Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown

by Jonathan Z. Smith

With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological.

Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them.

"These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Theory

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Jonathan Z. Smith is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he is also a member of the Committee on the History of Culture.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know J.Z. Smith is supposed to be all that in the field of religious studies, and Imagining Religion is supposed to be a must-read if you're entering that field, but sorry, this collection of essays just didn't do it for me.

Several of the essays felt nearly inaccessible, even for a Ph.D. student, even if what Smith was saying seemed helpful or important. The one essay that did not feel this way, "The Devil in Mr. jones," has aged poorly since its composition just after the Jonestown massacre/suicide; Smith's appearing to blame Congressman Ryan, who was unarmed when he was shot and killed trying to board a plane returning to America, for precipitating the ensuing mass suicide is about where I checked out.

Other essays by Smith, written more recently and not in this volume, I've found to be much more interesting, and much more useful to thinking about religion and its study. Sadly, this feels like something set in another time, and best left there.

[Roger Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

This eclectic collection of essays remains inspiring today. Smith's breadth of knowledge and ability to perform interdisciplinary analyses over widely varying moments in the history of religion is coupled with a sincere attempt to question what religious studies should be about.

[Stephen Bedard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Z. Smith is one of my favourite scholars in the area of Religious Studies. This book is a series of essays on various aspects of religion, the first section related to Judaism and the rest more general reflections. It is quite good.

[Rob Vanhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each chapter stands on its own as an independent essay tackling the problem of the category "religion" from different angles. Crucial reading for those wanting to explore the contrast between primary sources and the "spin" created by the scholarly, academic endeavor.

[Miller Sherling · Rating 5 out of 5]

J.Z. Smith is wonderful at tweaking readers' perspectives. The most noticeable shift (in terms of change/time) I've made in my thinking in my life was from reading him. Reading the chapter on "the persistence of canon" was the first time I'd made such a noticeable shift--he calls into question the whole enterprise of defining terms, & I've never stopped doing so since.

The chapter in this book in which he discusses Jonestown, what happened there, attempts to propose reasons why, & chastises academia & scholars of religion for dismissing the event & not attempting to explain it, I found earth-shattering.
Great stuff. T

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like he says in the early chapters in the book, that scholars of religions should not attempt toward unification, integration, and systemization, this book as a whole also remains a bit disconnected and unfocused. J.Smith is highly self-conscious as a historian of religion (of Judaism) and reflects on what does the exercise of this profession implicates. He begins with the problem of classification, and stresses again and again the structuralist insight of how things only obtain significance by being placed in relation to a bunch of other things but in more concrete historical contexts. The ritual chapter is especially written with clarity and could stand well in other contexts.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2012, I struggled with this book and gave it only 3 stars. Five years later, I have gone to graduate school and read a lot more nonfiction, so I better appreciated it. Smith calls for the study of religion as a secular discipline, not a theological one. No topic is off limits, in Smith's formulation. Ask the hard questions about religion. This might mean struggling between universal and particular, relative and absolute concepts, but the struggle is worth it. The chapter on Jonestown is fascinating.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decievingly obscure, but enlightening on second read- very dense material.