Series: Class 200: New Studies in Religion

A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation. We often identify secularisation's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible...

A vivid portrait of how divine and human intimacies sustain colonisation in the Amazon. On Brazil's Amazonian frontier, settlers pursue land and opportunity, but they also gather for prayer and pilgrimage, yearning for a deep relationship with God and one another. In The Mystic of Friendship, anthropologist Ashley Lebner examines how everyday religious practices and feelings, what she calls a...

Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography. In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the...

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law. Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offence? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalised world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code),...

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law. Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code),...

Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography. In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the...

A new anthropology of Protestant feminism, anchored by the language experiments of one Lutheran community. The language of the Bible is a powerful lens through which many Protestants understand themselves and their world, and its prohibitions on women's speech pose complicated challenges to women. Nevertheless, women frequently serve as vocal leaders in Protestant organisations, including the early twentieth-century Norwegian Mission...

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of...