Religious language

Janet McIntosh
Brandeis University
Table of contents

Any discussion of “religious language” must begin by acknowledging that “religion” itself is a contested category. Anthropologists and critical theorists have argued that conventional definitions of religion are shaped by ethnocentric assumptions, and that no single, universal essence of religion can be meaningfully located across all societies. Talal Asad (1993), for instance, traces how “religion” as many understand it emerged largely from modern Western (especially Christian and post-Enlightenment) history, as nominally secular colonial and modern states determined what qualified as religion for their purposes.

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