Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 For such a time as this: the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 1969–2009
- Part I Inventing and reinventing the field of religious studies
- Part II Method and theory in religious studies
- Part III Teaching religion
- Part IV Women and the bible in religious studies
- 20 For the advancement of my career: a form critical study in the art of acknowledgement
- 21 Women's studies in religion
- 22 The debut of the Bible as a pagan classic
- 23 Bible and religion
- Part V Religion and religious studies in civic life
- Part VI Religious studies and identity politics
- Part VII Islam and 9/11
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Index
23 - Bible and religion
from Part IV - Women and the bible in religious studies
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 For such a time as this: the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 1969–2009
- Part I Inventing and reinventing the field of religious studies
- Part II Method and theory in religious studies
- Part III Teaching religion
- Part IV Women and the bible in religious studies
- 20 For the advancement of my career: a form critical study in the art of acknowledgement
- 21 Women's studies in religion
- 22 The debut of the Bible as a pagan classic
- 23 Bible and religion
- Part V Religion and religious studies in civic life
- Part VI Religious studies and identity politics
- Part VII Islam and 9/11
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Summary
I had not known, until I received this year's Annual Meeting Program Book, that our conveners thought of this presentation in consort with my work in Drudgery Divine—an essay on methodological issues in comparison, using the rich documentation of the history of scholarship on the relations between early Christianities and Late Antique religions as the privileged example. As I wrote in the “Preface,” quoting Vološinov, “what interests us here is not so much the connections between the phenomena as the connections between the problems” (J. Z. Smith 1990: viii).
In the more than ten years since the writing of Drudgery, I have not so much altered the discussion of methods and models as I have sought to situate the comparative enterprise within the overall project of the study of religion, a project entailing definition, classification, comparison, and explanation. Each of these processes has in common that they are varying modes of redescription. From this perspective, the end of comparison cannot be the act of comparison itself. I would distinguish four moments in the comparative enterprise: description, comparison, redescription, and rectification. Description is a double process which comprises the historical or ethnographic dimensions of the work. First, the requirement that we locate a given example within the rich texture of its social, historical and cultural environments that invest it with its local significance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reinventing Religious StudiesKey Writings in the History of a Discipline, pp. 140 - 154Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013