"Timothy Fitzgerald is one of the most important scholars raising
questions about the category of religion today, and in this essay
he makes significant new contributions. He broadens the range of
the discussion to include important but neglected categories that
arose along with the category of religion, most notably the secular
and the political, and he traces the emergence of this discourse in
English-language texts dealing with travel and governance,
showing
that they emerge much later than is widely assumed. Anyone
seriously interested in religion simply must take seriously
Fitzgerald's central claim: it is wrong to think of religion as
something that
exists in and of itself, as an observable, objective domain
essentially distinct from other domains such as politics and
economics." --Gregory Alles, Professor of Religious Studies,
McDaniel College and author of Religious Studies: A Global View
"This important book continues Fitzgerald's investigations into the
rhetorical uses and abuses of "religion" and related terms. Here
Fitzgerald leads us into close readings of primary texts from the
early modern era, and shows that "religion" and "politics" and
"economics" are not value-neutral descriptive categories, but
modern inventions that serve the interests of a new kind of state
and a new kind of market. With relentless logic, Fitzgerald cuts
through
the confusions, anachronisms, and nonsense that surround the modern
use of these terms. In so doing, he helps us see that the way that
Western social sciences have constructed the world is not
inevitable, and that we need not see non-Western others through
only one lens. This book will be of tremendous benefit not only to
those in religious studies, but to political scientists,
sociologists, and historians as well." --William T. Cavanaugh,
Associate Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas
"In this perceptive study, Fitzgerald shows us just how the
assumption that religion is essentially about personal belief
becomes a crucial step in the construction of 'religion' as the
name of a universal human experience. His emphasis is on changing
configurations rather than binaries, which leads him to argue that
in taking 'the religious' as the binary opposite of 'the secular'
one is subscribing to an ideological enterprise. Discourse on
Civility and
Barbarity is an important contribution to the growing critical
literature on the idea of Religion as an essentialized category."
--Talal Asad, Author of Formations of the Secular
"John M. Giggie's After Redemption analyzes African American
political, religious, and cultural life in the Mississippi and
Arkansas Delta from the 1870s through the 1910s...[Does] a
meticulous job of excavating the worldview of [its] black Southern
subjects." --Church History
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