Fundamentalism, as the word implies, is about getting back to basics, and for Americans this has meant getting back to God's word as proclaimed in the Bible. Yet the issues that American fundamentalists have most hotly contested--abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment--have little to do with scripture per se. Why are these so central? Perhaps it is because the real fundamentals of fundamentalism are social, not textual. Fundamentalism often seems to be about "family values" and restoring women to their "proper place"--not just in America, but wherever the corrosive effects of...

The "science of religion" is an important element in the interpretation of William James's work and in the methodology of the study of religion. An authority on pragmatism and the philosophy of religion, Wayne Proudfoot and a stellar group of contributors from a variety of disciplines including religion, philosophy, psychology, and history, bring innovative perspectives to James's work. Each contributor focuses on a specific theme in The Varieties of Religious Experience and suggests how James's treatment of that theme can fruitfully be brought to bear, sometimes with revisions or...

This important new title by Richard J. Bernstein presents a detailed examination of Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism. Bernstein argues convincingly that this frequently vilified and dismissed book is one of Freud's most important works. It is in Moses and Monotheism that Freud answers the question that obsessed him: what is the essence of the Jewish people? Bernstein goes on to show how Freud developed a new interpretation of the concept of a religious tradition--an interpretation that is applicable to both Judaism and Christianity.

This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. It refers to religious and secular traditions and to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. It covers Said's heterogeneous corpus--from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction lies behind Said's cultural criticism, and his...

This major study of Kierkegaard and love explores Kierkegaard's description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope. It reads his Works of Love as a text that both deciphers and complicates the central books in his pseudonymous canon: Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. Amy Laura Hall argues that a spiritual void brings each text into being, and her interpretation is as much about faith as about love. Her scholarly and lyrical style makes this study a poetic contribution to ethics and the philosophy of religion.