A New Religious America

A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation

by Diana L. Eck

HarperCollins, San Francisco, California       © 2001    404 pp.

This book by Diana Eck is an outgrowth of her work as a professor at Harvard University and Director of The Pluralism Project. Here’s a compelling snippet from the book to contemplate. “When Siraj Wahaj, imam of Masjid al-Taqwa in Brooklyn, stood in the U.S. House of Representatives on June 25, 1991, and offered the first-ever Muslim invocation, he wove into his prayer one of the most oft-cited verses of the Qur’an: ‘Do you not know, O people, that I have made you into tribes and nations that you may know of each other.’ The moment was historic, and the Islamic prayer for life in a pluralist society was arresting. Our religious and cultural differences should not be the occasion for division but, on the contrary, the occasion for the biggest challenge of all: that ‘we may know each other.’ ”

-- reviewed by Jennifer Knight


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