Shopping cartMethod & Theory in the Study of Religion
Volumes & issues:
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Strategies for Surviving Dissolution: Working with Gary Lease in the Academic Study of Religion
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Gary Lease (1940-2008)
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The History of "Religious" Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution
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In this essay, Gary Leason advances a sweeping theory of religion as a specific technology of power which dissolves its own conditions of possibility. Religion, simply put, is its own gravedigger because the strategies employed to impose patterns of consistency and control on the messy reality of contradiction and contingency must eventually succumb to unmanageable paradoxes.
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Memento Mori: Gary Lease and the Study of Religion
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Gary Lease wrote vividly about the entanglement of religion and power, pursuing critical histories of religious claims and their social support structures. He sought to replace a standard story of religion's ubiquity (often coupled with an attitude of approval) with a much darker version of the human desires and conflicts embedded in, and masking as, religious discourse. But Lease seems to have been fundamentally ambivalent about the object in question. Is it "religion," namely the ideological dynamics deployed by human beings to dominate one another (and themselves), or is it religion, a void or death wish at the heart of human existence, a now-refashioned ubiquity but without the happy ending? I claim that there are profound, and ultimately productive, ambivalences in Lease's attempt cleanly to circumscribe the object of study—ambivalences which makes him a vital interlocutor in the effort to move beyond conventional histories of religion and consciousness.
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Delimiting Religion
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The problem of the definition of religion sparks perennial discussion; unfortunately much of the debate over the use of the word produces more confusion than understanding—some scholars suggest that religion cannot be defined and others suggest that all definitions are inadequate to religion. Through a consideration of the nature of language and Gary Lease's claim that "there is no religion," this essay attempts to clear away some of the incoherencies and to set out what we can and cannot say about the delimitation of the category "religion."
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Considerations on Life and Death: Medieval Asceticism and the Dissolution of the Self
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This essay explores the question of whether medieval asceticism is annihilation of the self or a means of constituting the self. It reads Gary Lease's conclusion, that religion is programmed suicide, against studies of medieval asceticism that argue for an understanding of religion as an embodied discipline which forms the subject and provides a means of resisting social norms. It suggests that the project of understanding the forms of power embedded in particular concepts of religion requires not only historicizing the term "religion" but also analyzing concepts of self, body, and agency. Drawing on the writings of the twelfth-century monk Bernard of Clairvaux as a case study, it argues that Bernard's conception of religion described a variety of ways in which embodied discipline could form a subject, and that he employed these variations ideologically to define the boundaries of his community and Church.
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Enemy Brothers: Gary Lease and the Scholarship of Religion
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Gary Lease, a controversial figure in the study of religion, was best known throughout his long career for his uncompromising antipathy towards theologically and phenomenologically-oriented approaches to the field. Lease developed his analytic perspective on religion around a set of broad, global assumptions about human nature, the mind, and society. These assumptions lie at the root of those provocative positions which have come to characterize Lease's work. This paper argues that those assumptions, which center primarily on his understanding of human thought as sharply and inescapably limited by biological, cognitive, and historical constraints, form the basis for a distinctive and robust framework for the study of religion. This framework posits, among other things, a fundamentally agonistic relationship between the religion and the study of religion.
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Religion's Death Drive and the Future of Religious Studies
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This paper seeks to recalibrate Lease's place within what Samuel Preus called the "explanatory tradition" of Religious Studies. While others sought to humanize religion by stressing its latent rationality, Lease humanized religion by stressing that it is constantly interrupted by its own internal movement towards failure. "Failure" is for me the central theme of "The History of 'Religious' Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture."
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The Excremental Vision and the Study of Religion: An Afterword
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Gary Lease often deployed a Swiftian "excremental vision" to upend the liberal pretensions of "religion" and religious studies. However, this essay argues that there is far more to say about the relationship between religion and defecation. Indeed, the inescapable fact of human excrement should be viewed as an under-utilized site for academic theorizing about the power of "religion."
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Gary Lease's Publications
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