MOMENTAN AUSVERKAUFT
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Product Identifiers
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
ISBN-100226763609
ISBN-139780226763606
eBay Product ID (ePID)83175
Product Key Features
Number of Pages180 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication NameImagining Religion : from Babylon to Jonestown
SubjectTheology, Christianity / History, Judaism / History
Publication Year1988
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaReligion
AuthorJonathan Z. Smith
SeriesChicago Studies in the History of Judaism Ser.
FormatTrade Paperback
Dimensions
Item Height0.6 in
Item Weight9 Oz
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional
LCCN82-002734
Dewey Edition19
IllustratedYes
Dewey Decimal200
Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism 2. In Comparison a Magic Dwells 3. Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon 4. The Bare Facts of Ritual 5. The Unknown God: Myth in History 6. A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams 7. The Devil in Mr. Jones Appendixes Notes Index
SynopsisWith this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity-simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."-Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review, With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity--simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."--Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
