Religious Inventions – Ancient Mediterranean Practice and the Study of Religion

Religious InventionsAncient Mediterranean Practice and the Study of Religion\nAuthor(s): William Arnal, Erin K. Vearncombe\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada\nImprint: McGill-Queen's University Press\nISBN-13: 9780228024453, 978-0228024453\nSynopsis\nReligion is a modern invention, a category used to describe and study certain kinds of human behaviour. Yet when it comes to the ancient world and its texts including those that comprise the Jewish and Christian Bibles it can be easy to forget that they did not fall from the sky as simple expressions of dogma. Rather, the ancient writings of early Judaism and Christianity are firmly rooted in the world and are the product of an astonishing array of human experience and agency: acts of self-fashioning; of imaginative speculation; of mourning and memorializing; of forming, dissolving, or refashioning group identities; and more.\n\n Religious Inventions asks how modern conceptions of religion can shed li.