Bruce Lincoln

A version of this article appeared in Religion Dispatches (May 20, 2016) under the title "Captain America: Civil Religion (And Why Donald Trump Thinks He's Batman)." The article reveals the religious and political dimensions of Marvel's "Captain America: Civil War." http://religiondispatches.org/captain-america-civil-religion-and-why-donald-trump-thinks-hes-batman/

In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions, Lincoln’s “How to Read a Religious Text” is anchored in decades of work with mythological texts or canonical texts, the six points deployed have their origins in his prior work, Theorizing Myth (Lincoln 2012, 5-15; Lincoln 1999, 150-155). 1 The sections from the Chandogya Upaniʂds that Lincoln uses to illustrate his points thus, fall in line with a number of his selected examples over the course of his career, add to this the analysis of relatively discrete events. The essay will apply Lincoln’s six lines of inquiry to Sara J. Duncan’s Progressive Missions in the South and Addresses: With Illustrations and Sketches of Missionary Workers and Ministers and Bishop’s Wives (1906) to walk through of the utility, limits and necessary adaptations that surface when Lincoln’s categories are applied to other types of religious texts beyond myth and canon.

Proceeding from the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, this paper is an attempt to survey the historical premises of the academic study of religion, both as a practice of detaching the subject matter of religion from its insti- tutional restrictions, and as a practice of rehearsing certain modalities of thought and action (philosophical as well as religious) flourishing in the ancient world long before Christianity conquered the sphere of public worship in the fourth century. By paying particular attention to themes of suspension and commensality in religious practice and discourse, an attempt is made to reconsider the critical task of the history of religions, famously devised by Bruce Lincoln as a reversal
of the orientation of religious discourse.