NOW AVAILABLE!
Number 153, Winter 2021 (available free for a limited time from UC Press)
Special Issue
Practices of Devotion
“The goal of this special issue … is to desegregate religious studies and theology from the humanities more broadly by reasserting religion’s significance to the histories of critique, theory, and literature … [and to] pursue connections between devotional practices, literary production, and contemplative or intellectual labor so as to move the intellectual project called Religion and Literature away from an emphasis on thematics and toward an investigation of practices.” –from the editors’ introduction
Edited by Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Niklaus Largier, and Kris Trujillo, this volume demonstrates that the work of devotion is as much about the transformation wrought through it as it is about the specificity of its object.
Of the many cross-disciplinary and topical strands that have emerged from nearly forty years of 
“The essays collected here counter [the] fantasy of pain as a knowable sensation that lies within that is then represented, or misrepresented, in language. Instead, they consider pain as always already enmeshed in social life, and representation as the means through which we can engage this imbrication. In so doing, they demonstrate the importance of bringing together two approaches to the problem of pain that have often been kept distinct. The first is the anthropological insight that pain behavior constitutes a mode of social engagement and, hence, that suffering is necessarily bound up with shifting, often unpredictable, cultural, familial, and interpersonal dynamics. The second involves a historical and literary-critical account of representation’s complex and productive relations to both experience and culture.” –from the editor’s introduction