Crucial to the vitality of any religious community is its ability to attract and engage descendants and converts. By this measure, notwithstanding the proliferation of mosques and Islamic organizations, the Muslim community in America is not doing at all well." This rather sober assessment motivates Dr. Lang to address, in this book, the alienation from the Mosque of the great majority of America's homegrown Muslims. 
In Losing My Religion: A Call For Help, the author comes to terms with many of the queries put to him by Americans of Muslim parentage and converts to Islam since the publication of his book Even Angels Ask in 1997. Lang asserts that to effectively respond to the general malaise of American-born Muslims, the Islamic establishment in America needs to be willing to listen to the doubts and complaints of the disaffected. This entails engaging in open discussions on issues with which many in the Muslim community will be uncomfortable, but Lang avers that such open dialogue will be of more benefit to young American Muslims struggling with their faiths than the covert and uniformed discussions that often take place or no discussion at all. For this reason, Lang feels it is important and beneficial "to be candid and objective and not evade controversy, for to inadequately state the case for or against a specific position, especially when it challenges convention, only serves to fur! ther alienate the sceptical." In addition to examining questions of theodicy, hadith authenticity, and moot practices within the American Muslim community, the author includes many testimonials and inquiries that make this book informative.

Losing My Religion: A Call For Help

Lang, Jeffrey

Biographies & Memoirs

Amana

At age eighteen, Yoshinori Mizutani moved to Tokyo after having grown up in a small town surrounded by rich wildlife and nature. In his constant search for aspects of the natural world in the midst of the bustling metropolis, he discovered the buzzer midge ('yusurika'), a tiny insect that allows him to transform the city into a sparkling, magical realm through his camera lens. Swarms comprising myriad individual animals radiate an almost palpable kinetic energy when reflected in the camera flash, appearing as white specks of light, "like fairies in the natural world". In this way, Mitzutani explores and contemplates his own past, linking memory and affinity towards nature. "As I conversed with and observed nature, I came across the buzzer midge, or yusurika in Japanese. Yusurikas inhabit freshwater areas such as rivers and ponds in groups, sometimes forming swarms. Reflecting the flash of the camera, each yusurika turns into a small white ball of light, and transforms into something fantastical, like fairies existing in the natural world."--Photographer's website. In Japanese and English. 1 volume (unpaged) ; color illustrations ; 31 cm

Yoshinori Mizutani - Yusurika

Arts & Photography

Yoshinori Mizutani

Photography & Video

Hideyuki Ishibashi - Presage

Hideyuki Ishibashi

Satoshi Fujiwara - Code Unknown

Satoshi Fujiwara

Sohei Nishino - Tokyo (Japanese Edition)

Sohei Nishino

In 1990, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the seas of New Zealand. On one particular deserted beach, he discovered hundreds of car parts, probably from the 1960s, disintegrated and corroded by decades under the waves. Photographing them individually, he imagined that human civilization had ended, thinking that the sight of crafted objects rotting away is at once dreadful and beautiful. This series of heavily black-and-white images of decaying metal on the sand are reproduced in this large-format photo book, accompanied by an introspective text by Sugimoto on the nature of the sea and the inexorable, practically incomprehensible, passage of time.

Hiroshi Sugimoto On The Beach

EDITED

Photographers Rinko Kawauchi and Terri Weifenbach met for the first time in Brooklyn five years ago. After corresponding via email for some time, and eventually attaching photographs to those messages, they decided to have a conversation only using their own photographs. More than a year later, these personal picture letters are now the subject of a show at IMA Gallery in Tokyo and of this marvellous double book. Flipping through the pages of the mirrored bindings sets each artists work opposite that of the other in a captivating progression of delicate and subliminal beauty: small observations and radiant nuances plucked from the respective worldviews of these two unusual talents.

Gift Rinko Kawauchi Terri Weifenbach

Photographer Stephen Shores extensive travels across the United States, document the banal scenes and objects he encounters along the way. This series was made on a single day in 2013, when Shore revisited a small Arizona town he had first seen in 1972. As part of Doug Aitkens Station to Station project, in which invited artists, writers, performers and filmmakers rode a train from New York to California, stopping at various points to stage happenings, Shore decided to photograph Winslow and make a slideshow at the next stop; a visual improvisation. His portrait of the sun-baked town is bleak, with boarded-up buildings, abandoned objects and lifeless streets.

Winslow Arizona: Stephen Shore

STEPHEN SHORE

Islam in focus

Ê»Abd al-Ê»AÌtÌ£iÌ, HÌ£ammuÌdah

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Books by Amana