Agents of God

Based on a year and a half of ethnographic observation and interviews with teachers and students at
four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical
Christian -, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin argues that these schools use politics, gender, sex, and the
internet to separate themselves from the rest of America, a country they view as both a promise and a
threat. In examining these boundaries, he describes how the schools use scripture, prayer, and
science as a means of maintaining their authority over the students' lives.