As scholarly disciplines, both philosophy and religion have historically attempted to provide keys to the meaning of human life. The philosophical and religious dimensions of representation are examined here in articles ranging from Augustinian metaphysics to Freud's Jewish jokes, from Thucydides' historical time to utopia in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.

J. Jorge Klor de Alva, "Is Affirmative Action a Christian Heresy?" Summer 1996, 55: 59-73.

Clifford Ando, "Signs, Idols, and the Incarnation in Augustinian Metaphysics," Winter 2001, 73: 24-53.

Stefan Andriopoulos, "Kant's Magic Lantern: Historical Epistemology and Media Archaeology," Summer 2011, 115: 42-70.

Jan Assmann, "The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism," Fall 1996, 56: 48-67.

Carlin A. Barton, "Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr," Winter 1994, 45: 41-71.

David Bates, "Idols and Insight: An Enlightenment Topography," Winter 2000, 73: 1-23.

Gordon C. Bearn, "Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida," Summer 1998, 63: 65-92.

Jonathan Beck, "Genesis, Sexual Antagonism, and the Defective Couple of the Twelfth-Century Jeu d'Adam," Winter 1990, 29: 124-44.

Harry Berger, Jr., "Facing Sophists: Socrates' Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras," Winter 1984, 5: 66-89. 

Harry Berger, Jr., "The Lie of the Land: The Text Beyond Canaan," Winter 1989, 25: 119-38.

Timothy Billings, "Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets: Athanasius Kircher and the Translation of the Nestorian Tablet," Summer 2004, 87: 1-42.

R. Howard Bloch, "The Fabliaux, Fetishism, and Freud's Jewish Jokes," Fall 1983, 4: 1-26.

Daniel Boyarin, "The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodesian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion," Winter 2004, 85: 21-57.

Daniel Boyarin, "Deadly Dialogue: Thycydides with Plato," Winter 2012, 117: 59-85.

Daniel Boyarin, "'Language Inscribed by History on the Bodies of Living Beings': Midrash and Martyrdom," Winter 1989, 25: 139-51.

Daniel Boyarin, "Paul and the Genealogy of Gender," Winter 1993, 41: 1-33.

Peter Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Spring 1983, 2: 1-26. 

Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women," Summer 1985, 11: 1-25. 

Monique Canto, "Acts of Fake: The Icon in Platonic Thought" (trans. Betsy Wing), Spring 1985, 10: 124-43.

Mary Carruthers, "On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer's Lachrymose Troilus in Context," Winter 2006, 93: 1-21.

Jerome Christensen, "Hume's Social Composition," Fall 1985, 12: 44-65.

David Damrosch, "The Ethnic Ethnographer: Judaism in Tristes Tropiques," Spring 1995, 50: 1-13.

Natalie Zemon Davis, "Art and Society in the Gifts of Montaigne," Fall 1985, 12: 24-32. 

Carolyn Dean, "Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the Subject," Winter 1986, 13: 42-62.

James D. Faubion, "Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis," Spring 2001, 74: 83-104.

Frances Ferguson, "Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality," Spring 1984, 6: 66-84.

Elizabeth Fowler, "The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser," Summer 1995, 51: 47-76.

Andrea Frisch, "In a Sacramental Mode: Jean de Léry's Calvinist Ethnography," Winter 2002, 77: 82-106.

Catherine Gallagher, "The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew," Spring 1986, 14: 83-106.

Lydia Goehr, "Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style: Philosophical Reflections on Maeterlinck-Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande," Spring 2001, 74: 55-82.

Moshe Gold, "Ethical Practice in Critical Discourse: Conversions and Disruptions in Legal, Religious Narratives," Fall 1998, 64: 21-40.

Dena Goodman, "Pigalle's Voltaire nu: The Republic of Letters Represents Itself to the World," Fall 1986, 16: 86-109. 

Jean-Joseph Goux, "Vesta, or the Place of Being" (trans. William Smock), Winter 1983, 1: 91-108. 

Stephen Gudeman, "Ricardo's Representations," Winter 1984, 5: 90-114. 

Janet E. Halley, "Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse:  The Case of the English Family of Love," Summer 1986, 15: 98-120.