Religious Studies

This research report examines the relationship between promissory acts and promissory notes in Kenyan history and its popular imagination. In Jomo Kenyatta’s classic ethnography of the Kikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya, he decries the corrosive power of money to corrupt the ritual techniques used to guarantee the honesty of elders in customary legal tribunals. However, at the advent of monetary independence from the East African shilling in 1966, Kenyatta seemed to have undergone something of a modification in his monetary thinking. Kenya’s new currency was emblazoned with Kenyatta’s own image as if to suggest that he himself backed its stability and capacity to ensure social reproduction. If we are to take seriously Keith Hart’s observation that money always has two sides, heads and tails, representing both the authority of the state and a commodity with a price, what might the iconography of Kenya’s new money tell us about Kenyan notions of trust and value that were grafted onto the nati...

Karl Jaspers' theory of the axial age has attracted renewed interest in recent years and constitutes a rich, potentially fruitful ground for exploration by theologians and scholars of religion and literature interested in 'scriptural reasoning'. Yet rather than to construe our times as a second axial age, as some do, it may be more appropriate to think of ours as an 'age of comparison'. This article considers the dual histories of comparative literature and comparative religion leading up to the current theoretical impasse where comparativism is questioned, yet essential for the advancement of religion and literature as an area of study.

The tale in 2 Kings 2 about what happened to the prophet Elisha on his way from Jericho up to Bethel is hauntingly brief: approached by some little boys Open image in new window from the city who jeer at him, chanting ‘Go up, you baldhead’(v. 23b), he turns, sees them, curses them in Yahweh’s name, and two shebears emerge from the woods and maul 42 of the boys Open image in new window Afterwards, as reported in the verse that completes the pericope 2.23–25, he proceeds ‘from there’ to Mount Carmel, and thence back to Samaria.

Despite the abundance of lore about Joachim Wach's lifelong passion for literature, music, and other arts, the pertinence of his aesthetic reflections to his formation as historian of religions is often ignored or under-appreciated. Yet his involvement with the Kreis surrounding the poet Stefan George was perhaps one of the chief early factors that led Wach to liken the study of the history of religions to contemplation of literature and the arts. It is even possible that ideas of the literary historian Friedrich Gundolf about the relationship between the artist and the artist's work helped stimulate Wach's early thinking about the relationship between religious experience and the theoretical, practical, and institutional expressions of that experience. Indeed, throughout his own scholarly writings Wach displays an irrepressible tendency toward combining religionswissenschaflich theorizing with aesthetic reflection, and toward encompassing literary, musical, and other ....

The 'non-confessional' stance of Literature and Theology, together with its embrace of 'theology broadly understood', has allowed the Journal to carve out a unique niche in the academic terrain of North America, for the Journal affords a forum for theologically inclined scholars to pursue the enterprise traditionally, and perhaps still most often, associated with its title, that of seeking transcendent meanings manifest or concealed within the immanence of literary texts, while also welcoming contributions that represent perspectives at odds, sometimes quite emphatically, with any traditional, strictly literalist, etymological construal of 'theology.' This article considers the rather precarious relationship that 'theology' has historically had to American culture, before concluding with some reflections on why the specific association of 'theology' with 'literature' in this Journal's purview has proven so alluring and fertile a subject in America over the past twenty-five years, and why this same association promises to make the Journal all the more crucial a forum for critical reflection in the coming decades.

According to Marthe Robert, the novel Don Quixote raises the question of the truth of literature: ‘‘What place do books have in reality? Are they absolutely true or true only relatively?. . . If they are false, their very fascination makes them useless or harmful and they must be rendered null and void, or better still, burned.’’ This article explores the pertinence of this question to the writings of Kierkegaard, who was preoccupied by
images of fire and burning as well as by questions of the ultimate adequacy of literature, including his own ‘‘prolix literature,’’ to communicate Christian truth. Throughout his authorial career, and increasingly in his final years, Kierkegaard expresses concerns
over what Johannes Climacus calls ‘‘the inadequacy of language.’’ Incited by Jesus’s
arsonist declaration ‘‘I came to cast fire upon the earth’’ (Luke 12:49), which he invokes
as part of his attack on the established Danish Church, Kierkegaard becomes convinced that the ‘‘prolixities’’ of false Christendom ‘‘must go.’’ Yet, as his journals and authorship reveal, he remains haunted to the end of his life by thoughts about his (and his pseudonyms’) own sheer verbosity, his authorial needs for ‘‘filling up’’ time and narrative,
and the ultimate ‘‘superficiality’’ of his literary vocation.