{"title":"J Barton Scott","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"slandering-the-sacred-book-j-barton-scott-9780226824901","title":"Slandering the Sacred","description":"A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.     Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745179115793,"sku":"NGR9780226824901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51115203166481,"sku":"NIN9780226824901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52737838645521,"sku":"CIN022682490XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022682490X.jpg?v=1751133341"},{"product_id":"spiritual-despots-book-j-barton-scott-9780226368672","title":"Spiritual Despots","description":"Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the self-governing individual that arose from it. In Spiritual Despots, J. Barton Scott reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the “self-ruling subject” crucial to both nineteenth-century reform culture and early twentieth-century anticolonialism in India. Scott uses the quaint term “priestcraft” to track anticlerical polemics that vilified religious hierarchy, celebrated the individual, and endeavored to reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influence. By drawing on English, Hindi, and Gujarati reformist writings, Scott provides a panoramic view of precisely how the specter of the crafty priest transformed religion and politics in India.     Through this alternative genealogy of the self-ruling subject, Spiritual Despots demonstrates that Hindu reform movements cannot be understood solely within the precolonial tradition, but rather need to be read alongside other movements of their period. The book’s focus moves fluidly between Britain and India—engaging thinkers such as James Mill, Keshub Chunder Sen, Max Weber, Karsandas Mulji, Helena Blavatsky, M. K. Gandhi, and others—to show how colonial Hinduism shaped major modern discourses about the self. Throughout, Scott sheds much-needed light how the rhetoric of priestcraft and practices of worldly asceticism played a crucial role in creating a new moral and political order for twentieth-century India and demonstrates the importance of viewing the emergence of secularism through the colonial encounter.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346016964881,"sku":"CIN022636867XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52745003467025,"sku":"NGR9780226368672","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022636867X.jpg?v=1750812622"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-j-barton-scott.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}