ABOUT THIS BOOK

A new edition of a classic resource—composed of twenty-three essays written specifically for this volume.

First published nearly thirty years ago, Critical Terms for Religious Studies proved a vital resource for an emerging interdisciplinary conversation. We still use much of the same language in the study of religion, but fresh concerns have both changed the meaning of terms and given rise to new terms altogether. This edition consists of twenty-three entirely new essays that offer students and scholars alike the tools to historicize and evaluate the shifting role of familiar and emerging critical terms in religious studies.

These are “critical terms” both because they are important in our cultural moment and because thinking through them reveals how religions are embedded in and shaped by material, social, economic, and political forces. A shared conviction unites contributors from a range of traditions and methodologies: a recognition that our world is saturated by the persistence of religious traditions as shape-shifting (not static or transcendent) forces of authority, as powerful today as ever before.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sarah Hammerschlag is the John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her books include Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

“Critical Terms for Religious Studies does not seek to police scholarship in the field. Instead, each chapter conjoins various discourses to help students imagine more interesting avenues of research and to help those lucky enough to be faculty create more diverse and appealing classes. Thanks to Hammerschlag’s shrewd editorial vision, the next twenty-five years of the study of religion should prove to be even more compelling than the last.”

— Martin Kavka, Florida State University

“The critical terms assembled here are not a list of so many keywords that one needs to launch a study of religion (no such list exists). Rather, each of the essays, authored by some of the leading scholars of today and tomorrow, offers a new vantage point from which to consider religion by focusing on a seemingly ordinary concept—life, law, matter, etc. A welcome update on the broad scope of the scholarship on religion and its immediate promise.”

— Tomoko Masuzawa, University of Michigan

"Rather than focusing on theological concepts that might be used by only one religious tradition, such as the Christian understanding of its own tradition, this handbook focuses on larger methodological definitions used by scholars of many traditions, such as "memory," "life," and "law." . . . This is a useful handbook, especially for introductory classes on methodologies in religious studies or in graduate seminars on theory and method, which are common in many graduate programs. Additionally, professors and researchers will find this handbook useful for updated scholarship on concepts they may already be employing in their work."

— Choice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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