Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z.Smith

To mark the contribution of one of the most influential theorists of religion, thirty-one leading scholars of religion from around the world put their minds together to work on problems of introducing religion: as a category of human social practices, as a term that must be subject to scholarly theorizing, as a subject that must be carefully presented to students in the classroom. The claim of this volume is that the disciplined, cross-cultural and comparative study and teaching of religion in the academy is closely tied to the multi-level task of introducing (in the Latin sense of introducere) religion, of taking religion inside the academic discourses in the humanities and social sciences, of taking students whether career academics or college students inside religion as a set of ordinary human practices rather than initiating them into a sanctum of extraordinary knowledge about extraordinary things.