Overview

"Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon rigid conceptual oppositions between ""secular"" and ""religious"" to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. The artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical ""academic study of religion"" and an ideological and authoritarian ""religion,"" he argues, only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, Roberts calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of ""encounter"" and ""response,"" illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds, and scholars must confront questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. Roberts refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. In humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious, and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation."

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Roberts' work is the single most consequential programmatic work on the study of religion of the past several decades. It takes seriously, and treats charitably, a range of thinkers of interest to religious studies -- from J.Z. Smith and Rowan Williams to Saba Mahmood and Stanley Cavell -- learning from them while (and sometimes through) critiquing them. It also lucidly lays out its own alternative vision of a truly humanistic form of the study of religion -- one open to a response to religious themes, figures, or texts, and not just permitting an explanation or critique of those objects of study. In all these ways it marks the first fully realized, in style and content, humanistic account of the study of religion -- and thereby marks the opening of a new era in the history of the field. He shows how a truly humanistic, liberal-arts approach to the study of religion can forego none of the hermeneutics of suspicion while also being open to the possibility of a genuine encounter with the energies that fuel, for good and ill, the many modalities of human life that we gather under the ramshackle rubric religion . A tremendous accomplishment. -- Charles Mathewes, Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia

Author Information

Tyler Roberts is professor of religious studies at Grinnell College. He received his B.A. from Brown University and his M.T.S. and Th.D. from Harvard University. He is the author of Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion and has published essays on Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and J. Z. Smith.

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