The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought,by Anthony Ossa-Richardson,Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, 342 pp. ISBN 978 0 691 15711 5, US$35.00 (hardback); ISBN 978 1 400 84659 7 (e-book)

In this article, I juxtapose Pentecostal churches with youth gangs, two popular barrio institutions that at first glance appear to be irreconcilable but when considered together evince organic parallels that reveal important insights into contemporary life in urban poverty. Reflecting on ethnographic data from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, I argue that due to an analogous ritualization of everyday life – through rigorous rules and clearly defined consequences for breaking them – both Pentecostal churches and youth gangs, despite their ostensible differences, afford a unique kind of freedom in constraint, and by providing reliable spaces of predictability, control, and mastery, have become popular stages for managing the precariousness of barrio life in late modernity.     

Rethinking Secularism,edited by Craig Calhoun,Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen,Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2011, vii + 311 pp. ISBN 978 019979667-0, US$99.00 (hbk); ISBN 978 019979668 7, US$24.95 (pbk)

Neo-monasticism, including the desire to live in Christian intentional community, is increasingly popular in the United States. Communities are structured around a rule or shared covenant that outlines the parameters of living in community. Daily prayer is often a central feature to neo-monastic life as is an emphasis on socio-ecological justice. Drawing on recent Christian theology about gardens, a popular neo-monastic book of common prayer, interviews with practitioners of neo-monasticism, and fieldwork conducted with a nascent neo-monastic community in the southeastern United States, this article argues that prayer acts as a religious technology of the self for socio-ecological change. Through prayer, participants of intentional communities change, and this in turn leads to acts that alter the socio-ecological worlds around them.