Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
1. Introduction: "And What Kind of Society Does that Create?"
Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
Russell T. McCutcheon [+]
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, USA. He publishes widely on the history of the study of religion, the tools scholars use in their work, and the practical implications of that work. Among his recent publications are Reading J. Z. Smith (with Willi Braun; Oxford University Press, 2018), ‘Religion’ in Theory and Practice (Equinox Publishing, 2018) and Fabricating Religion (de Gruyter, 2018).
Description
This essay introduces the first section of the volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann. It contributes to an analysis of the political deployment of the good/bad religion distinction and asks what is at stake when such categories emerge as the self-evident principles upon which supposedly rigorous scholarship on religion is grounded.