The Fall 2024 print issue of New Lines offers a collection of stories that explore politics, culture and religion from around the world. With the U.S. presidential campaign capturing global attention, we delve deeply into Tampa’s evolving Muslim community (or the “new Dearborn” as a young Palestinian American calls it). But we don’t stop there, traveling across the globe to report on everything from Kyrgyzstan’s Russian-speaking Orthodox community to Somalia’s harsh military training to the Sudanese civil war’s effect on the people of the Nuba Mountains to an archaeological dig in Scotland reshaping our understanding of Neolithic Europe. We also spotlight the late Iraqi-Israeli novelist Sami Michael’s legacy and examine the influence of global narco-Pentecostalism. We hope you enjoy our latest issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together.
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Brazilian prosperity theology has made it possible for pastors and their congregants to be “involved in the drug trade and human trafficking, even in prostitution, and yet still see themselves as loyal and steadfast Christians,” Chesnut says, even if outsiders see “great contradictions in slinging an AK-47 across your shoulder after you've attended church.”
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Tampa’s Muslims are shaping local, statewide and national elections with the increasing political power that comes with such a substantial presence. But that influence is far from monolithic: The Muslim community’s shifting political crosscurrents and fault lines mean it doesn’t align neatly with either camp in the country’s increasingly polarized landscape.
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The Nuba Mountains are the theater of a separatist conflict and have long been one of the most perilous regions of Sudan. Yet with the outbreak of the country’s civil war last year, they became a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees who now face famine on a vast scale.
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After the Nazis marched into France in 1940, a French veteran living almost 7,000 miles away in Buenos Aires started a small bulletin to counter fascist ideology — and sparked what would become one of the largest Free French resistance movements in the world.
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Can’t Black writers write what they want to write in the 21st century? In the world of Percival Everett’s 2001 “Erasure,” the answer was no. In 2023, with the novel’s adaptation into the movie “American Fiction,” the answer is still no.
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A proposed ban on the sale of a key raw material used to make many of Scotland’s best whiskies raises an alarming question for the drink’s fans: Is their cherished Scotch destined, sooner or later, to lose its signature taste?
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Thousands of years ago, Orkney was at the heart of Neolithic northern Europe — its landmark buildings welcoming vast numbers of people. Now the main archaeological site on the island has been reburied after 20 years of astonishing research, just as it’s revealed that the Altar Stone of Stonehenge came from nearby.
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The formation of states in the post-Ottoman Balkans owed much to individuals who had thrived in a world of rural lawlessness, warfare and violence. They brought the characteristics of frontier societies to bear on the political culture of these new countries, with lasting effects.
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A young Somali soldier joined the army to fight al-Shabab after being promised he would be trained in Qatar. Instead, he was flown from Mogadishu to Eritrea, where he was abused and tortured while undergoing covert military training.
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The novelist Sami Michael died last year aged 97. Born and raised in Baghdad, he introduced characters previously marginalized or omitted in Hebrew literature: immigrants, Mizrahim, women and especially Arabs. His portrayals are sympathetic but unsparing, and his writing tackled issues central to Israeli society that were previously cloaked in silence.
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Western writers have hesitated for centuries — over a millennium even — to call Byzantium what it was: the Roman Empire. The historian Anthony Kaldellis has dubbed this tendency “Roman denialism,” an intellectual condition he has mercilessly criticized for years. Now he has brought this battle to a popular audience.
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Suluktu in Kyrgyzstan is a desolate, far-flung spot of the former Soviet empire, where some remain faithful to Russia, or at least their idea of it. The Russian-speaking minority here is engulfed in a battle over control of their Orthodox heritage, while their new priest tends to an empty church.
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