Religious Inventions: Ancient Mediterranean Practice and the Study of Religion (Studies in Christianity and Judaism, 6) (Volume 6) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0228024455 ISBN 13: 9780228024453

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Religion is a modern invention, a category used to describe and study certain kinds of human behaviour. Yet when it comes to the ancient world and its texts – including those that comprise the Jewish and Christian Bibles – it can be easy to forget that they did not fall from the sky as simple expressions of dogma. Rather, the ancient writings of early Judaism and Christianity are firmly rooted in the world and are the product of an astonishing array of human experience and agency: acts of self-fashioning; of imaginative speculation; of mourning and memorializing; of forming, dissolving, or refashioning group identities; and more.

Religious Inventions asks how modern conceptions of religion can shed light on the relics, textual and otherwise, of ancient Mediterranean Jews and Christians. What insights from the contemporary study of religious behaviours and practices challenge what we think we know about the ancient world? Conversely, how can thinking about the ancient world challenge what we think we know about religion today? This volume responds to these questions through explorations of the material and social circumstances behind the production of written artifacts. It examines how religious practices relate to conceptions of identity and critiques the utility of the comparative method for approaching ancient writings.

Textual authority is used and abused by many of today’s public figures. Religious Inventions offers an alternative approach to understanding how authority is constructed: from the ground up, by the creative actions and choices of real people who lived long ago.

About this title

About the Authors

William Arnal is professor of religious studies at the University of Regina.

Erin K. Vearncombe is assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

From the Back Cover

Series editor: Richard S. Ascough

The Studies in Christianity and Judaism Series publishes volumes dealing with Christianity and Judaism in their formative periods, with special interest in studies of the relationships between them and of the cultural and social contexts within which they developed.

The series is sponsored by the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion whose constituent societies include the: Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, Canadian Theological Society, Société canadienne de théologie, and Société québécoise pour l'étude de la religion.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228024455
• ISBN 13: 9780228024453
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 438
• Editor: Arnal William, Vearncombe Erin