1. What is the main argument in this book?
The main argument of the book is that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from other areas (like politics, economics, or science) is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a completely natural part of the world. This line of argumentation has been developed considerably in the last forty years (the names Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Peter Harrison--among others--come to mind). What Before Religion attempts to do is synthesize a lot of this work and provide a genealogy of the concept of religion--a narrative of how we came to see the world in this peculiar way, while at the same time showing how the ongoing discourse in "ancient religions" helps religion keep up this appearance of being universal, natural, and necessary.
2. What motivated your work?
The main motivation for the book came out of my struggle to work through scholarship on the apostle Paul. My background is in the study of early Christians and Jews, and I found it curious that biblical scholars were happy to declare that Paul was Jewish, but often in the same breath they would then compare "Paul" or "Paul's religion" with Judaism. This struck me as strange, and I came to see that one of the problems I was facing was the usefulness of the concept of religion for talking about ancient evidence. As I got deeper into the considerable amount of literature working to historicize the concept of religion, I thought it would be a useful exercise to try to produce a reading of Paul's letters that just didn't invoke the category of religion at all. To justify this move, I needed to produce a coherent genealogy of religion, and that ended up being nearly half of my doctoral dissertation. Readers of the dissertation thought that material would work well as a stand-alone book, and so that formed the core of what became Before Religion.
3. What theory or theorists inform your methodology?
It's hard to single out all the theorists that have influenced me. The names mentioned in number 1 above have all been influential to me. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations always looms over my thinking. Although they are not cited in the book, two writers whose works have challenged me are Frederic Jameson ("Always historicize!") and Michel Foucault. Foucault's writings especially have been formative for me. My dissertation ended with what I think is the sharpest formulation of what genealogy helps us do: the object is "to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently" (The Use of Pleasure, p. 9).
4. How might the book be used or how has it been used in a classroom?
For undergraduates, I think the book works either at the introductory level or in more advanced "Approaches to Religion" class. For the former, Before Religion can serve as a nice counterpoint to traditional World Religions textbooks since it contains material that corresponds to most of the geographic areas or "faith traditions" one encounters in the textbooks. The book can call into question a number of the assumptions about authenticity and universality that one usually finds in such textbooks. For advanced undergraduates and graduate students, I think the book could function well in a methods class as an example of an approach that tries to take seriously Wittgenstein's thoughts on language (an interesting pairing I haven't tried is reading the book along with Benson Saler's Conceptualizing Religion [1999], which takes Wittgenstein in another direction).
5. How do you think students would most benefit from your book?
I would hope that students would find the book to be a stimulating read that challenges some of their assumptions. The notes are pretty thorough, so I would also be happy if book is able to help them find further more in depth reading in the topics that interest them.
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