Jacques Berlinerblau

The 'Popular Religion' Paradigm in Old Testament Research: a Sociological Critique

In this article the author examines some of the prevailing methodological and theoretical assumptions that inform the study of ’Israelite popular religion’. It is argued that many of these assumptions need to be re-evaluated in light of recent developments in ’popular religion’ research and modern sociological theory. The author wishes to delineate some of the theoretical difficulties that arise when we attempt to find ’popular religion’ via an uncritical and sociologically uninformed reading of the Old Testament. A definition of the ’Israelite popular religious group’ is offered with the hope of stimulating further discussion on this burgeoning field of inquiry.

Let the study of American secularisms begin

Religion (AAR)—is at least partly to blame for the appalling under-theorization of our alleged subject matter. For academia, as opposed to the public sphere writ large, and against the backdrop of the AAR, the new atheists start to look good again—not, I stress, because their theories of religion are especially viable, well-informed, or intellectually coherent, but because the new atheists are not afraid to try to explain ‘‘religion’’ writ large: they are not afraid of big theories, theories that dissolve religion as an entity into the ebb and flow of characteristically human practices. They thus allow us to see the scope of what we might be doing, of what might be intellectually possible, were we to set aside our reserve about saying things that are not ‘‘nice’’ or strategically wise. We must be willing to allow that there may be nothing especially religious about religion—that the very idea of ‘‘religion’’ may be an artifact of historical, contingent, all-too-human processes. If a secular politics must focus on freedom for religion, a secular academia must place front and center a freedom from religion. Strict separationism—the treatment of academic inquiry into religion as uncompromisingly distinct from any religious practice whatsoever—looks very attractive in this context.

Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine

Each spring issue of Expositions will feature an Academic Roundtable, in which three scholars from different fields review a contemporary work of criticism or scholarship.