Books in the AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion series

This text seeks to discover what makes pragmatism uniquely American. It argues that the inextricably American character of pragmatism of such figures as C.S. Peirce and William James lies in its often understated affirmation of America as a uniquely religious country.

Three understandings of the nature of religion-religion as experience, symbolic meaning, and power-have dominated scholarly discussions, in succession, for the past hundred years. Visions of Religion carefully integrates these approaches into a social practical theory of religion.

This groundbreaking work presents the first sustained discussion of the connections between two quintessentially American traditions: liberation theology and pragmatism. It explores the dynamic relationship between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of faith practice, with a focus on the liberating potential of religious ritual.

In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to séance tables and trance lectures. It has alternately been ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous credulity and hailed as a feminist movement. Its tricks have been exposed, its charlatans unmasked, and its heroes' names lost to posterity. In its day, however, its leaders were household names and politicians worried about capturing the Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places Spiritualism in thecontext of the 19th-century American Renaissance. Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden blossoming of American letters, Gutierrez points to its original meaning: a cultural imagination enraptured with the past and the classics in particular, accompanied by a cultural efflorescence.Spiritualism, she contends, was the religious articulation of the American Renaissance, and the ramifications of looking backward for advice about the present were far-reaching. The Spiritualist movement, says Gutierrez, was a 'renaissance of the Renaissance,' a culture in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting Christian ideas about salvation, Spiritualistsembraced Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. Humans were shot through with the divine, rather than seen as helpless and inexorably corrupt sinners in the hands of a transcendent, angry God. Gutierrez's study of this fascinating and important movement is organized thematically. She analyzes Spiritualistconceptions of memory, marriage, medicine, and minds, explores such phenomena as machines for contacting the dead, spirit-photography, the idea of eternal spiritual affinity (which implied the necessity for marriage reform), the connection between health and spirituality, and mesmerism.

Kamitsuka cautions the feminist theological community against the possibility of excluding some segments of the female population in its quest for liberation.

A model of interreligious theology that seeks to reconcile the ideal of religious tolerance with an acknowledgement of the extent to which religious communities construct identity on the basis of religious differences.

The Language of Disenchantment explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions.

This book investigates the substance and presentation of major metaphysical themes in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. Using rigorous philosophy it seeks to refute the view that the Guide hides an ''esoteric'' philosophical meaning beneath a traditional veneer, and offers a new explanation of his esotericism.

This book investigates the universalization of religious and secular knowledges that emerged in their particular modern forms originally in the Christian West. It it an attempt to explore the epistemological grounds and political implications of the formation and codependency of 'secular' and 'religious' discourses and practices.

Markus Dressler tells the story of how a number of marginalized socioreligious communities, traditionally and derogatorily referred to as Kizilbas (''Redhead''), captured the attention of the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish nationalists and were gradually integrated into the newly formulated identity of secular Turkish nationalists.

Argues that moral life is inherently creative. Creativity, this book says, is an element not just in the expression of moral sentiments, the application of moral principles, or the formation of moral cultures, but also the very activity of living morally itself.

In this book, Joy McDougall offers a reading of Moltmann's major theological writings over the past thirty years from his first major book, The Theology of Hope, to the present, tracing the development of Moltmann's doctrine of the Trinity and its implications for ethics broadly understood.

The authors of this volume seek to revive the preferential option for the poor for the postmodern world, showing how options for the margins can engage postmodernity in new ways and break new ground in religious, theological and ethical, as well as social, political and economic thinking.

Theologians are increasingly looking to cultural criticism, rather than philosophy, as a dialogue partner for cross-disciplinary studies. This book explores the importance of this shift, analyzing different contemporary theories of cultural movements.

Theologians are increasingly looking to cultural criticism, rather than philosophy, as a dialogue partner for cross-disciplinary studies. This book explores the importance of this shift, analyzing different contemporary theories of cultural movements.

This book offers a hermeneutical reading of Franz Rosenzweig's 1921 masterpiece, The Star of Redemption. In her analysis, Yudit K. Greenberg draws on German idealistic and Romantic ideas as well as Kabbalistic philosophical strands in Rosenzweig's thinking. She portrays Rosenzweig as a transitional figure between philosophy and theology, Judaism and German culture, modernity and postmodernity.

Jason Mahn traces the concept of the fortunate Fall through the later writings of Soren Kierkegaard, examining Kierkegaard's blunt critique of Idealism's justification of evil, as well as his playful deconstruction of romantic celebrations of sin.

As a category, however, magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that.