . [T]his book is unique. The rich biographical sketches and lengthy quotations from Palestinians themselves constitute a treasure that both enriches and challenges conventional labels such as Islamist, secular, modern and traditional."--Don Holsinger, Mennonite Quarterly Review
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Loren D . Lybarger
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2021
This article analyzes transformations in Palestinian secularism, specifically in Chicago, Illinoi... more This article analyzes transformations in Palestinian secularism, specifically in Chicago, Illinois, in response to the weakening of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the emergence of Islamic reformist structures since the late 1980s. Up until then, secular community organizations that aligned with the secular-oriented Palestinian political factions constituted the ideological center of this community. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, a discernible religious shift began to take place. The analysis draws from extensive fieldwork (2010–15) to show how secularism has not disappeared but rather transmuted into new, often hybrid forms whose lack of institutionalization reflect the attenuation of secularist structures and orientations. The weakening of the secularist milieu leaves individuals who have become disenchanted with the religious-sectarian shift (at the time of the fieldwork) with few alternatives for social connection, solidarity, and action. They forge their own idiosyncratic paths as a result.
Journal of Religion and Society , 2018
This article analyzes how religion shapes Argentine memory of the period of state terror (1976-19... more This article analyzes how religion shapes Argentine memory of the period of state terror (1976-1983). The analysis focuses on the commemorative practices at the Church of Santa Cruz, a target of the former regime’s violence. The article describes the mechanisms through which the church undertakes its commemoration. These processes produce a “martyrological memory” that links the secular political past to core Christian narratives about “the giving of blood” for the sake of justice and “the kingdom of God.”A vision of a reconciled Argentina that centers the oppressed and the martyrs thus emerges.
Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy, and the Arts, 2016
This article explores a set of photographs that documented commemorative events led by
university... more This article explores a set of photographs that documented commemorative events led by
university students in Buenos Aires, Argentina in March 2006. After defining three key features
of these photographs—commemoration, testimony, and protest—the authors consider ways the
students used written language as well as their bodies in dramatic performance to communicate a
critical perspective about historical events in Argentina. The authors then begin to sketch out
what it means to read and respond in critical solidarity to or through these images of
commemoration, testimony, and protest.
This article explores the limits of the debate surrounding Robert A. Orsi's call for a “third way... more This article explores the limits of the debate surrounding Robert A. Orsi's call for a “third way” in scholar-practitioner encounters in religious studies research. It argues that the debate has reached an impasse and that, as Joel Robbins suggests, an alternative approach might exist within theology—particularly, theological discussions of how the Christian is to relate to the non-Christian other. The article tests this notion by probing the writings of A. Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican theologian and Islamic Studies specialist who proposed the possibility of expanding the Christian canon within the context of interfaith encounters. The article concludes that although religious studies remains, as a field, unprepared to countenance the kind of hybridization toward which Cragg's conception of the interfaith situation leads, his notion of “bi-scripturalism” has the potential nevertheless of opening up new questions for religious studies scholars concerned with alterity.
Drawing on dozens of in-depth life-history interviews and extensive participant observation in mo... more Drawing on dozens of in-depth life-history interviews and extensive participant observation in mosques and community centers, this article probes the interaction of religion and nationalism in the formation of individual identities within the Palestinian immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois since the late 1980s. The analysis focuses on three individuals who represent distinct approaches to negotiating the relationship of religion and nation. The first approach is context-adaptive, responding and accommodating to the diverging moral assumptions that underlie the ethos of religious and secular spaces. The second approach entails a transition from secular-nationalism to a type of Islamic nationalism or even Islamic secularism. The third approach resists both forms of nationalism, seeking a transcendent Islam in which ethnicity and nation recede within a new religious humanism. The core argument throughout is that processes of religious return, often analyzed in relation to transnational trends, take diverse and indeterminate forms. This fact results from the shaping effects of a range of “secular” factors — gender, generation, class, family dynamics, intercommunal interactions, traumatic events — which register within the specific local settings of ordinary life.
Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 2012
No single paradigm or debate currently orients the social scientific study of religion. Because o... more No single paradigm or debate currently orients the social scientific study of religion. Because of this, those engaged in the multidisciplinary study of religion find that a public conversation is often difficult. In this article and the Forum it introduces, we explore Martin Riesebrodt's recently published book, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Responding to the inadequacies of secularization paradigms, rational choice models, and postmodern criticism, Riesebrodt proposes an approach that ideal-typically reconstructs the subjective meanings of institutionalized religious practices (liturgies). These subjective meanings center on the prevention and management of crises—social, natural, and bodily—through appeal and access to superhuman powers. This pragmatic emphasis on the superhuman defines religion as a distinct sphere of social action transhistorically and transculturally. Riesebrodt's theory creates new analytical possibilities, especially for understanding the modern resurgence of religion under conditions of secularization.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jan 1, 2007
Social Compass, Jan 1, 2005
The Journal of religion, Jan 1, 2000
Book Reviews by Loren D . Lybarger
Journal of Religion, 2015
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Books by Loren D . Lybarger
Endorsements:
"Loren Lybarger's book provides the first in-depth examination of an important Palestinian-American community in a major US city. Based on painstaking research and extensive interviews, this book constitutes a welcome contribution to our understanding of both the Palestinian diaspora and an important US immigrant community."—Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
"In this groundbreaking and beautifully written book, Loren Lybarger centers the voices of a wide array of Palestinians—Muslim and Christian, religious and secular, immigrant and American-born, politicized and not. Palestinian Chicago brings forth the complex, dynamic, and fluid ways members of this community navigate identity and belonging in today's world."—Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
"Palestinian Chicago masterfully transforms existing understandings of Palestinian identity, resistance, and diaspora. By situating secular nationalism and Islamism within the changing realities of race, class, gender, generation, and space, Lybarger reveals the complex ways Palestinian politics take on local form in Chicago. Palestinian Chicago is an extraordinarily valuable text for anyone interested in History, Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, Religious Studies, and Middle East Studies and the themes of displacement, diaspora, race, identity, and resistance."—Nadine Naber, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
"Palestinian Chicago is a compelling work that complicates the secular in Palestine and the Arab world, in diaspora, and in the United States."—Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians.
Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.
Reviews:
"Lybarger, a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee, lived and worked among the Palestinian villagers and refugee camp inhabitants in the Israel-occupied West Bank and Gaza for several years when he gathered the material for this book...Observations and conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with men and women, members or supporters of diverse political factions. The author¹s account presents the human face of this wide range of orientations."--D. Peretz, Choice
"[T]his book is a major contribution to our understanding of the recent developments in Palestinian identity. It is easy to imagine historians several decades from now drawing on this book to recover the political debates that took place in Palestinian society on the eve of the second Intifada and at the turn of the twenty-first century."--Weldon C. Matthews, Journal of Islamic Studies
"[A]n original and discerning study."--Khaled Hroub, Journal of Palestine
"The book's achievement lies not in its creditable interviews or riveting narrative, though these are a boon; rather, it resides in the ability to convey advice for the future through these mediums. Islamist groups have become an innate element of Palestinian society, and whether they will become a positive or negative force within the peace process depends on the international community's approach toward negotiations for a viable Palestinian state."--K. Luisa Gandolfo, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
"Loren Lybarger's Identity and Religion in Palestine does a masterly job of communicating the rich texture of life that lies behind this widely misunderstood label. . . . [T]his book is unique. The rich biographical sketches and lengthy quotations from Palestinians themselves constitute a treasure that both enriches and challenges conventional labels such as Islamist, secular, modern and traditional."--Don Holsinger, Mennonite Quarterly Review
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Loren D . Lybarger
university students in Buenos Aires, Argentina in March 2006. After defining three key features
of these photographs—commemoration, testimony, and protest—the authors consider ways the
students used written language as well as their bodies in dramatic performance to communicate a
critical perspective about historical events in Argentina. The authors then begin to sketch out
what it means to read and respond in critical solidarity to or through these images of
commemoration, testimony, and protest.
Book Reviews by Loren D . Lybarger
Endorsements:
"Loren Lybarger's book provides the first in-depth examination of an important Palestinian-American community in a major US city. Based on painstaking research and extensive interviews, this book constitutes a welcome contribution to our understanding of both the Palestinian diaspora and an important US immigrant community."—Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
"In this groundbreaking and beautifully written book, Loren Lybarger centers the voices of a wide array of Palestinians—Muslim and Christian, religious and secular, immigrant and American-born, politicized and not. Palestinian Chicago brings forth the complex, dynamic, and fluid ways members of this community navigate identity and belonging in today's world."—Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
"Palestinian Chicago masterfully transforms existing understandings of Palestinian identity, resistance, and diaspora. By situating secular nationalism and Islamism within the changing realities of race, class, gender, generation, and space, Lybarger reveals the complex ways Palestinian politics take on local form in Chicago. Palestinian Chicago is an extraordinarily valuable text for anyone interested in History, Ethnic Studies, Urban Studies, Religious Studies, and Middle East Studies and the themes of displacement, diaspora, race, identity, and resistance."—Nadine Naber, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism
"Palestinian Chicago is a compelling work that complicates the secular in Palestine and the Arab world, in diaspora, and in the United States."—Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians.
Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.
Reviews:
"Lybarger, a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee, lived and worked among the Palestinian villagers and refugee camp inhabitants in the Israel-occupied West Bank and Gaza for several years when he gathered the material for this book...Observations and conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with men and women, members or supporters of diverse political factions. The author¹s account presents the human face of this wide range of orientations."--D. Peretz, Choice
"[T]his book is a major contribution to our understanding of the recent developments in Palestinian identity. It is easy to imagine historians several decades from now drawing on this book to recover the political debates that took place in Palestinian society on the eve of the second Intifada and at the turn of the twenty-first century."--Weldon C. Matthews, Journal of Islamic Studies
"[A]n original and discerning study."--Khaled Hroub, Journal of Palestine
"The book's achievement lies not in its creditable interviews or riveting narrative, though these are a boon; rather, it resides in the ability to convey advice for the future through these mediums. Islamist groups have become an innate element of Palestinian society, and whether they will become a positive or negative force within the peace process depends on the international community's approach toward negotiations for a viable Palestinian state."--K. Luisa Gandolfo, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
"Loren Lybarger's Identity and Religion in Palestine does a masterly job of communicating the rich texture of life that lies behind this widely misunderstood label. . . . [T]his book is unique. The rich biographical sketches and lengthy quotations from Palestinians themselves constitute a treasure that both enriches and challenges conventional labels such as Islamist, secular, modern and traditional."--Don Holsinger, Mennonite Quarterly Review
university students in Buenos Aires, Argentina in March 2006. After defining three key features
of these photographs—commemoration, testimony, and protest—the authors consider ways the
students used written language as well as their bodies in dramatic performance to communicate a
critical perspective about historical events in Argentina. The authors then begin to sketch out
what it means to read and respond in critical solidarity to or through these images of
commemoration, testimony, and protest.