Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Second Edition
Sarah Hammerschlag
May 2025 · University of Chicago Press
Ebook
432
Pages
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infoThis book will become available on May 21, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
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—identity, race, sex, catastrophe, power, and money—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.
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—identity, race, sex, catastrophe, power, and money—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.
About the author
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.
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