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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.

Three scholars of religion explore literature and the literary as sites of critical transformation.

We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives.

Each essay in this book suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible—and the impossible—transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and ways of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion and their critical and creative import but also a powerful enactment of devotion itself.

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often  the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity.

Sarah Hammerschlag explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jew’s rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, Hammerschlag ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.

Both an intellectual history and a philosophical argument, The Figural Jew will set the agenda for all further consideration of Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought, and continental philosophy.