Peer-Reviewed Articles by Jason W. Smith
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2022
The Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the... more The Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the first two sections of the text contain practical pieces of ethical advice, the third section contains an extended love poem. This variation in content has resulted in a dichotomous view of the text in which ethics and poetry are viewed as fundamentally distinct. This paper blurs the distinction between ethics and poetry by showing how the poetic form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ's proverbs not only enhances the text's ethical message but also participates in the ethical formation of the text's audience. Building on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's notion of sub-ethics, I argue that the Tirukkuṟaḷ uses three literary strategies—metaphor, inference, and suspense—to engage the audience in modes of “sub-ethical” reflection by raising ethical questions and framing ethical choices.
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Book Chapters by Jason W. Smith
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Comparative Theology: A Festschrift in Honor of Francis X. Clooney, SJ, 2023
The work of Francis X. Clooney has contributed enormously to the renaissance of comparative theol... more The work of Francis X. Clooney has contributed enormously to the renaissance of comparative theology and comparative religious studies more broadly, even as comparative work has been subjected to scathing critiques, ranging from accusations of latent Orientalism to claims that comparative study lacks methodological rigor and produces only a superficial understanding of religions. Clooney himself has often eschewed dwelling at length upon matters of theory and method, arguing that the discipline of comparative theology can truly be understood only in the practice of it. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, Clooney’s work is very much grounded in a deep sensitivity to theoretical and methodological concerns and a strong sense of what good comparative work and careful scholarship looks like. In this chapter, I draw from my own reading of Clooney’s work and personal conversations with him over the years to outline five insights on the comparative method: (1) a commitment to scholarly rigor that comes only from the slow, painstaking study of languages, texts, and contexts over time; (2) an honest account of one’s own scholarly positionality vis-à-vis the research material; (3) an embrace of learning with and from others, both past and present; (4) a conviction that good academic work must always be grounded in the particulars rather than in generalities; and (5) a notion that comparative work must always be driving toward some end goal in which new interpretive insights are generated. Such insights apply not only to comparative work specifically but to research in religious studies writ large.
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Thesis Chapters by Jason W. Smith
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Book Reviews by Jason W. Smith
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021
Leah Elizabeth Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World offers a timely analysis... more Leah Elizabeth Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World offers a timely analysis of one of the most significant works of Śaiva bhakti or devotional literature from the Tamil-speaking southern part of India: the Tirukkōvaiyār, composed around the ninth century CE by the poet Māṇikkavācakar. Along with the Tiruvācakam, the other major work attributed to Māṇikkavācakar, the Tirukkōvaiyār constitutes the eighth volume of the Tamil Śaiva canon known as the Tirumuṟai.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Jason W. Smith
Book Chapters by Jason W. Smith
Thesis Chapters by Jason W. Smith
Book Reviews by Jason W. Smith