Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political (Routledge Studies in Religion) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138053325 ISBN 13: 9781138053328

Publisher: Routledge, 2017

Synopsis

Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures/scripturalization/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) "work" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"―understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language―as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.

About this title

About the Author

Vincent L. Wimbush is the director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures and is past president of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138053325
• ISBN 13: 9781138053328
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260
• Editor: Wimbush Vincent L.