Award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in "The Tenth Parallel" show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the people she writes about, one's sense of God is shaped by one's place on earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic.

I. AFRICA. Nigeria: The rock: one -- The rock: two -- The flood -- Drought -- The tribulation -- Modern saints and martyrs -- The God of prosperity -- "Races and tribes" -- Sudan: In the beginning -- Faith and foreign policy -- "Missionary mayonnaise" -- Justice -- Choose -- Spoiling the world -- "The real superpower" -- "They'll kill you" -- Proxy -- "Gather ye men of tomorrow" -- II. ASIA. Indonesia: Beyond Jihad -- Noviana and the firing squad -- Beginning on the wind -- "No more happy Sundays" -- A world made new -- The clash within -- "Allahcracy" -- Malaysia: The race to save the last lost souls -- The wedding -- The river -- The greatest story ever told -- Philippines: A kidnapping -- From 2,000 feet -- Reversion -- Victory or martyrdom -- To witness.