Overview

How should we understand promises as public, private, or political commitments? What are the conditions for promise-making in religiously diverse societies with competing jurisdictions and sovereignties? Making Promises addresses how promises are made meaningful not only through law, but also through appeals to transcendent powers across diverse traditions. Each contribution in this volume takes a closer look at specific kinds of promises: oaths, treaties, and covenants. The chapters reveal much about the nature of promises in multi-religious and multi-jurisdictional societies, and with contributions from scholars of religious studies, Indigenous studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, this volume represents a comparative conversation on the making of promises. It pays close attention to Indigenous histories, visions, and conceptions of justice; comparative law within and across settler colonial states; interactions among religions and secularisms; and the ongoing importance of material culture, ritual, and emotion for these practices. At a time of human-caused environmental devastation and political upheaval, when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this volume shows that promises have long been made and unmade, kept and broken, in ways that successive generations need to acknowledge and take up anew.

Full Product Details

Author:   Pamela Klassen ,  Benjamin Berger ,  Monique Scheer
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.001kg
ISBN:  

9781487542061

ISBN 10:   1487542062
Pages:   352
Publication Date:   25 November 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

Promising Practices: A Preface Pamela E. Klassen, Monique Scheer, and Benjamin L. Berger Introduction: Fragmented Promises, Pentimento & the Salvage Paradigm      Jeffery Hewitt Part I:  Promises in Place: A Great Lakes Pentimento     Pamela E. Klassen 1.  Remembering, Forgetting and the Telling of Stories: Land and Commemoration in the       Aftermath of the American Revolution     Elizabeth Elbourne 2.  “The Culture of the Soil”: Agriculture, Improvement, and Settler Colonial Landscapes of       Nineteenth-Century Manitoulin Island      Kate Stoehr 3.  Between Gratitude and Guilt: The Promise of a Better Life in a Settler Colony for Racialized Refugees Sujith Xavier Part II:  The Weight of the Promise: Material–Immaterial Practices     Monique Scheer 4.  Making Promises to the Shogun: Spinoza on the Dutch United East Indian Company in Japan Pooyan Tamimi Arab 5.  Longing and Belonging in France and Algeria: The Promise of Amel’s Chedda     Jennifer Selby 6.  Quid pro Quo? Egyptian Papyri Distributions and the Bureaucracy of a Promise     Gregory Fewster 7.  Covenant, Torah, and the Failed Promise of Jewish Museums     Yaniv Feller Part III:  The Oath, the Law, and the “Sense of Religion”     Benjamin L. Berger 8.  “However Honestly Meant”: Chinese Australians and Truth-Telling in Colonial Victorian          Courts       Catherine Evans 9.  An Oath on the Big Book: Oaths and Examinations in American Codes of Procedure Kellen Funk 10.  Ceremonial Promises: Oath, Treaties, and the Transformation of Christian Privilege in Canada Pamela E. Klassen and Isabel Klassen-Marshall Conclusion: Promises That Make Us Who We Are Jeremy Webber

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Author Information

Pamela E. Klassen is a professor of the study of religion at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Benjamin L. Berger is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. Monique Scheer is a professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen, and the author of Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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