Printing Religion after the Enlightenment

(Hardback)

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Description

Over the course of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, an interior private notion of religion gained wide public recognition. It then spread through settler colonial contexts around the world. It has since been criticized for its abstract, immaterial nature as well as its irrelevance to traditions beyond the European context. However, such critiques obscure the contradiction between religions definition as a matter of interior privacy and its public visibility in various printed publications. Timothy Stanley responds by re-evaluating the cultural impact of the exterior forms in which religious texts were printed, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, books, and journals. He also applies that evidence to critical studies of religion shaped by the crisis of representation in the human sciences. While Jacques Derrida is oft-cited as a progenitor of that crisis, the opposite case is made. Additionally, Stanley draws on Derridas thought to reframe the relation between a religious texts internal hermeneutic interests and its external forms. In sum, this book provides a new model of how people printed religion in ways that can be compared to other material cultures around the world.

Reviews

Timothy Stanley draws our attention to an aspect of religion that is widely overlooked: whenever reading the Bible is central to religion, both the individuals interior states and their communitys ability to form itself as an entity in the world depend upon the publication, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival of printed materials. This means that a material information culture has to be included in the way that the concept of 'religion' is theorized. In sustained debate with Kant, Habermas, and especially Derrida, Printing Religion after Enlightenment clarifies the dialectical relationship between the faith of the private individual and the materiality of the public spherewithout giving up either one.

-- Kevin Schilbrack, author of Philosophy and the Study of Religion

This book deftly follows the modern movement from the historical printing of religious texts in Europe, and their distribution in various colonial contexts, to the privatization of religion, while powerfully illuminating, through the materiality of faith, how the concept of religion changes through the means of its communication. By bridging gaps between the material and the theoretical, as well as the inner and outer worlds of texts, Stanley draws deeply and insightfully from contemporary philosophical debatesmost centrally involving Jacques Derrida and the crisis of representationin order to assist readers in rethinking the category of religion altogether.

-- Colby Dickinson, Loyola University Chicago

Author Bio

Timothy Stanley is senior lecturer in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle.