Religion: general
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Religions of the World: Questions, Challenges, and New Directions
Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steven W. Ramey
Religions of the World: Questions, Challenges, and New Directions provides a critical introduction to the social, political, and cultural interests that inform how people describe and identify with religion. One of its goals is to provide a sense of methodological transp...
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Evil: A Critical Primer
Evil: A Critical Primer begins with the claim that evil is a concept that is contextually bound. This means that we should not expect to find shared or similar notions of evil across cultures. Addressing evil in a way that is at once contextually specific and applicable to cross-cultural...
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The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism
The values of liberalism, pluralism, and democratic governance are under sustained attack from right-wing Christian fundamentalists, white ethnonationalists, and economic populists. At the same time, liberal democracies are failing at cultivating and transmitting the values, wisd...
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Interpretation: A Critical Primer
This volume examines the nature of interpretation, strategies within interpretation, and negotiations about the adequacy of an interpretation, with special attention paid to possible roles interpretation plays in the academic study of religions. While many people engage in interpretation, it is n...
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Religion and Marxism
This concise and accessible introduction brings the writings of Marx and Engels and later thinkers in the Marxist tradition including Althusser, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School as well as Liberation Theologians such as Gutierrez and Maduro, into focus in relation to questions of religion, social chang...
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Thinking with J. Z. Smith: Mapping Methods in the Study of Religion
In his bio-bibliographical essay, J.Z. Smith wrote that he was fond of the expression “when the chips are down” in the sense of all being said and done. With his passing in December 2017, the phrase has gained an additional layer of sad finality – the chips are really down. Scholarship is not pok...
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Remembering J. Z. Smith
Emily D. Crews, Russell T. McCutcheon
This volume presents an archive of remembrances of the person and the contributions of the late Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017). Section one collects previously unpublished papers from three separate recent scholarly panels (from the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, an...
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Identifying Roots
This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley's Roots as a case study in 'operational acts of identification.' It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of...
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Ritual and Democracy
Sarah M. Pike, Jone Salomonsen, Paul-Francois Tremlett
This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open Univers...
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Religion and Sight
Sight is both celebrated and denigrated in religion. In some contexts it is extolled as a source of knowledge and revelation. In others it is demonized as the road to illusion and idolatry. There is no single way that sight functions in religion, nor indeed a single way to study it. This edited volu...