In Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, Ralph H. Craig III tells the story of Tina Turner’s life as a tale of two dreams. The first is well known to the general public: achieving commercial success—as she put it, “[to] fill a football stadium” (p. 165). The second is to be a religious teacher, and it is this dream that Craig identifies as the main throughline of Turner’s life. Craig’s thesis is that “Turner’s story is fundamentally a religious one” (p. 6), and his stellar book takes care in crafting a compelling narrative of Turner’s life in terms of religion and spirituality. Published within Eerdmans’s Library of Religious Biography series, this book will be an exciting and insightful read for fans of Tina Turner because of Craig’s focus on Turner’s spirituality and religiosity in telling her story, which amounts to an intervention in previous accounts of Turner’s life that have not paid sufficient attention to this aspect of her life.
Tag: review
Book Reviews
Book reviews in this volume include: Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds. By David L. McMahan. Oxford University Press, 2023.Reviewed by Dhivan Jones, University of Chester Learning from the West, Learning from the East: The Emergence of the Study of Buddhism in Japan and Europe Before 1900. Edited by Stephen Kigensan Licha and Hans Martin Kräme.…
REVIEW: The Epic of the Buddha
The Epic of the Buddha: His Life and Teachings. By Chittadhar Hṛdaya. Translated by Todd T. Lewis and Subarna Man Tuladhar. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2019. 448 pages. $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781611806199. The Epic of the Buddha: His Life and Teachings is the third (and final) incarnation of Todd T. Lewis and Subarna Man Tuladhar’s translation of Chittadhar Hṛdaya’s epic…
REVIEW: Making a Mantra
Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path of Liberation. By Ellen Gough. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. 315 pages with bibliography, index, and 20 halftone illustrations. $95 (hardcover), ISBN 9780226766904; $30 (paperback), ISBN 9780226767062. This book transforms at least four fields of study: the study of mantras, the study of the Jain…
REVIEW: Monks, Money, and Morality, edited by Brumann, Abrahms-Kavunenko, and Świtek
Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism. Edited by Christoph Brumann, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, and Beata Świtek. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 255 pages. $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 9781350213753. Religion and economics is an area of ever-increasing scholarship, particularly within studies of Buddhism, despite still being in its early stages. The first book-length entry to Buddhism and economics, Buddhism and…
REVIEW: Dogen: Japan’s Original Zen Teacher, by Steven Heine
Dogen: Japan’s Original Zen Teacher. By Steven Heine. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2021. xxiii + 333 pages. $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 9781611809800. Steven Heine, full professor at Florida International University and editor of Japan Studies Review, is the author, editor, or co-editor of nearly three dozen books, nearly a dozen of which are about the thirteenth- century Japanese Zen monk and…
REVIEW: Hungry Ghosts, by Andy Rotman
Hungry Ghosts. By Andy Rotman. Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2021. 224 pages + 8 color repro- ductions. $32.00 (paperback). ISBN 9781614297215. Andy Rotman is an acknowledged expert in Indian Buddhist narrative literature, and his two volumes of translations of Sanskrit stories from the Divyāvadāna have broadened and greatly enriched our understanding of early Indian Buddhism. We are lucky to have…
REVIEW: Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism, by Jacob P. Dalton
Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism. By Jacob P. Dalton. Columbia University Press, 2023. 334 pages. $35.00 (paperback). ISBN 9780231205832. In Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism, Jacob P. Dalton employs both material and textual archaeologies to illustrate a tantric Buddhist tradition in flux at various transitional points in its development. He does this…
REVIEW: What Happened after Mañjuśrī Migrated to China?, edited by Chen, Kuan, and Fo
What Happened after Mañjuśrī Migrated to China?: The Sinification of the Mañjuśrī Faith and the Globalization of the Wutai Cult. Edited by Jinhua Chen, Guang Kuan, and Hu Fo. New York: Routledge, 2022. 316 pages. $170.00 (hardcover). Comprehensive index. Notes and bibliography follow each chapter. ISBN 9781032073491. When we write phrases like “the history of Buddhism,” what in the world…
REVIEW: American Sutra, by Duncan Ryūken Williams
American Sutra is the first comprehensive study of the history of Buddhism in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Pacific War. As Williams notes, this is a topic that has heretofore been relatively understudied in the history of a country that continues to be seen as white and Christian.