“I would suggest that, among other things, ritual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables (i.e., the accidents) of ordinary life may be displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful.
Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the [...]
Tags:accidents·Bare Facts of Ritual·control·Jonathan Z. Smith·lack of control·ritual·variability
While searching for something else yesterday, I came across the Chicago Maroon’s 2008 interview of Jonathan Z. Smith, a leading historian of religion and author of several important books in the field, including Map Is Not Territory, Imagining Religion, and Drudgery Divine. You can find the full text of the interview here. If you have [...]
Tags:comparative religious history·Drudgery Divine·Greek myth·Hegel·historian of religions·History·Imagining Religion·J.Z. Smith·Jonathan Z. Smith·Map Is Not Territory·New Testament·Supriya Sinhababu·Yale Divinity School
Just the other day, I commented on the origin of ritual and noted that Jonathan Z. Smith sees “the thrill of coincidence” as at least a partial explanation. Before rationalists dismiss this thrill as mere superstition, Smith also notes that the same kind of coincidence resides at the heart of scholarship:
The discovery that two events, [...]
Tags:Africa·Assembly of God·Catholics·charismatics·charms·coincidence·evangelicals·exorcism·Foursquare Gospel·Geoffrey MacDonald·Glimpses of African Belief·indigenous beliefs·Johann Hari·Jonathan Z. Smith·Massachusetts·mediums·pagans·Pentecostals·possession·psychics·ritual·rituals·rosaries·saints·Salem·secret interconnection·spells·spiritual tourism·spiritualism·superstitition·The Gathering·The Masque of Africa·The Vault·transubstantiation·V.S. Naipaul·voodoo·Wicca·witchcraft
Ritual and religion are, as everyone knows, closely intertwined. So tightly linked are they that some scholars, such as Emile Durkheim, seem to have mistaken one for the other or at least conflated the two. For those who cannot accept Durkheim’s position, there are two competing explanations for the origin of ritual. The first is [...]
Tags:anxiety·augury·autoeroticism·Barbara Smuts·causal illusion·college football gods·college football religion·confession·corn husking·Cornhuskers·costly signaling·David Hume·Emile Durkheim·football·gods·guilt·Huskers·Immanuel Kant·John Watanabe·Jonathan Z. Smith·Joseph Bulbulia·male baboons·masturbation·mythology·narcissism·Nebraska·Nebraska Fan's Confession·omen·Onan·onanism·propitious coincidence·randomly connected events·Richard Sosis·ritual·ritualized greetings·rituals·Roman ritual·Roy Rappaport·serendipity·solipsism·Superstitition in the Pigeon·The Bare Facts of Ritual·thrill of coincidence
Among scholars and historians of religion, there has long been an unfortunate tendency to treat myth as mere text — disembodied, free-floating, timeless, and ahistorical. In such non-contexts, myth is considered to be something universal or essential, that which captures and expresses archetypes, or even worse, an archaic and tentative approach to monotheism.
In the fifth [...]
Tags:ahistorical·archaic·archetype·Carl Jung·disembodied·history·Homo faber·Homo religiosus·Imagining Religion·incipient monotheism·interpretation·Io·Io myth·Jonathan Z. Smith·Karl Marx·Maori cosmology·Maori creation myth·Mircea Eliade·monotheism·myth·native·primordial·text·timeless·universal
Sooner or later any serious student or historian of religion will encounter Jonathan Z. Smith, he of the infamous quip — “there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.” A curious statement indeed coming from one of the most prominent historians of religion, whose entire career and oeuvre [...]
Tags:classification schemes·costly signaling·essentializing·F. Max Muller·group level selection·Imagining Religion: From Bablyon to Jonestown·increased fertility·Jonathan Z. Smith·moral glue·multilinear evolution·religious cartography·religious classification·religious history·religious phylogeny·religious taxonomy·ritual signaling·science of religion·social cohesion·unilinear evolution
Nearly 5,500 years ago or about 3,500 BCE, the Sumerians began writing about supernatural matters; in a sense, this marks the origin of what most people today understand as “religion.” This relatively modern and provincially Western understanding of religion is on full display in Paul Raushenbush’s article introducing HuffPo Religion’s new series on religious texts [...]
Tags:Bhagavad Gita·books·Buddhist·category of religion·Christian presuppositions·doctrinal·Edward Said·essentializing·Harvey Whitehouse·Hindu·imagistic·Jonathan Z. Smith·non-written traditions·orientalism·Paul Raushenbush·religion as academic creation·religion as text·religion as writing·religions of the book·religious writings·scriptures·shamanisms·shamanist·shamans·Sumeria·Sumerians·texts·The Word·theologians·theology·transcendence·transcendent·Vedic·word·writing
This is the question asked by Philip Goldberg in a recent article in which he boldly answers yes: “Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws. The same can be said for Buddhism, which derives from the same Vedic roots.”
Setting aside for a [...]
Tags:ahistorical·Buddhism·C.W. Huntington·critique·eastern religions·elites·empiricism·enlightenment·essentializing·Gregory Schopen·Hinduism·intellectuals·Jonathan Z. Smith·Philip Goldberg·reconstructed Buddhism·Religion and Other Products of Empire·Richard Horsley·Robert Sharf·science·social construction·The Zen of Japanese Nationalism·Vedic·Western consumption·Zen Buddhism
