Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion - In Celebration of Tim Jensen’s 65th Birthday - Peter Antes
1. The Magic and Drudgery in J.Z. Smith's Theory of Comparison
Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion - In Celebration of Tim Jensen’s 65th Birthday - Peter Antes
Ivan Strenski [+]
University of California Riverside (retired)
Author of 15 books and more than 100 academic articles on religion and political issues
like gift, sacrifice, freedom of religion/religious freedom, religious nationalism, French
Catholic integralism, post-revolutionary French Jewry, divine right of kings, Ivan Strenski
is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. His most recent books are Muslims, Islams, and Occidental Anxieties:
Conversations about Islamophobia (2022), a history of the study of religion from the
Renaissance to the present-day, Understanding Theories of Religion (2014) and Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics (2009), Arabic translation (2016).
Description
Jonathan Z. Smith has gained considerable notoriety for popularizing the phrase ‘in comparison a magic dwells.’ But, this assertion remains largely unanalyzed, despite it’s remarkable currency in discussions of comparison. I shall argue that Smith’s notion of comparison is largely undeveloped, leading to the corresponding undeveloped and unsophisticated conceptions of comparison in the study of religion.