Synopses & Reviews
A century that began with modernism sweeping across Europe is ending with a remarkable resurgence of religious beliefs and practices throughout the world. Wherever one looks today, from headlines about political turmoil in the Middle East to pop music and videos, one cannot escape the pivotal role of religious beliefs and practices in shaping selves, societies, and cultures.
Following in the very successful tradition of Critical Terms for Literary Studies and Critical Terms for Art History, this book attempts to provide a revitalized, self-aware vocabulary with which this bewildering religious diversity can be accurately described and responsibly discussed. Leading scholars working in a variety of traditions demonstrate through their incisive discussions that even our most basic terms for understanding religion are not neutral but carry specific historical and conceptual freight.
These essays adopt the approach that has won this book's predecessors such widespread acclaim: each provides a concise history of a critical term, explores the issues raised by the term, and puts the term to use in an analysis of a religious work, practice, or event. Moving across Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Native American and Mayan religions, contributors explore terms ranging from experience, territory, and image, to God, sacrifice, and transgression.
The result is an essential reference that will reshape the field of religious studies and transform the way in which religion is understood by scholars from all disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and literary studies.
Review
“I have contemplated and endured ‘nothing’ for so long that it did not seem right to break my practice or offer other readers something like insight, possibly a moment of sense making and affirmation. But I break out of my trance to assert the emphatic necessity of this book, so erudite without loading us down, relentless in its ability to resignify. Sassy, brilliant, a genuine engagement with and of thought, this work tunes us to a thrilling, endorphinating way of thinking: my drug of choice.”
Synopsis
Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a “Buddhaphobia” that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness,
Nothing opens up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed.
About the Author
Marcus Boon is professor of English at York University in Toronto.Eric Cazdyn is Distinguished Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Toronto.Timothy Morton is the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Table of Contents
Introduciton, Mark C. Taylor
Belief, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Body, William R. LaFleur
Conflict, Bruce Lincoln
Culture, Tomoko Masuzawa
Experience, Robert H. Sharf
Gender, Daniel Boyarin
God, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza & Gordon D. Kaufman
Image, Margaret R. Miles
Liberation, Kenneth Surin
Modernity, Gustavo Benavides
Performance, Catherine Bell
Person, Charles E. Winquist
Rationality, Paul Stoller
Relic, Gregory Schopen
Religion, Religions, Religious, Jonathan Z. Smith
Sacrifice, Jill Robbins
Territory, Sam Gill
Time, Anthony F. Aveni
Transformation, Bruce B. Lawrence
Transgression, Michael Taussig
Value, Edith Wyschogrod
Writing, David Tracy
Contributors
Index