Hot off the Presses!

REL faculty members are a pretty productive group of people; apart from keeping your eyes peeled for a forthcoming book from Prof. Ramey, forthcoming peer review essays from Prof. Marouan, and Prof. Jacobs's forthcoming book (pictured at right), as well as a just-published edited volume from Prof. Trost, the following three books have just been published.

Representing Religion: Essays in History, Theory, and Crisis, by Tim Murphy

Since Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) argued that there is an arbitrary, not a natural, relationship between a signifier and what it signifies, the human sciences have been in a "crisis of representation." This volume consists of essays which explore the critical and constructive dimensions of that crisis. The critical dimension focuses on the history of Religious Studies, especially Phenomenology, showing how it has been predicated on a transcendental, non-empirical concept of subjectivity (German: Geist). This led to a universalized concept of “consciousness” and a dehistoricized concept of "experience" as central to the understanding of religion. Freidrich Nietzsche's critique of precisely these concepts, as refined and extended by poststructuralist theorists, is applied to this segment of the history of the study of religion. The constructive dimension of this work combines the methodological insights of Nietzsche and Saussure, along with Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin to form a "Nietzschean semiotics" which serves as the basis for a new theory of religion. This theory sees religion as the agonistic deployment of semiotic materials both to structure difference and to form trans-generational identities.

Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, edited by Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon

To mark the contribution of one of the most influential theorists of religion, some of the leading scholars of religion from around the world have put their minds together to work on problems of introducing "religion" as a category of human social practices, as a term that must be subject to scholarly theorizing, as a subject that must be carefully presented to students in the classroom. The claim of this volume is that the disciplined, cross-cultural and comparative study and teaching of religion in the academy is closely tied to the multi-level task of "introducing" (in the Latin sense of introducere, to bring a new, possible alien element in from the outside) religion, of taking religion inside the academic discourses in the humanities and social sciences, of taking students--whether career academics or college students--inside religion as a set of ordinary human practices rather than initiating them into a sanctum of extraordinary knowledge about extraordinary things.

Studying Religion: An Introduction, by Russell McCutcheon

While many entry level resources concentrate on providing detailed descriptions of the world's religions, Studying Religion: An Introduction turns its attention from the data of religion to the analytic skills required of anyone interested in studying the behaviors and institutions that we commonly name as religions. It therefore shifts the focus from describing the exotic or curious religious "Other" to examining scholarly practice itself, and tries to persuade readers that prior attention to their own habits will assist their efforts to study the habits of others. Although this little book can be used as part of an introductory course (when supplemented by descriptive, ethnographic materials of the instructor’s choosing), and is accessible to interested readers outside the university, it will also be of use in any course in the study of religion. For, despite the topic under study, the same intellectual skills are required to isolate, name, and examine within a comparative context, those collections of human artifacts that strike students as deserving of their attention. Studying Religion: An Introduction will therefore assist instructors across the academic study of religion to set the table, as it were, with the descriptive and comparative methods, as well as explanatory theories, on which scholars routinely draw in carrying out their work.