Irreverence and the Sacred

<em>Irreverence and the Sacred</em> brings together some of the most cutting edge interdisciplinary and international scholars working today in order to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging provocative and often-irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies Lincoln argues that the field has tended to champion a validating feel-good approach to religion rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history politics and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions he suggests would focus on the human temporal and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman eternal or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln's challenge to do better by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth ritual gender and politics. The book also interrogates the politics of scholarship itself critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion--such as Wendy Doniger Russell McCutcheon Ivan Strenski and Lincoln himself--but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not as well known in the U.S.--such as Stefan Arvidsson Claude Calame Nicolas Meylan and others.<br>