Remembering J. Z. Smith
A Career and its Consequence
Edited by
Emily D. Crews [+–]
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
Russell T. McCutcheon [+–]
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).
This volume presents an archive of remembrances of the person and the contributions of the late Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017)—the long-time University of Chicago faculty member who was one of the world’s most influential scholars of religion. Part I collects previously unpublished papers from three separate recent scholarly panels (from the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the North American Association for the Study of Religion), in which a wide variety of scholars reflect on the impact Smith had on their own careers and the field at large. Part II includes revised versions of blog posts, many of which appeared shortly after news of Smith’s death, in which scholars, journalists, and former students of Smith offer a more intimate and personal look at his legacy. Part III features extended transcripts of seven interviews about Smith carried out with those who either trained or worked with him. The volume closes with an afterword by Emily D. Crews, along with a previously unpublished essay of Smith’s own. Taken together, the volume documents the role Smith’s work has played in the modern study of religion while providing a basis for further considering the future direction of the field.
While of interest to scholars who either knew Smith or those who are already familiar with his work, this volume will also be helpful to newcomers to Smith’s writings, read alongside his own essays, as a way to deepen their understanding of the modern study of religion—its history, its methods, and how to teach it.
Series: NAASR Working Papers
Table of Contents
Preface
Preface [+–] xi-xiii
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).
Brief introduction to the volume that explains its rationale and describes the various sections, chapters, and contributors included in the book.
Introduction
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).
A description of his life, training, teaching and research and an assessment of Jonathan Z. Smith’s contributions to the academic study of religion.
I. Essays
Georgia State University
Kathryn McClymond is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University. Her current work examines how veterans deal with moral injury by drawing on world cultures’ ritual traditions.
Brief introduction to the 2018 panels on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith that were held at the annual meeting of the American Academic of Religion (AAR).
2. The Poetics and Politics of Comparison: From Revolutionary Suicide to Mass Murder (AAR Panel) [+–] 19-27
Ohio State University
Hugh B. Urban is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books and is currently finishing a book on religion and secrecy.
Based on Jonathan Z. Smith’s own reply to the author’s earlier article on Smith’s work—a correspondence from 1999-2000—Urban explores the implications for the field today of both Smith’s call for scholars of religion to be relentlessly self-conscious in their work and his focus on the comparative method.
3. The Magus: Jonathan Z. Smith and “the Absolute Wonder of the Human Imagination” (AAR Panel) [+–] 28-36
Harvard University
Kimberley C. Patton is Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Her research is in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, particularly ritual studies, sanctuaries, and iconography.
Seeing Jonathan Z. Smith as a champion of incongruity in the study of religion, and one who engaged the thought of those with whom he disagreed, Patton explores the implications of Smith’s work for those interested in portraying rather than explaining in the study of religion, thereby focusing on the mythmaking and world-building function of religion.
4. Citing Smith (AAR Panel) [+–] 37-45
University of Virginia
Kurtis R. Schaeffer is the Frances Myers Ball Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia; focusing on the study of the Buddhist traditions of Tibet, his interests center on the literary history of life-writing, poetry, philosophy, and the cultural history of intellectuals.
Using two recent books that both cite and discuss the work of Jonathan Z. Smith—Aaron Gross’s The Question of the Animal and Religion and Donovan Schaefer’s Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, Power—Shaeffer explores how each author reads, and in effect reconstructs, Smith’s work, thereby posing not just the question of how we read Smith’s corpus but how his various readers create it and canonize it.
University of Texas
Oliver Freiberger is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Aside from his work on early Buddhism and asceticism, he studies the methodology of comparison in the study of religion.
Identifying divergent assessments of Jonathan Z. Smith’s contributions to the field, Freiberger examines two misinterpretations of Smith’s views about comparison in the study of religion: the notion that Smith questioned the very possibility of comparison as a method and (2) the assumption that he endorsed homological and rejected analogical comparison.
Guilford College
Eric D. Mortensen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and International Studies Program Coordinator at Guilford College. He has recently spent a year researching folk performances in Tibetan communities in China through the Fulbright Program.
Mortensen revisits some of the ideas of Jonathan Z. Smith’s with which he himself wrestles: the notion of magic in the historical and comparative study of religion; the influence of Smith’s writings on his own fieldwork and research in southeastern Tibet; and what he finds most pedagogically valuable about Smith’s work on methodology—how it can lead undergraduate students, whom Smith himself famously taught at the University of Chicago, to challenge the way they see themselves and others.
Los Angeles Valley College
Zev Garber is Emeritus Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College. He has presented and/or written hundreds of academic articles and reviews and has authored and/or edited 14 academic books.
Brief introduction to the 2018 panels on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith that were held at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).
Wesleyan University
Ron Cameron is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He is the author or editor of a number of essays on the Gospel of Thomas and book-length studies of the New Testament and Christian beginnings.
Building on Jonathan Z. Smith’s insight that “[t]hings that are interesting, things that become objects of interest, are things in which one has a stake, things which place one at risk, things for which one is willing to pay some price, things which make a difference,” Cameron examines in careful detail three areas in which Smith took a special interest and which, for him, had something at stake: theory, method, and a liberal arts education.
9. Introduction: Remembering J.Z. Smith (North American Association for the Study of Religion Panel) [+–] 90-92
University of Alberta
Willi Braun is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Classics and the Program in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the former President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion and also the past President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Although a specialist in the writings and social formations of earliest Christianities in the Roman empire, his work also focuses on the methods and theories of the academic study of religion itself. He has published and presented his work widely and served as editor of a variety of books and journals, including his longtime role as editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion; most recently, he co-edited Reading J. Z. Smith: Interviews and Essay (Oxford, 2018).
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).
Brief introduction to the 2018 panels on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith that were held at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR).
Columbia College Chicago
Stephanie Frank is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College, Chicago; she teaches a variety of courses in religious studies, philosophy, and history at Columbia.
Unlike many who quote Jonathan Z. Smith’s claim that religion “is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” Frank focuses on these imaginative acts of comparison and generalization, concluding that, even to do their specialized work, all scholars of religion need to be, to some extent, comparativists and generalists.
University of Colorado
Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus University of Colorado at Boulder. Jonathan Smith was his most important influence and mentor for nearly fifty years. He works on indigenous religions, dancing and religion, religion theory, and religion and technology.
Starting with Jonathan Z. Smith’s Yale dissertation, The Glory Jest and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough (1969), Gill argues that comparison is powered by the distinctly human capacity to say that one thing is not the other. This structurality (one of play and joke and riddle) applies not only to comparison, but also to religion, with both comparison and religion having what he characterizes as an abductive quality—that feeling-kind of knowing, often initiated by the surprise of incongruity.
University of North Carolina
James Tabor is a Professor of Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
In a paper presented three days shy of what would have been Jonathan Z. Smith’s 80th birthday, Tabor relates personal memories of Mr. Smith, as students always called him at the University of Chicago, as well as offering an account of how Smith profoundly shaped or “impressed” his own scholarship.
II. Blogs
Journalist
Pete Grieve is a Political Science graduate of the University of Chicago. He worked as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, where he also wrote in-depth pieces for Grey City, the publication’s long-form supplement. He has completed internships at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, and CNN Politics.
In an article published in The Chicago Maroon on March 23, 2018, Pete Grieve chronicles the life and career of Jonathan Z. Smith, with particular focus on his role as a beloved teacher, mentor, and dean at the University of Chicago.
14. How I Failed J. Z. Smith [+–] 130-132
University of Chicago
Brett Colasacco has a Ph.D. in religion, literature, and visual culture from the University of Chicago, where he now works as a writer.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Brett Colasacco reflects on the ways that his failure in his intellectual relationship with Jonathan Z. Smith were some of the most transformative aspects of his undergraduate work in the study of religion.
15. The Positive Genealogy of J. Z. Smith [+–] 133-138
Mahidol University, Bangkok
Tenzan Eaghll is a Lecturer and Chair of the International M.A. program at the College of Religious Studies, Mahidol University, Bangkok. His research focuses on continental philosophy, religion and film, and method and theory in the study of religion.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Tenzan Eaghll offers a detailed response to the pedagogical usefulness and methodological example of Jonathan Z. Smith’s scholarship, particularly as it is demonstrated in Smith’s essay “Religion, Religions, Religious.”
University of California, Santa Barbara
Richard Hecht is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also affiliated with the Jewish Studies Program. He has become increasingly interested in the deep contextualization of religion in its lived environments and most centrally the intersections of religion, politics, and culture.
In this essay, originally published on the blog of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Richard Hecht locates Jonathan Z. Smith’s well-known system of the taxonomic analysis of religion in Smith’s rarely discussed experiences as a counselor to and supporter of conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.
Shumei University
Mitsutoshi Horii is Professor at Shumei University, Japan, working at Chaucer College, UK, as Shumei’s representative. His research focuses on the function of modern categories, such as “religion,” and examines the ways they authorize specific norms in a variety of contexts.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Mitsutoshi Horii asserts the value of “getting lost” in the work of Jonathan Z. Smith. Horri credits Smith, alongside scholars like Timothy Fitzgerald, with enabling his own cross-disciplinary approach, which connects the sociology and social theory of Japanese Buddhism with theoretical considerations of the category of “religion.”
18. On J. Z. Smith and the Remarkable [+–] 151-152
University of Alabama
Richard Newton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He is author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures(Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2020) and former editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Newton is also curator of the social media professional development network, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture and Teaching (SowingTheSeed.org).
In this essay, originally as a blog post on Sowing the Seed on January 2, 2018, Richard Newton reflects on the remarkable potential that Jonathan Z. Smith’s career has for empowering younger scholars to take ownership of their own work and ideas, even when they might be at odds with the expectations or customs of the field of Religious Studies.
De Paul University
William O’Connor is Professor of Theatre Studies at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and the history of world theater.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, William O’Connor, who spent many hours in the classroom with Jonathan Z. Smith, credits Smith with giving him “a sense of appreciation for what humans are capable of” as scholars and teachers.
University of Bonn
Matt Sheedy holds a Ph.D. in the study of religion and is a visiting professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism and atheism, as well as representations of Christianity, Islam, and Native American traditions in popular and political culture. He is the author of Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021).
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Matt Sheedy argues that Jonathan Z. Smith’s work on comparison, classification, and taxonomy has the potential to teach all his readers that “the study of religion is a boundless field, limited only by our imagination.”
21. On Articulate Choice [+–] 162-165
University of Alabama
Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, methodological issues concerning the use of the category of “religion” in the study of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, as well as the study of the past in general.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Vaia Touna discusses the importance of strategic choices, which she learned from reading the work of Jonathan Z. Smith. Smith’s idea that “less is better” has been significant for Touna when building a syllabus, making comparisons, and analyzing the contributions of other scholars.
22. J. Z. Smith’s Gift [+–] 166-168
Independent Scholar
Bruce Woll credits Jonathan Z. Smith with making him into a philosopher and an anthropologist equipped to recognize that anything can be fraught, no matter how precious and rich it may seem; he retired in 2011 from a twenty-seven year career in information technology and then returned to his central intellectual interest: a critique of parochial Modernity.
In this essay, originally a blog post published on The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Bruce Woll ruminates on the significant role that Jonathan Z. Smith played in his doctoral experience and his career. He draws readers to the importance of the connection Smith makes between religion and thinking and the way that awareness of such a connection can enliven our understanding of our subject matter.
23. Significant, Significance, Signifier [+–] 169-174
Study of Religion as an Analytical Discipline workshop
Ipsita Chatterjea is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Study of Religion as an Analytical Discipline workshop (SORAAAD). Her research is focused on gender, race, and class as well as regulation and violence.
In this essay, originally a post published on the author’s personal blog, Chatterjea discusses the promise of the work of Jonathan Z. Smith for current and future scholars of religion. She challenges those thinking, writing, and teaching about religion not to revere Jonathan Z. Smith, but to “find him useful.”
III. Interviews
24. Interviews [+–] 177-213
Sam Gill,Amir Hussain,Donald Wiebe,Carole Myscofski,Christopher Lehrich,Eugene V Gallagher,Ron Cameron,Michael J. Altman
University of Colorado
Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus University of Colorado at Boulder. Jonathan Smith was his most important influence and mentor for nearly fifty years. He works on indigenous religions, dancing and religion, religion theory, and religion and technology.
Loyola Marymount University
Amir Hussain is a Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on Islam and world religions.
University of Toronto
Donald Wiebe is Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Trinity College at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Religion and Truth: Towards and Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion (De Gruyter, 1981), The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), Beyond Legitimation: Essays on the Problem of Religious Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) and The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Illinois Wesleyan University
Carole A. Myscofski is McFee Professor of Religion and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Illinois Wesleyan University. She began working with Jonathan Z. Smith in her third year in The College and completed her dissertation in the Divinity School under his guidance.
Boston University
Christopher I. Lehrich trained under Jonathan Z. Smith at the University of Chicago; he was the editor for Smith’s collection of pedagogy articles, On Teaching Religion (2012), and the author of a forthcoming volume on Smith’s work for the Key Thinkers in the Study of Religion series.
Connecticut College
Eugene V. Gallagher is the Rosemary Park Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Connecticut College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago for a dissertation written under Jonathan Z. Smith.
Wesleyan University
Ron Cameron is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He is the author or editor of a number of essays on the Gospel of Thomas and book-length studies of the New Testament and Christian beginnings.
University of Alabama
Michael J. Altman is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama where he researches and teaches course on colonialism, Asian religions in America, and critical theory. He holds a Ph.D. in American Religious Cultures from Emory University, a M.A. in Religion from Duke University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies and English from the College of Charleston.
Sam Gill In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Sam Gill reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching. Amir Hussain In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Amir Hussain reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching. Donald Wiebe In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Donald Wiebe reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching. Carole Myscofski In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Carole Myscofski reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on her own scholarship and teaching. Christopher Lehrich In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Christopher Lehrich reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching. Eugene Gallagher In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Eugene Gallagher reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching. Ron Cameron In this interview, originally published as a podcast hosted by Michael J. Altman at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Ron Cameron reflects on the impact of Jonathan Z. Smith’s long career on his own scholarship and teaching.
IV. Afterword
25. Clues to a Great Mystery [+–] 217-220
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
In the Afterword, Emily D. Crews draws on her experiences with Jonathan Z. Smith at the University of Chicago Divinity School to ask what Smith’s legacy might be for current and future scholars of religion. She offers three lessons that she learned from Smith’s work and that she hopes others may learn, as well.
V. Appendix
26. Academic Freedom and Academic Responsibility [+–] 223-225
Jonathan Z. Smith, who passed away in late 2017, was retired from a long teaching career at the University Chicago. Known for his careful attention to the methods scholars use when studying religion, Smith worked with a wide variety of ancient and contemporary textual and ethnographic examples, becoming one of the most influential scholars of religion in the last fifty years.
This chapter was originally a brief response presented by Smith on November 22, 2004, at the San Antonio annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, as part of a panel entitled “Academic Freedom and Academic Responsibility in the Study of Religion.”
End Matter
Index [+–] 227-238
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).
Constituting an archive of remembrances of the person and the contributions of the late Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017), section one this volume collects previously unpublished papers from three separate scholarly panels from the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the North American Association for the Study of Religion in which a wide variety of scholars reflect on the impact Smith had on their own careers and the field at large. Section two includes revised versions of blog posts, many of which appeared shortly after news of Smith’s death, in which scholars, journalists, and onetime students of Smith offer a more intimate and personal look at his legacy. The volume closes with the extended transcripts of seven interviews about Smith carried out with those who either trained or worked with him followed by a brief, previously unpublished essay by Smith himself. Taken together, the volume documents the role Smith’s work has played in the modern field while providing a basis for further considering the future direction of the field.
