Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

by Brent Nongbri

For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, Brent Nongbri shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from 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 natural and necessary part of our world.

Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Nongbri demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, Nongbri offers a concise and readable account of the emergence of the concept of religion.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Politics, Theory

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Brent Nongbri is an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and the author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and numerous articles on the paleography and codicology of early Christian manuscripts.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

There Is No Old Time Religion

For some years I have proposed the thesis that Christianity is an historically aberrant religion. By defining itself in terms of ‘faith’ Christianity, or more specifically the Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who invented Christianity, made religion into something it had never been before - a matter of belief. Or so I contended. The consequences of this invention have been both profound and disastrous for humanity, and quite possibly for life on Earth.

It turns out that I was mistaken. Paul did not invent a new form of religion; he invented all of religion as we have come to know it. His definition of religion as faith has come to be applied to customs and practices that are historically remote from any idea of belief or truth, metaphysical or practical. Whole cultures have taken up the Pauline concept of faith - religion as belief - as their own, completely unaware of how alien this concept is to their traditions. Paul, therefore, has much more to answer for than Christianity.

Paul’s real genius was not in the formulation of any particular doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Rather it was his skill and insistence on the dual psychological/sociological role of what has since become known as religion that created a new global category of human thought. Paul made religion both solely personal and solely communal simultaneously. This is the great innovation of ‘faith’. It created not just Christianity but also religion as a modern phenomenon.

Nongbri‘s extensive analysis of language, traditions and cultural practices shows that there is no such thing as ‘ancient religion.’ He examines four historical episodes involving progressive Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic developments of the idea of religion. He makes his point succinctly: ‘The real problem is that the particular concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious,’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world.”

Hence my error: I have been giving Paul much less credit than he deserves. He didn’t just change what religion means, he permanently altered the consciousness of the world. Religion wasn’t even a ‘thing’, it had no ontological status, before Paul created it. Nongbri made me aware of an enormous gap in my knowledge.

Nongbri understands the centrality of Christianity to his thesis when he says “It is thus not surprising that various Christian texts have been identified as marking the beginning of the concept of religion.” Incredibly, however, Nongbri has almost nothing to say about the Christian foundational texts by Paul of Tarsus. Paul doesn’t even appear in the index.

Nongbri‘s focus on the 4th century church historian Eusebius as a key point of Christian development of the idea of religion seems almost absurd since Eusebius’s concept of Christianity is solely Pauline. For Eusebius, all religions were already ‘faiths.’ Christianity had by then re-interpreted Judaism as such and was on the verge of inspiring Islam as a faith opposed to its own. Nongbri completely ignores the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writings which would not only definitively prove his point about the invention of religion but also would explain the consternation Christianity provoked in Roman civilisation, the relationship among all his ‘episodes,’ and the subsequent European wars of religion. If for no other reason, Occam’s razor would seem to demand he look in Paul's direction.

Because of this crucial hiatus in Nongbri’s analysis, he is unable to notice the source of the private/public distinction which became so important in the Renaissance. Nor is he able to appreciate to drift back to a reunion of these spheres, drawn together by the gravitational pull of Pauline faith. This faith is simultaneously totally private - a personal relationship between a human being and the divine - and totally public - requiring an approved relationship with other human beings.

John Locke, in response to the 16th and 17th century wars of this new thing called religion, attempted to put the genie back in the bottle by separating the political from the religious. He accepted faith for what it is and suggested a ‘hack’ that would ease the tension. But his was a patch not a fix. His solution seemed to work and inspired what is recognised as the secular state in which religion is a private matter best kept out of politics.

More recently, however, we have discovered that faith will not tolerate this separation of the private from the public. Faith is a category which is not just dominant but also all-inclusive. Taken seriously, faith is not just political action, it is also apolitical (or anti-political) militancy, that is to say, terrorism. Hence our modern faith-based wars of religion.

Nongbri knows that faith is the fulcrum of the development of the modern idea of religion. And he is aware of the political consequences of faith. His 2008 thesis is entitled ‘Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective.’
Yet he unaccountably neglects the person who made faith his life and death issue in this volume of 2013. And I am at a loss to account for this.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up as a Christian in western culture, I remember first becoming interested in other religions. I was curious how my religion differed from others. As a curious teenager, I discovered some helpful at the time, but in retrospect truly shallow and simplistic, books that compared Christianity with Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and other religions. Usually these books, written from a Christian perspective, analyzed these other religions based on Christian assumptions. So rather than taking these other faiths on their own, letting them speak for themselves, these books sought to show how these other religions were flawed in comparison to Christianity.

When I went to college, I ended up majoring in Religious Studies. One of the first classes I took was a survey of world religions. It was fascinating to study these religions on their own merit, even to study under members of those religions and thus get a first-hand account rather than one filtered through Christians.

Yet, I do not recall discussing the questions that Brent Nongbri discusses in this book. At most, I have vague memories of learning how eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism were not concerned with belief in the way Christianity was. I recall learning that some religions don’t even believe in God. We discussed the difficulty of defining religion and what is a religion, but not how religion itself is a modern concept.

This is what Nongbri writes about here - “The particular concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world” (4). Our concept of religion in the 21st century is the result of the creation of a secular sphere over against a religious one, a process that took off in the post-Reformation period.

After the Protestant Reformation broke apart the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, Christendom in the West splintered. Nongbri shows how John Locke, among others, argued for religion to be a private sphere of beliefs and practices. By pushing religion into the private sphere, the idea was that nations and peoples would not keep going to war about religion. For our understanding of “religion” then, two things followed. First, as colonial expansion brought Europeans in contact with the rest of the world, they brought their definition of religion to all corners of the globe. For example, Indians may have been surprised to learn they were not part of the Hindu religion. Second, looking back through the pages of history, European scholars read their modern definition into the ancient world.

Nongbri’s book tells the story of both of these moves. He spends a lot of time talking about the words for “religion” in Greek, Roman and Arabic literature. In the original context, these words meant nothing like what we imagine as religion. Yet due to translations and our own worldview, we come across the word “religion” and think we know what it means. Scholars then study and write whole books on Greek or Roman “religion” as if this was a part of life you can separate from other parts of life, as you can for religion in our day.

There is a lot that could be said about this book, but I don’t have time to write it all. One key point is the difference between descriptive and redescriptive accounts of religion - “a descriptive account is an observe’s best effort at producing the classification systems of a group of people being studied (this is not the native viewpoint itself, but the observer’s best effort at reproducing that viewpoint). A redescriptive account, on the other hand, freely employs classification systems foreign to those of the people being observed” (21).

Part of the problem is that scholars think they are being descriptive while they are actually being redescriptive. In the conclusion, Nongbri says it is okay to use redescriptive concepts while studying the ancient world (157). To some degree, we cannot help but put categories into studying history that were not original in those historical times. But Nongbri encourages caution:

“If we are going to use religion as a second-order, redescriptive concept, we must always be explicit that we are doing so and avoid giving the impression that religion really was ‘out there’ ‘embedded in’ or ‘difficulty in’ the ancient evidence. The problem with using ‘religion’ to talk about the ancient world is not anachronism. All of our concepts are modern and hence anachronistic when applied to the ancient world. The problem is that we so often suffer from a lack of awareness that we are being anachronistic” (158).

When it comes to descriptive accounts then, Nongbri imagines such accounts be “disaggregated and rearranged in ways that correspond better to ancient people’s own organizational schemes. What we will produce with such a procedure is not a ‘replacement’ for religion, it will be something different altogether” (159).

What about the contemporary world we live in? I have often argued that religion is universal, that all humans are religious, whether we are members of a particular Religion or not. Admittedly, this is playing with the definition of religion. Is an atheist religious? Are Communism and Capitalism religions? As a Christian who is highly critical of Christian Nationalists, how do I even separate my faith from theirs? When I talk about religion here, claiming religion is an inherent part of human life, I obviously mean more than belief in God. Religion here is about Ultimate Concern - what is your ultimate reality or big motivator?

Nongbri touches on this as well in the conclusion. He writes:

“We would no longer ask the question, ‘Is phenomenon X a religion?’ Rather, we would ask something like ‘Can we see anything new and interesting about phenomenon X by considering it, for the purpose of study, as a religion?’ Take the example of capitalism. If we pose the question, “Is capitalism a religion?’ We fall into the old trap of seeing how many characteristics capitalism shares with modern Protestant Christianity and debating whether the number is sufficient such that capitalism should receive the designation of religion. If we shift way from the essentialist standpoint, we might ask different questions such as, ‘How might’ve we understand human behavior differently if we, as a thought exercise, regard capitalism as a religion?’ Such an inquiry could provoke a series of strategic comparisons involving gods and invisible market forces, catechumens reciting creeds and advertisers’ sloganeering. This kind of exercise helps us see phenomena in new ways and should be encouraged” (155-156).

Overall then, “religion” is not what we think it is if we think it just refers large group of people who believe and practice relatively the same thing. Beware reading this understanding into the ancient world, or worldwide today. Yet we need to talk about humanity and what concerns us and it is hard to get away from religious language; religious language may even be helpful to describe what we see.

[Caleb Ausbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

"An especially popular way of viewing religion is as a kind of inner disposition and concern for salvation conceived in opposition to politics and other “secular” areas of life. In this model, religion is presumed to be a universal feature of human cultures, and the individual World Religions are culturally specific examples of this general phenomenon of religion. Such a view is so common that many people in the modern world would, I think, consider it self-evident. In this book I argue that such a view of the world is foreign to ancient cultures and that we can, in rough outlines, trace how this peculiar way of viewing the world developed." (24)

According to Nongbri, the popular notion of the term “religion” found among modern readers would be considered alien to those often labeled “religious” throughout much scholarship. As stated in the quote above, religion is generally thought to include the following traits: a primary concern for personal salvation outside of the political realm and a cross-cultural presence throughout the world. Nongbri refutes both of these commonly held assumptions and argues that these traits are the product from the past 400 years rather than antiquity.

Nongbri starts his argument by analyzing the terms often translated as “religion” in ancient texts, which includes the Latin religio and Greek threskeia. He shows how both terms were used to denote rituals or worship practices, referring to textual examples which use the plural form of the terms for religion within Christianity alone. In other words, the terms often translated as “religion” would be better understood by the modern audience to mean “rite” or in some cases “sect”. The notion that there was one “Christianity” which could be structurally compared to other unique systems of religious thought, such as “Islam,” was unheard of. In fact, other belief systems such as Manichaeism and Islam were understood to be Christian heresies by Western scholars in Medieval Europe. In other words, other groups (which would be labeled as independent “religions” to the modern audience) were not understood to be unique and autonomous systems, but rather as degradations of one practice, namely Christianity.

Nongbri also argues that the idea of secularism was absent among the ancients. Part of the modern concept of religion holds that it exists primarily internally and outside of politics and state culture. He claims that this division is a product of the Enlightenment and was not recognized by the ancients. The emergence of this characteristic of modern religion was the result of the War of Religion in Europe and the rising popularity of Protestantism. With various political leaders warring against other states under the fragmenting Christendom, philosophers such as John Locke began to theorize about how the ideal state would function. Christendom was far too fragmented to be reunited, thus making the ideal government one separated from the various religious factions in order to maintain peace. Rather than other traditions being reinterpreted to fit into one’s own tradition, other traditions were being recognized as independent systems which could harmoniously coexist together under an ideal government.

The last chapters of Before Religion inspect studies attempting to understand “ancient religion” despite the ancients’ lack of the modern concept of what religion is. Greek and Roman “religions” are often depicted as valuing the same elements as modern Protestantism, such as the emphasis on personal interaction with gods. A brilliant example Nongbri gives of such an anachronism is that of Hinduism. Hinduism is a term given to the “religion” of India by British colonialists. It is often perceived as having a strong canon of gods and adherence to holy texts, particularly the Bhagavad Gita. However, Mahatma Gandhi, often depicted as a popular and influential “Hindu,” encountered the Bhagavad Gita for the first time during a trip to Great Britain, not in India.

Nongbri concludes his book by emphasizing the importance in acknowledging the modern perception of religion in contrast to the ancient perception. He argues that using the term “religion” on ancient customs leads to misunderstanding how ancient civilizations actually functioned and perceived their environment. He does state, however, that such redescriptive academic practices do have a place in scholarship, so long as it is acknowledged that a modern framework is being applied to practices which did not use such a framework and one defines religion in such a way that allows one to break away from the common perception of religion that is accepted today.

Before Religion provides an excellent critique of past scholarship and challenges the modern scholar to rethink his or her own projections of what religion is onto the ancient world. However, Nongbri makes little attempt to redefine religion. As stated, he acknowledges the benefit of redefining religion outside its current Protestant parameters, but ultimately his possible alternatives to “ancient religion” is found in his last paragraph of his conclusion. While Nongbri successfully makes his critique, further work on producing a more accurate redescriptive category which “ancient religions” could fit into (if such a task is possible) would be highly beneficial to the academic community.

[Individualfrog · Rating 2 out of 5]

What has the 5-paragraph essay wrought? This was a book on an interesting topic written in a hideous style that I would prefer not to call "academic", but perhaps is the terrible state of academic writing today, after decades of teaching kids how to write painfully awful essays. This book actually has sections labeled "Introduction" and "Conclusion" for each chapter, where he actually says "in this chapter I will show..." and "in this chapter I have shown..." Ugh it is horrible. Horrible. Every time he quotes from an author of the past, it is a wonderful breath of fresh air, and I want to shake him and say "Do you see? None of these people wrote in this godawful way. Why are you doing this??" I don't believe that Nongbri can't write. I believe he is operating under a bizarre delusion of how he's "supposed to" write.

Anyway. The big problem I had with this book other than the style was that it did not live up to its title, which is not really Nongbri's fault, I imagine. He wants to prove that "religion" is a modern concept, and he does. But what was life like before religion? This was completely unanswered, and it was what I wanted to know. He's not claiming, obviously, that there were no temples, no prayers, no rituals, etc, before the Reformation, just that the people--even the Christian people--didn't concieve of any of this as "religion" as a category. But how did they concieve of this stuff? How do the people for whom today 'religion' is not a coherent concept concieve of them? I feel like my understanding of these things was challenged but it's difficult to de-program myself from these colonialist/Protestant paradigms without some hint of other paradigms.

Luckily there is an extensive bibliography and notes I can use to research this myself if I want. I just wish this book had been a bit more ambitious, a bit less tentative, did less hemming and hawing and clarifying ("I do not intend to say this is a good definition...", he says over and over, until you want to scream, "I don't care what you don't intend to say, I want you to just say something!!") and better helped me break the chains on my mind.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked Nongbri's book. For me he took what Asad and McCutcheon have been writing about - that religion is a modern cultural concept - and explained how that modern concept of religion is read back into historical studies of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and ancient Greek and Latin religions, etc. While his review of this history is detailed - perhaps more than necessary - it offers very concrete examples of how modern understandings of religion (which he defines, rather insightfully, as anything similar to Protestant Christianity) has distorted our understandings of the Other and their context.

For example, din in Arabic, now usually translated as religion, normally meant something more akin to the rule of law or the ordering of society. These social movements (such as Islam, early Christianity, Hinduism, etc) weren't about 'how to get into heaven when you die', but about how can we organize our lives as a people. It changes the way in which one looks at this entire history.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-argued, nuanced, and eye-opening. Also not overly long!

[Faheem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short little book is akin to a bomb.

[Jordan J. Andlovec · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great topic and one that needs to be explored more, hopefully in a more accessible volume at some point. Nongri's depth of study is obvious and he makes an excellent case for the modern invention of "religion", I just wish it had a more popular-level feel to it so the topic could he injected into the broader culture.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good account of the linguistic and phenomenological development of the Western concept of religion.

[Benja Graeber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro sin duda va a dejar pensando a la mayoría, su tesis principal es que la religión como algo como concepto inmanente, natural, atemporal, universal e intrínsecamente humano no existe o ciertamente es una invención cristiana reformada occidental del siglo XVI y XVII.

El autor repasa algunos textos precursores en el nacimiento del concepto, al hacerlo deja claro que las categorías como judaísmo, musulmán o maniqueísmo no se veían como religiones diferentes una de otras, sino como tipos cristianismo herejes o diferentes.

Uno de los puntos más interesantes, que al comienzo pensé que podía desafiar la tesis de Nongbri, es el hecho de que el cristianismo como creencia parece romper con el código etnonacionalista que tanto caracteriza al judaismo al apelar a los gentiles.

Sin embargo escritores del Cristianismo temprano como Eusebio se refieren al Cristianismo como una etnia pura, predecesora de los hebreos, con un ethnos claro, diferenciandolo del helenismo y judaísmo, ambos con connotaciones etnonacionalista, por lo que, contrario a lo que se afirma, el cristianismo temprano era visto como una etnia, como los griegos, con una clara herencia anterior a la griega o judía.

Además, por mucho tiempo los musulmanes o budistas fueron vistos como cristianos herejes, esto se debe a que los escritores cristianos no los veían como una religión diferente sino como una desviación del cristianismo, y esto aplicaria al resto de las prácticas religiosas no cristianas, las cuales se mediría bajo el criterio cristiano. Este modo de clasificación influiría fuertemente en la creación del concepto moderno de religión.

Para no extenderme demasiado, el concepto de religión alcanza su clímax y desarrollo conceptual como lo conocemos ahora durante la reforma protestante, la crisis de la iglesia católica, la perdida de autoridad religiosa generó una mueva visión sobre la salvación, la cual ya no dependia de la iglesia sino que en la actitud interna del creyente, esto generó una variedad dd sectas que reclamaban ser el cristianismo verdadero, esta forma fragmentada de ver el cristianismo se reflejó en las demas practicas religiosas las cuales fueron divididas en grupos de creencias los cuales fueron nombradas como religión, a su vez está visión fragmentada y plural llevó a que durante la formación temprana de los Estados nación se definiera como religión a las prácticas privadas diferentes de la esfera pública en la que está creencias no estaban aprobadas, dando como resultado la creación de conceptos como la tolerancia o el pluralismo religioso.

[The Nine Sisters · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a few brief chapters Nongbri presents several scenarios that elucidate how the concept of "religion" as we currently understand it came about. In this historical overview he shows us how the European Enlightenment, together with the Protestant Reformation, reshaped the word "religion" to mean something that never quite existed before.

One remarkable example toward the end of this book perfectly encapsulates his argument. When archaeologists initially began to find the many ancient texts out of Mesopotamia, they struggled to understand the purpose and use of these texts. By trying to label these texts as religious in some sense, they backwards projected a concept that would have been foreign to the Babylonians. Did the Ancient Babylonians have no religion? How can we understand the roles of temples and priests, gods and kings in Ancient societies?

This book is a perfect introduction to the paradigm shift that I believe is currently happening in our culture. A good follow up would be any of Peter Harrison's work, but particularly The Territories of Science and Religion and The Fall 0f Man and the Foundations of Science.

Check out some of Harrison's lectures at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

might have been a bit unfair for me to read this alongside masuzawa’s “the invention of world religions,” but i just did not find this book’s argument very compelling. maybe this is because masuzawa uses a historiographical method versus nongbri’s linguistic method, but i found most of his examples repetitive and lacking historical context. it’s a case study book where the second half is mostly repeating scholarship from his predecessors (chidester and masuzawa, in particular). i think if this was a booklet rather than a full blown monograph, it would have worked a lot better. still, i think nongbri’s assertion that “religion” didn’t exist in the ancient world seems true and he convinced me of that in the first two chapters. so credit to him there.

[Jarl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book about the history of the term "religion". It is enlightening to see how the concept of religion gradually turned into the meaning we ascribe to it today. My only skepticism is the reasoning behind the methodology which postulates that we are trapped by our language and can't think beyond it.

[Drew Tschirki · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting documentation on how the term “religion” has been used to indicate various social / political / historical aspects throughout different ancient / premodern / medieval societies.

How is religion defined? Is that accurate in any / some / all contexts? Why or why not? These are some of the questions he seeks to answer.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a useful history of the word and ultimately modern concept of 'religion.' Nongbri's work is well-researched and argued. It is especially useful in moving beyond static and transcendent notions of the concept.

[Austin Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, well-researched revelation that religion has a history, and the term itself is a modern superposition on top of ancient (and not so ancient) cultures. A beautiful debunking of the nagging, easy rhetoric of some pluralists; a sharp correction to a traditional education of World Religions.

[Zexas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, precise, easy to follow and very beginner-friendly. I have no background in religious studies but I like his discussion and argument.

[Luke Mizzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars only due to its quite dense and academic nature. Readers not used to certain modes of writing and concepts might find this difficult. Content wise, though, very informative.

[Lilly Ruiter · Rating 3 out of 5]

book for religion class, enjoyed, definitely learned something new!

[Alejandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesante reflexión sobre el concepto de religión y sus problemas a la hora de abordar los estudios sobre la Antigüedad.

[Lacey Liberty · Rating 1 out of 5]

boring boring yawn yawn skimmed it skimmed it
some of the stuff at the beginning was kind of interesting i guess
blah blah blah

[Rod White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a book that kept highlighting the binary comparison of spirituality and religion, "religion" being filled with all sorts of meaning I thought it did not deserve and I knew did not reflect the ancient community in which I live. So I looked for book to support my suspicions and immediately came to Brent Nongbri's. He has exhaustively demonstrated where the modern notion of religion comes from and how it has been imposed on practices in the past, creating whole "religions" in the image of European sensibilities. I have a BA in History and still love getting into a good historical argument. This is an important one for alternative Christian types, but be forewarned, you'll probably be looking up the other things he is talking about along the way so you can understand his points.

[Sahara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a class, and Nongbri's explanation of modernism pertaining to various religions and how it changed was a great read. While usually required readings are often written in a dry, hard to understand way, Nongbri's book made understanding modern religion a lot more approachable compared to other books on the topic. It also helped that his book was the started the development of two of my classmates MA theses.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a really good idea. To introduce the idea of "religion" as a modern concept to people who might not be familiar with it and to apply the idea to the ancient world. At times, Nongbri's execution is quite good, especially in the initial chapters. But then, he gets lost in the weeds. There are too many details without enough direction. There are several points you can really tell he's not in his element (this was expanded from a dissertation on Paul). And, also, I found the ending a bit unsatisfying. He works through the entire book hammering home this narrative of "religion" as a modern concept and its inappropriateness for the ancient world. Before the "Conclusion," I assumed he would be agreeing with Timothy Fitzgerald that we should do away with the category entirely. But he suddenly and surprisingly states in his conclusion that the category can be useful. He states his disagreement with Fitzgerald very briefly in a single footnote from the Conclusion. I got the sense that the Conclusion was tacked on after people asked Nongbri, "So what? What's the take away about all this? What do we do with the category?" The bulk of the book did not seem to match his measured conclusions at the very end. In general, I appreciate the narrative that he tries to lay out, but its just too much detail, some of it questionable (often citing a single source on a major, controversial point), and not enough clear argumentative direction throughout. To be successful, this book really needs to be reorganized and pruned of extraneous detail.

I assigned the book to my Religion 101 course and they demonstrated that they learned quite a bit from the book, but a majority of them also very strongly voiced their displeasure with the book's style. I found myself having to defend the book to them (and explain it a bit more than I'd like). I just don't know a better book for undergrads that handles this narrative. You can't really start them out with Asad. McCutcheon has a little bit on it in his Studying Religion textbook, but it's just not detailed enough for what I wanted to lay out.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book on how we impose certain assumptions during our studies of ancient "religions."

[Bruno · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was asked to do two short lectures on the main points of this book. I’ve linked them below for anyone interested:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/I6DnEQntbRU
Part 2: https://youtu.be/mmicnMAGgbY

[Corey Wozniak]

Read Intro, Chapter 1, and Conclusion for “Religious Worlds of NYC” NEH-sponsored summer institute, summer ‘22