Religious Intimacies: Intersubjectivity in the Modern Christian West

Scholars of religion have come a long way since William James famously made of religion a matter between man and his maker. For decades now, they have been attentive to the ways in which religion takes shape as the product of broad social forces, focusing on the dynamics of power and culture as heuristics for understanding religious phenomena and experience.

What, however, might they be missing by moving too quickly from one interpretative extreme to the other―and what might we learn about religion by staying in the interstitial space between the individual in her solitude and society as a whole?

Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore,brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion.

Mary Dunn is Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianity in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. She is author of The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition.

Brenna Moore is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology at Fordham University. She is author of Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival, 1905–1944.