Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Anna Della Subin, "Accidental Gods: On Race, Empire, and Men Unwittingly Turned Divine" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
Description: Ever since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine—nearly always men—have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence—civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions—they have much to teach us.In Accidental Gods: On Race, Empire, and Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (Metropolit...