Readings in the Theory of Religion: Map, Text, Body

Readings in the Theory of Religion is an interdisciplinary Religious Studies resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Readers will encounter the rare grouping of breakthrough texts by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Jonathan Z. Smith in Religious Studies, alongside classic essays by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Joan Wallach Scott in literary and cultural theory. Historically significant interventions such as those just named are accompanied by examples of recent, theoretically-informed research by scholars like Saba Mahmood, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Steven Moore. Readers are provided with the tools to become familiar with crucial theoretical debates in Religious Studies and related fields in the humanities and social sciences, and with models of contemporary writing that successfully approach the study of religion in savvy ways. Its three sections, `Map', `Text', and `Body', speak to diverse methods, specialties, and emphases within the study of religion: the study of text and textuality, the study of ritual, the body, gender and sexuality, religion and race, religion and colonialism, and methodological and theoretical issues in the study of religion. As an introduction to theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion, Readings in the Theory of Religion is an indispensable starting point.

Scott S. Elliott is Assistant Professor of Religion at Adrian College, Adrian, Michigan. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. He is co-editor of Translation and the Machine: Technology, Meaning, Praxis (2008) .He currently chairs the Ideology, Culture and Translation Group of the Society of Biblical Literature.
Matt Waggoner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. He holds a PhD from the Department of History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz. Waggoner has served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University and his articles appear in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Culture and Religion, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.