The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From The Fault Line Between Christianity And Islam - Hardcover

Griswold, Eliza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374273189 ISBN 13: 9780374273187

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

A riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worldsThe tenth parallel the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world s 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world s 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well. An award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in The Tenth Parallel show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water,

About this title

About the Author

Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, received a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's Magazine, among others. A 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she was awarded the first Robert I. Friedman Award for investigative reporting. A collection of her poems, Wideawake Field, was published by FSG in 2007.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Griswold may be the first to explain how global warming intensifies religious conflict. For as she travels the climactically vulnerable region near 10 degrees latitude, she sees climate change exacerbating tensions dividing 700 million Muslims and 1.2 billion Christians. These tensions emerge in probing interviews with religious leaders—Christian and Muslim—aflame with spiritual passions now rare in the secular West. Yet Griswold also discovers how the West has helped incubate the region’s interfaith hostility. It was, after all, Western colonizers whose arbitrary boundaries helped harden religious differences: in Sudan, for instance, the British established the tenth parallel as a partition between the Islamic north and the Christian south. More recently, it was the U.S.-led invasion of distant Afghanistan that triggered bloody clashes between Muslim and Christian mobs in the Middle Belt of Nigeria. And in Indonesia, Griswold listens to angry jihadists certain that the spread of fast-food restaurants signals a threatening Christian onslaught. Here and elsewhere Griswold teases out the threads of a complex fabric of religious doctrine, capitalist economics, ethnic pride, and power politics. Despite the complexities, Griswold retains her hope that authentic faith can yet transcend theological differences and foster peace. A compelling portrait of embattled human communities yearning for more-than-human succor. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374273189
• ISBN 13: 9780374273187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336