Religious Orthodoxies: Provocations from the Jewish and Christian Margins

Abstract

This review represents a dialogic experiment developing the comparative analytical category of religious orthodoxies. To explore the category, we profile scholarship on Jewish and Christian orthodoxies, neither of which fits into the Protestant ideas of religion, secularism, and modernity that still implicitly undergird the anthropology of religion. For religious orthodoxies, the heart of religious experience is correctness and continuity, rather than personal transformation and reform. Furthermore, the imbrication of the political with the theological that is definitive of religious orthodoxies holds promise for new understandings of politics and religion's potential for social action. By including different relationships of scale in a range of social formations and institutional dynamics, religious orthodoxies provide insight into the mutually constitutive relationship between practice and belief; the taken-for-grantedness of material mediation of presence in orthodox traditions; the ethical dimension of practice; and the entanglements of orthodoxies, heterodoxies, and heresies.